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Diet Myths

 Your stomach is the place where you store your belly fat.

 Diets are mostly about calorie control.

 Your brain is the only part of your body that reacts emotionally to food.

We all know about the daily skirmishes that play out in the battle against obesity. You versus the ranch dressing, you versus the dessert tray, and in the title fight, your butt versus your college jeans. But it would be a mistake to think that every weight-loss war happens at the table or in the privacy of your own closet. In fact, millions of little firefights break out inside your gut every time you eat or drink—and these are the most influential battles in your personal crusade against excess weight. Deep inside your éclair-encrusted gut, you have cells and chemicals that react and respond to food in two ways: as an ally or as an enemy.

As we move along in our digestive journey to the second half of our digestive system, we’ll explore these battles and how they influence your waistline. Here, your body doesn’t just form allies or fight enemies according to how many calories a particular food has, or how greasy it is, or whether its mascot is a red-haired clown. When interrogating nutrients as they pass through your digestive system, your body classifies them by what kind of inflammatory effect they have; the enemies contribute to inflammation, and the allies quiet it.

We’re not just talking about the inflammation that happens when your belly balloons to the size of a convention center, or the inflammation that happens to your joints if you have arthritis. We’re talking about the chemical reaction of inflammation that happens within your bloodstream and is an underlying cause of weight gain. This process is like the rusting of our bodies. Just like metal rusts when exposed to oxygen, inflammation is caused when oxygen free radicals (no political affiliation) attack innocent bystanders in our bodies.

Inflammation happens on many different levels and through several different mechanisms, many of them having to do with food. Not only can you get inflammation through allergies to food, but you can also get inflammation in the rest of your body—through the way your liver responds to saturated and trans fats, and through the way your body and belly fat respond to such toxins as cigarettes and stress. In turn, these inflammatory responses can cause things like hypertension, high cholesterol, and insulin resistance—and those inflammatory responses influence the total-body mother of all inflammation in your arteries, which leads to heart disease. (We’ll discuss these at length in the next chapter.)

How Tolerant Are You?

With more than 100 million neurons in your intestines, gastrointestinal (GI) pain is immediate, but the level of GI discomfort you feel depends on your genetics; specifically on your tolerance of or allergies to certain foods and your genetic disposition for feeling the effects of those GI land mines. While there are certainly pharmaceutical solutions for dealing with the digestive explosions, there are also foods that produce an anti-inflammatory effect and can come in and put out the fire (see YOU Tips). During these inflammatory firefights, your intestines are contracting too much, or are being dilated-a painful process that works through the vagus nerve. Too much stimulation or distension of the bowel is what causes the pain. Some of us are less sensitive to those internal motions, so we may not always be getting the clue from our gut. These are some of the more common GI firestorms involving food intolerance:

 Enzyme deficiencies: When your intestines lack enzymes to metabolize specific foods like milk or grains or beans, the food remains undigested, so you start feeding your intestines’ ravenous bacteria. The result: lots of intestinal dilation and more gas than a Hummer fuel tank. The most common of these is lactose intolerance (the lack of GI agreement with dairy products), and a close second is an allergy to the protein gluten from wheat (and rye and barley; nutritional good guys). As an example, when you lack the enzyme lactase, the sugar lactose in the milk reaching your intestine is not metabolized, so it’s presented to your intestinal bacteria, which metabolize the lactose in your intestines, producing a lot of gas.

 General GI disorders: Problems like irritable bowel syndrome, which causes gut-related symptoms like diarrhea and abdominal pain, are caused by sensitive nerves and result in inflammation in the intestinal walls. For example, we usually all pass the same amount of gas a day (about fourteen times, or 1 liter total), but some of us sense discomfort from that gas more than others do.

 Psychological responses: Food aversions can develop if, say, a person had a bad vomit-inducing shrimp dinner one night. The response would be to associate the shrimp dinner with the painful aftereffects and avoid it.

Of course, there are a number of extreme-end GI problems like infections, parasites (worms are the world’s most successful weight-loss technique-but we don’t recommend the Fear Factor diet), and violent and even lethal allergic reactions to food. The point is that we all may have degrees of intolerance in ways we may not even recognize. And we need to start listening to what our small intestine is trying to tell us about what we eat. Once you recognize that the general sense of “feeling off” can be caused by the foods you eat you can identify—and work to eliminate, reduce, or substitute-the substance that makes your gut twist like an animal balloon.

FACTOID

For those of you who’ve stayed up wondering, here’s the reason why your gas may smell and other people’s gas may not: Think of your body as a refrigerator. If you let food sit in there, it’s going to smell after a while. In your body, sulfur-rich foods like eggs, meat, beer, beans, and cauliflower are decomposed by bacteria to release hydrogen sulfide-a smell strong enough to flatten a bear. Avoiding these foods is the ideal solution, but when stinky gas persists, the best solutions are leafy green vegetables and probiotics (specifically lactobacilli GG or Bifidus Regularis), which work like baking soda in your fridge to reduce odor. Beano can sometimes work with beans, but soaking the beans ahead of time is useful as well.

Here, we’ll look at how inflammation happens at the gut level, and then, in the next chapter, how that can lead to inflammation at the total-body level.

Inflamed Gut: The Intestinal Firefights

At the intestinal level, foods can cause inflammation of your intestinal wall through such things as allergies, bacteria, or other toxins. When food incites inflammatory responses in your gut, it’s as if a grenade has been launched throughout your digestive system (see Figure 4.1 on page 81). Then in response to this already damaging grenade, your body tosses more grenades to create an apocalyptic digestive War of the Worlds. The effect is that the more inflammation we have in our intestines, the more toxins can enter our bloodstream.

During this firefight along the digestive border, your body perceives a foreign intruder and assigns its special forces—mast cells and macrophages—to eliminate the culprit. These are the cells that start an immune-response process throughout your body by ingesting foreign elements and alerting the rest of your body’s protecting cells that intruders have entered the area. Foods that don’t agree with your body’s sensibilities are seen as foreign invaders, so the macrophages attack these foods and tell everyone that this war is going on. This causes your whole body to start firing away at these foods and at innocent bystanders—and thus causes inflammation in your bloodstream. In that way, eating unhealthy food is really like having a chronic infection that triggers an immune response, which then causes inflammation.

One of your body’s goals is to get glucose into your brain cells—to feed those brain cells so that they can function. But inflammation in your body prevents sugar from getting to those cells, so you end up wanting more glucose and eating more sugary foods, which then increase inflammation and starts the whole cycle again.

FACTOID

Probiotics like lactobacillus GG or Bifidus Regularis repopulate your small intestine’s bacteria with healthful bacteria, especially after a course of antibiotics. The good bacteria calm down the dangerous ones-meaning that they can help you have less GI irritation, less gas, and less risk of an inflammatory uncivil war breaking out.

While we should be concerned about decreasing our body fat, we should also concentrate on decreasing our body’s inflammatory response so we become more efficient in managing potential complications of our waist size. There’s some genetic component to inflammation (some us have more than others, and smokers tend to have higher levels of inflammation than nonsmokers). Most important, the process of gaining weight is often a process of inflammation. YOU-reka! When you decrease your body’s inflammatory response, you will decrease your weight and waist as well.

The more inflammation you have, the less efficiently you use your food calories, and the worse you feel. The worse you feel, the more bad foods you eat to try to make yourself feel better. The more bad food you eat, the less well you can respond to the normal stresses of life, and the more inflammation you experience. And the more inflammation you have, the higher your risk of developing:

 diabetes

 high blood pressure

 bad cholesterol numbers

 and all of the other conditions that contribute to your increase in size and your decrease in health

Plain and simple: Inflammation ages your body by making your arteries less elastic and by increasing atherosclerosis (the rusting of blood vessels). Inflammation also makes it more likely that your DNA will be damaged, and a cell will become cancerous. And it increases your risk of infections. If the inflammatory mediators are fighting in the arteries, they can’t be defending elsewhere, and this situation increases the risk that your body will turn on itself, causing an autoimmune disease in which you attack your own tissues (for example, some forms of rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disease).

FACTOID

We have two main sources that power nature’s rear-propulsion system. Gas comes from the air we swallow (20 percent) and the digestion of foods by bacteria in our intestines (80 percent). These bacteria love digesting sugars, fiber, or milk (if you’re lactose-deficient). The result is lots of gas made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane (which—duck!—is flammable). You can reduce swallowing air by avoiding cigarettes, gum, and carbonated beverages, or by eating and drinking more slowly.

Inflammation stresses your body

Inflammation fattens your body.

Obesity isn’t just a disease of doughnuts and baked ziti. Obesity is a disease of inflammation. As we travel through the rest of our digestive journey, well be stopping at three digestive landmarks to see how foods influence inflammation and how inflammation influences fat:

Your Major Interstate of Food: Your Small Intestine. This approximately twenty-foot-long organ (it’s about three times your height) serves as your second brain, deciding which foods agree with your body and which foods cause your body to rebel like sixth graders with a substitute teacher.

Your Parking Lot of Fat: Your Omentum. The omentum, which is located next to your stomach, serves as your primary storage facility of fat, where you park some or (in really bad cases) all the excess foods you eat. Ideally, the garage is empty. But as we gain weight, some of our bellies are housing four stories of Winnebago-worthy fat. Most important, the omentum serves as our body’s ultimate stress gauge: YOU-reka! As we’ll explain in a moment, bigger bellies indicate higher levels of inadequately managed chronic stress—which causes chronic levels of inflammation.

Abdominal Pain Is a Pain in the Neck

Your abdominal discomfort may be caused not by what’s happening inside your belly but by what’s happening outside. According to one researcher, there’s such a thing as Tight Pants Syndrome, which is abdominal pain lasting two to three hours after a meal. Its cause? Yup: pants that are too tight. (The researcher says there’s as much as a three-inch difference between waist size and waistband.) Funny, but the same thing happens with men and shirt size. Two-thirds of men purchase shirts with a neck size that’s too small, so they get headaches, changes in vision, and even changes in blood flow to and from the brain.

Your Post Office Processing Facility: Your Liver. Your liver is the second-heaviest organ in your body (the largest, your skin, is actually twice as heavy) and is your body’s metabolic machine. Your liver works a lot like an urban postal center, taking in all the incoming mail (in terms of nutrients and toxins), sorting it, detoxifying it, and then shipping it off to different destinations for your body to use as energy.

While the three organs all play different roles, the upshot of their relationship is this: The small intestine initially processes your food, and your omentum helps store it. Inflammation occurs in your small intestine and omentum, but the big battle happens in your liver, where the mother of all inflammatory responses takes place. That’s the one that makes you store fat—and experience the unhealthy effects of it.

FACTOID

Fat is like an organ, but the omentum is the supercharged version. Omentum fat has more blood supply than any other kind of fat and is quickest to mobilize itself to feed the liver.

Yes, we know that in-your-gut physiology isn’t always pretty, but we want you to keep in mind our main gut goal: By understanding how food travels through this leg of your digestive system, you’ll be able to identify the foods that will help you reduce harmful and weight-related inflammation. When you do that, you’ll have signed a digestive peace treaty that can end the war on your waist.

FACTOID

About 10 percent of Americans have fatty livers that are overwhelmed with fat sent from the intestines and omentum for processing. Fatty livers can lead to fibrosis-reduced liver function, and even the serious liver disease cirrhosis over time, although for most folks, you just end up looking like foie gras on the insides.

Gathering Intelligence

They say that a woman thinks with her heart, and a man thinks with his personal periscope, but when it comes to sheer anatomy, the organ closest to your brain isn’t the one that flutters over a midnight serenade or the one that tingles over a lingerie catalog. It’s the one that coils through your gut like a sleeping python.

From a purely physiological standpoint, your small intestine functions as your second brain. It contains more neurons than any organ but your brain (and as many as your spinal cord), and the physical structure of the small bowel most resembles that of the brain. In addition, after your brain, your small intestine experiences the greatest range of emotions—in this case, your feelings manifest themselves in the form of gastrointestinal distress. In your brain, you react to actions: You feel love when your spouse holds your hand, mad when he forgets an anniversary, humiliated when he takes off his shirt at the Bears game and thumps his densely forested chest for a shot at being on SportsCenter. Your small intestine does the same thing. It reacts to foods that enter its pathway, depending on their anti- or proinflammatory effect. Your foods dictate whether your small intestine feels mild annoyance (a little bloating), anger (gas), stubbornness (constipation), or all-out temper tantrums (a thar-she-blows case of diarrhea).

Of course, you’re the one who decides what foods you’ll eat, but your small intestine works like an undercover agent—gathering information about all the nutrients and toxins that enter your body.

Your small intestine feels. Your intestine thinks. And your intestine performs a critical job during digestion: It helps guide you in all of the decisions you make about eating, because it tells you which foods agree with your body and which ones don’t. How does it do that? Through the absorption of those foods. Your small intestine has an absorptive surface area that’s 1,000 times larger than its start-to-end length because of all of the accordion-like nooks, crannies, and folds within it. Those spaces are where your body actually absorbs nutrients. So your intestinal absorption area isn’t just 20 feet long; it’s the equivalent of 20,000 feet long. No wonder you absorb so much of what you eat. When you have inflammation in the wall of your small intestine (through a food allergy or intolerance), it dramatically cuts down on that absorptive surface area—from about 2 million square centimeters to 2,000 square centimeters—because of swelling and poisoning of the functional surface cells. And if the intestine can’t absorb nutrients, you experience an upset stomach and diarrhea.

Why Some People Stall

We’d like to think that our bodies work like cars-press the accelerator to go faster, tap the brakes to slow down. But our body’s metabolic switches don’t quite work that way: We may not gain or lose weight at the rate in which we expect to. When we have inflammation, our bodies are less efficient meaning that we burn more calories-as a way to protect you, even as you gain weight. As we lose weight and decrease inflammation, our bodies go back to being efficient, and we may not burn calories at the proportional rate in which we gained them. So when we eat the right foods and more efficiently metabolize them, weight also may stall temporarily-meaning you still may be heavy, but might not have as many health risks associated with the weight.

While we’re all familiar with those overt, emergency intestinal crises, our intestinal emotions also influence us in ways we don’t normally associate with food. The reason we may feel groggy or have less energy than a drained nine-volt could be because our intestines are trying to tell us we’re choosing the wrong foods. If you pulled out the small intestines of your entire family and laid them on the back deck to compare them (latex gloves, please), you’d see that they all look alike; they’re the classic, wormy tubes that wind throughout your gut. In terms of basic physiology, we all have the same intestines, just as we all have the same basic brain structure. But just as all of our brains don’t function the same way even though we have the same parts, our intestines don’t function the same way either. YOU-reka! Our intestines are as different as our smiles, as our laughs, as our political views, as our fetishes. A particular food can make one person feel energized and make another person feel as lethargic as a rag doll.

FACTOID

You may hear that celebrities get colonics because they seem like some sort of miracle weight-loss cure. Here’s how they work: You get a tube pushed up into your lower intestines (via your back end). You’re infused with a solution, and you roll around to wash out your colon, then the fluid gets sucked out (you’re given coffee, to help you go to the bathroom quickly). The purpose is to cleanse out the toxins and “reboot” your intestines. You’ll produce a lot of waste after a colonic, but the main waste here is of money. Your colon only absorbs water, so there’s no weight-loss benefit from colonics. In fact, you can get the same colon-cleansing and toxin-eliminating effect with a twenty-four-hour fast.

Anatomically, your intestinal wall is Clint Eastwood tough. With more than a trillion bacteria living in your intestines at any given time (most of them helpful, but at least 500 species of which are potentially lethal), your body protects itself with a fortified infrastructure to keep the bacteria out of your bloodstream. But your body—though it relies on that Fort Knox-like wall—has to have a way to give clearance to authorized visitors. That is, it needs to allow nutrients to get through the wall to your bloodstream so you can use food as energy to keep your organs functioning, to go to work, to pry the kid’s fingers from the panicked frog’s leg. (One of the ways this penetration system works is through bile, which tricks the wall’s security so fats can get through to the bloodstream.) This selection of what stays in your intestines and what can cross the line is one of the least understood anatomical processes, but it’s part of the inflammatory battle that plays out daily in your body. When your intestinal wall is inflamed, some unauthorized visitors get in.

Figure 4.1 Internal Conflict Food and toxins continually line the frontier of our intestines. Good foods slip through to provide us nutrition, but combatants stimulate an aggressive response from local immune cells. The resulting inflammation causes swelling, gas, and belly cramps.

FACTOID

While hundreds of herbs and supplements have been purported to help you lose weight, many of them have not been studied well enough to support those claims and are not regulated by the FDA. Safety can be an issue-as was the case with ephedra, which helped people lose weight through adrenalinelike action but put them at risk of heart attacks. Here are some common herbal remedies and why they may not be all they’re supposed to be, which is why you shouldn’t put your weight-loss faith in any of them:

 Calcium: It’s been touted as an ingredient that speeds weight loss. Studies have shown that those with low calcium are more likely to gain weight and be overweight. But the people who lost weight with increased calcium were also on short-term, calorie-restricted diets, so the weight loss was more predictable than an Oscar winner’s speech.

 Bitter orange: It’s been shown to decrease weight but has the same side effects as ephedra, such as increasing heart rate and blood pressure.

 Chitosan: It’s extracted from the shells of shellfish, and the theory is that it works a little like some weight-loss drugs, by blocking fat absorption in your body. But studies show that chitosan doesn’t lead to weight loss.

Essentially, alien bacteria are living in your intestines, trying to get into your bloodstream to multiply (which is their goal) and cause havoc, but they’re being fought at the intestinal wall by those who guard it. (Your gastrointestinal tract, but especially your intestines, is one of three places where your body interacts with the external world; your skin and lungs being the other two.) In your small intestine, your mast cells and macrophages, which are part of your immune system, serve as the bowel brigade, fighting alien invaders.

When foods enter the small intestine and are transported across the intestinal wall, they’re met by this bowel brigade border patrol, which screens the nutrients. The bowel brigade lets the food through because it has an authorized ID card—it’s food, and your body wants it. But if it’s the wrong kind of food, or if it’s got some toxins with it, your bowel brigade responds by calling in more mast cells and setting off time-released bombs throughout your intestines. This is where the inflammation firefight starts. The result? Pain, gas, nausea, or general GI discomfort.

Milking It

If you suffer from a milk allergy, it can make your gut feel like a washing machine in the rinse cycle. Here are some ways you can help manage it:

 Milk’s one of the easiest ingredients to substitute in baking and cooking by using an equal amount of either water, fruit juice, or soy or rice milk.

 Watch out for hidden sources of dairy. For example, some brands of canned tuna fish and other nondairy products contain casein, a milk protein. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently working on requiring products to eliminate the term nondairy if they contain milk derivatives.

 In restaurants, tell your server about your allergy. Many restaurants put butter (which comes from milk) on steaks and other food after they’ve been grilled or prepared to add extra flavor, but you can’t see it after it melts.

 Some ingredients seem to contain milk products or derivatives but actually don’t. These are safe to eat if you have a lactose allergy: cocoa butter, cream of tartar, and calcium lactate.

By the way, there’s a higher ethnic predominance of lactose intolerance in those of non-European origin. It’s just another example of how genes-not willpower-help dictate what you can and cannot eat.

Why is this crucial? Not just because of the initial inflammatory reactions, but for the role it plays in your eating emotions (your small bowel is your second brain, and 95 percent of your body’s serotonin, which is a feel-good hormone, is in your gut). How you feel influences how you eat, and how you eat influences how you feel. When you eat food that makes you feel bad, you self-medicate with food that may make you feel good in the short term but will actually contribute to both inflammation and weight gain. Ultimately, when you’re caught in a cycle of feeling bad and eating worse, you’ll create a chemical stress response in your body—one that’s handled by your parking lot of fat.

FACTOID

About 2.5 percent of us suffer from milk allergies, making it the most prevalent of food allergies. While allergies to dairy products are generally outgrown, peanut allergies are not (and they’re the most potentially lethal). By the way, it seems like allergies are more prevalent the earlier in life we’re exposed to the foods.

Figure 4.2 Belly Up Not all fat is skin-deep. Deep down under your muscles, the omentum drapes off the stomach like stockings on a hanger. As we store fat the omentum wraps around to give us the dreaded beer belly.

FACTOID

Most of our body parts are adaptable enough to use multiple energy sources to survive. Only two organs need sugar directly: the brain and the testes. Evolutionary hints often come in these forms of clues.

The Storage of Stress in Your Belly

The best way to tell how stressed you are: Take a look how much belly fat you have. The larger your waist, the higher your stress.

Along the intestinal freeway, the parking garage for fat that is your omentum looks like a stocking draped over a hanger (the stomach is the hanger), but changes depending on how many calories you’re storing (see Figure 4.2). In a person with little omentum fat, your stomach looks as if it has nylons hanging off it—thin, permeable, with some webbing. But in a person with a lot of omentum fat, the hanger looks as if snow pants are hanging on it—the fat globules are so fat that there’s no netting or webbing whatsoever. (While cells can convert to fat in the liver, getting fatter is more a case of your existing cells growing. When you add body fat, you don’t get more fat cells, just more fat in each cell.)

Genetics certainly helps dictate whether you’re going to have a full garage (by having lots of belly fat) or an empty one. But your lifestyle—in terms of stress—often plays a bigger role in deciding whether you’ll have large amounts of belly fat or not. Here’s how it works:

Historically, mankind has two types of stresses. The first kind is the immediate soil-your-loincloth stress (in other words, the dinner-seeking saber-toothed tiger is closing in fast). In that fight-or-flight scenario, your body produces the neurotransmitter norepinephrine to speed your heart rate, breathing, and 100-yard-dash time to the cave. When that happens, the last thing you’re thinking about is grilling up some tubers on the campfire, so your hunger levels are squashed. That’s because your body inhibits the peptide NPY during periods of acute stress (it’s why exercise cuts appetite, because your body senses that you’re in acute stress). So high levels of stress work in favor of your waist: They take away your appetite and speed up your metabolism.

The second kind of stress that early man faced is the chronic struggle brought on by drought and famine. In contrast to the thirty or forty seconds they sweated over tiger fangs, our ancestors worried about survival all the time, and their bodies had to deal with chronic stress. When they faced famine, they sought out as many calories as they could, and their metabolism downshifted to help them conserve energy. While we don’t deal with famine, we experience modern-day versions of chronic stress that make us seek out calories and then downshift our metabolism. YOU-reka! Our bodies respond by storing the excess energy to call upon during periods where there may not be enough food. Those extra calories are stored in the omentum—our abdominal fat depot—to have on hand in case we are denied food. The liver, which is the relay station for energy circulation in the body, has immediate access to this omental fat, unlike the cellulose cluttering up the back of our thighs.

FACTOID

About 95 percent of your body’s serotonin is found in your intestines, while your central nervous system has only 2 percent to 3 percent. Remember, serotonin is what helps control depression in your brain.

FACTOID

The additive olestra looks like a fat cooks like a fat, and tastes like a fat, but is not a fat and isn’t absorbed as a fat-which is why it’s used in some food products to lower their fat and calorie contents. The problem is that olestra gives your stools the consistency of tea and sucks away some of the valuable fat-soluble vitamins, especially carotenoids. So it’s smart to eats lots of yellow and green vegetables if you’re eating chips made with olestra. By the way, the official name of olestra provides a useful insight into its mechanism of action: “sucrose polyester.”

When people are under stress, their bodies release high amounts of steroids into their bloodstream in the form of the hormone cortisol. In acute cases (the tiger or a car accident), steroids stick around briefly. But when you’re under chronic stress (the drought or the nagging task), your body needs to find a way to deal with those high levels of cortisol. So your omentum clears the cortisol steroids; it has receptors that bind to them and can suck them out of the bloodstream. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily reduce the stress level that you feel.) The steroids turbocharge the ability of omentum to store fat, so your belly fat (and subsequent waist size) becomes the best surrogate indicator of how well you are really coping with stress—despite what your brain might be claiming. That uptake of steroids throws your body into metabolic disarray by making your omentum resistant to insulin so that sugar floats around without being absorbed and used appropriately by needy cells. This:

 chronically raises your blood sugar, which damages your tissues;

 supercharges your omentum with inflammatory chemicals that destabilize the delicate equilibrium of your hormones;

 forces your omentum to pump high-octane fat directly into your liver—causing your liver to make even more inflammatory chemicals.

Figure 4.3 Toxic Dump All the nutrients we absorb through the intestines pass through the liver via the portal vein. Excess fat and inflammatory chemicals stored in the omentum can dump directly into the liver as well which can start a cascade of toxic protein release into the body.

The Fight Against Inflammation

The liver—the organ that’s responsible for your metabolism—receives its blood and nutrients from your gut. What it wants isn’t the trans fat from the extra-large fries. It wants the other nutrients: the protein from the meat, the carbohydrates from the bun, the lycopene from the tomato, the calcium from the cheese. The liver is always on the job, processing munchies after midnight, as well as 5 a.m. coffee. Your liver takes every chemical in your body and processes it by binding it to a protein, transforming it into something the body can use.

FACTOID

Preliminary studies in animals show that the scent of grapefruit oil-yes, just the scent-has an effect of reducing the appetite and body weight. Rats exposed to the scents for fifteen minutes three times a week enjoyed the effect. The cause? It’s unclear, but it may work through grapefruit oil’s effects on liver enzymes. Grapefruit oil is widely available through aromatherapy stores and websites. As a bonus, try to eat a couple of grapefruit while you’re searching.

So your poor overworked liver also gets the toxic trans fat directly from your intestines and from your omentum via that portal vein that feeds right into it. When your intestines send that convoy of fat pouring down into the vein, the liver sees it as a runaway train and tries to metabolize the foods. But in defending the body, additional inflammatory chemicals are released. In your liver, nutrients can be met by two substances. In our digestive town along our intestinal highway, let’s think of one as the raucous frat house that stimulates inflammation, while the other is a nice, stately nonprofit group that quiets inflammation and performs good deeds throughout your body.

Infected and Inflated

While it’s true that everything from your hair to that ankle tattoo technically belongs to you, the truth is that only 10 percent of the cells on and in your body are actually yours. The rest are microbes living on your skin and in your orifices (pleasant visual, eh?), and especially in your gut. Those gut-residing microbes provide the enzymes you need to digest the fiber in fruits and vegetables that would otherwise pass through your system without being absorbed (pleasant visual number two). That’s right. Without the bacteria and viruses in your gut the food-label warning about 100 calories per bite would be a gross exaggeration. Specifically, mice raised without exposure to any germs have 60 percent less body fat than ordinary mice, even though they eat 30 percent more food. More intriguingly, common gut bacteria inhibit proteins that normally prevent the body from depositing fat, so infected mice have more belly fat.

So what do a few blubbery mice have to do with obesity in humans? It turns out that people infected with a specific chicken virus in India carry an extra 33 pounds of fat compared with noninfected humans. More important they have lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels-just the opposite of what we expect with weight gain. Why? Perhaps because the germs in the gut also digest cholesterol, so that less of it is absorbed. In an American study, the virus was found in 30 percent of obese subjects compared to only 11 percent of leaner people, and the folks who had the virus weighed significantly more than uninfected people. (And when twins with only one infected sibling are examined, the infected twin has 2 percent more body fat, despite having the same genes.)

Finally, we know that fat cells and our immune cells share lots of similarities. Fat cells can engulf bacteria and can secrete hormones that stimulate the immune system, possibly explaining why obesity causes an inflammatory response and leads to elevated C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation). So how do you tell if you have a germ civil war inside you that’s causing obesity? If your cholesterol and triglyceride levels are low and your C-reactive protein level is elevated, it might be worth testing yourself; Obetech (www.obesityvirus.com ) makes a kit. This might reduce your guilt level, but since science is still gathering data and a cure is still lacking, you will still need to focus on other approaches. At least for now anyway.

Eating foods that stimulate your liver to release the frat-house substance—which is called nuclear factor kappa B, or NF-kappa B—triggers a chain of events that causes the inflammation in your body and prevents the transport of glucose to your cells (and thus triggers hunger). Glucose (sugar) on the inside of cells stops hunger (in the specific satiety center of the brain). But you can also eat foods that stop the inflammation riot or foods that stimulate the release of the do-good substances that have an anti-inflammatory effect (see Figure 4.4). They’re called PPARs (it stands for peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, but we like to think of them as Perfectly Powerful Abdominal Regulators). The reason PPARs are so effective: Once they’re activated, they decrease glucose and insulin levels, as well as cholesterol and inflammation. Though we all have different genetic dispositions for levels of PPARs, PPARs aren’t self-starters; they need to be activated by foods to work.

Help on the Horizon

“Fat-free” can refer to marathoners and teen pop stars, but when you see it referring to food, you have to be skeptical. That’s because either it tastes like a shoe box or it can be loaded with lots of sugar to compensate for fat-making that “fat-free” food more dangerous than a slowpoke in the passing lane. One goal for food manufacturers is to make foods that allow eaters to have the best of both worlds: great-tasting food that doesn’t have waist-expanding ingredients. One such substance that may eventually change the way we eat is called Z-trim-it’s a natural, zero-calorie fat substitute that’s made from the fiber of such ingredients as oats, soy, rice, and barley. While there’s no clinical data showing its effectiveness in weight loss, there’s some evidence to suggest it can be used to cut the amount of fat usually used in a meal by 25 percent to 50 percent. The resulting food has all the “taste” benefits of fat (better taste, more creaminess, better mouth-feel) without the caloric load. Z-trim, which you can use with your own recipes, might also inhibit the hunger-inducing ghrelin because of its fiber content. The downside seems to be that by adding Z-trim, you also lose the benefit of the healthy oils in the food. Our tasters reported that foods with Z-trim had all the flavor of full-fat food, and that’s enough to make us hopeful that nonfat won’t always have to mean high-sugar or no taste.

Now, if you look at PPAR and NF-kappa B at the cellular level, you can also see how they predispose us to obesity. Every human cell is run by DNA strands that carry blueprints for future growth. When the DNA mutates, it makes our cells less able to reproduce themselves rapidly and accurately, so our bodies age. What makes that DNA break down? Yes, inflammatory responses in your body that cause oxidation (remember that this is your body’s rusting process)—namely in the form of increasing NF-kappa B with inadequate PPAR levels to put out the inflammatory fires. How do we stop that mutation, that oxidation, and that inflammation? By eating foods with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties—foods that we’ll cover in the waist management plan on page 231. These foods are particularly useful for those who are aging and unable either to exercise or to manage stress efficiently.

This is one of the primary battles you want to win—to quiet your inflammation and decrease your fat storage through the regulation of these two chemicals and their allies. To quash those hooligans living in the NF-kappa B house, you need to increase the effects of the noble PPARs throughout your body.

Figure 4.4 Party’s Over Foods entering the liver can stimulate either proteins (NF-kappa B) that act like drunk frat boys and cause inflammation or soothing receptors (PPAR) that put out the fires. Even if you eat too much, if the PPARs are running the show, the negative effects are far less.

Weird Causes of Obesity

Most people assume that being overweight means one of two things: that you eat too much or move too little. But some research suggests that overeating and inactivity shouldn’t be the only things taking the blame for our moon-sized waist circumferences. Studies show that other explanations for obesity include things like-get this-what you stick under your armpits and the age of your mom when she gave birth. Here are some of the more unusual things theorized to be related to obesity:

 Deodorants: Some deodorants contain chemicals that can disrupt your normal metabolism, making you more likely to gain weight. While we don’t recommend ditching the deodorant and scaring off elevator mates, you should avoid deodorants that contain the ingredient aluminum or sprays with polychlorobiphenols.

 The temperature: Air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter may make you less cranky, but they also may make you fatter. If you’re in a cold room, for example, your body has to do more metabolic work to bring your temperature to normal (same for a warm room)-thus increasing your metabolism. You can increase your calorie-burning motors simply by lowering the temperature in your house during the winter or raising it in the summer.

 Stopping smoking: We recommend cigarettes about as much as we recommend DIY vasectomies, but nicotine can be a powerful weapon in the fight against fat. See our take on nicotine on page 324. Your mom: Studies show that the older your mom was when she gave birth, the more likely you are to be fatter. While there’s nothing you can do to change your family history, having a mom who was older at the time of your birth means you need to be more vigilant about watching your waist.

 Your mate: Studies show that fatter people tend to choose fat mates, and that increases the odds that you’ll produce an even fatter child. We’re not in the matchmaking business, but it’s worth noting that the best place to meet a mate isn’t at the burger joint.

The Stress Response: Putting It All Together

Today, we don’t experience droughts or famine, but we do have high levels of chronic stress, whether it comes in the form of workload, relationship troubles, or to-do lists that are longer than Route 66. And our bodies respond the same way as our ancestors’ bodies did. But the difference is that we have plenty of food at our disposal. Chronic stress triggers an ancient response of calorie accumulation and fat storage, so we end up continually upgrading the size of our omentum storage unit. Here’s where the cycle of fat spins out of control:

 When you have chronic stress, your body increases its production of steroids and insulin, which…

 Increases your appetite, which…

 Increases the chance you’ll engage in hedonistic eating in the form of high-calorie sweets and fats, which…

 Makes you store more fat, especially in the omentum, which…

 Pumps more fat and inflammatory chemicals into the liver, which…

 Creates a resistance to insulin, which…

 Makes your pancreas secrete more insulin to compensate, which…

 Makes you hungrier than a muzzled wolf, which…

 Continues the cycle of eating because you’re stressed and being stressed because you’re eating.

Figure 4.5 Stress Mess The cycle of stress affects weight by increasing hormones above normal levels, resulting in hunger and fat deposition, which causes inflammation, which causes more stress, and off we go.

Is There Such a Thing as a Bad Food?

Fast-food franchise owners aren’t the only ones who may say that there’s no such thing as good or bad food-that it’s just the volume of food that you eat. There are plenty of dietitians, nutritionists, doctors, and food growers who believe the same thing. Our research leads us respectfully to disagree. Good, healthy foods satiate you, they decrease inflammation in your body, they decrease the tendency to yo-yo, they’re nutrient-dense, and they make you younger. Bad foods make you more hungry, increase inflammation in your body, make you feel sluggish, make it more likely you’ll yo-yo, have few nutrients, and make you older. After all, when you eat fries (no matter whether it’s two fries or two bags), you’re taking in calories that taste good, but have as much nutrient value as plywood. In our words, bad foods add to your waste; good foods make waist management easier because they help keep you satisfied so that you never feel like gorging on nutrient-low and calorie-high foods. We call those good foods the YOU-th-FULL foods.

Interestingly, the more fat you store in your omentum, the more it reduces the effect of stress on your brain—it’s your body’s way of comforting you, assuring you that you’ll be prepared during times of famine. It’s why your omentum fat—the fat around your belly—isn’t just an indicator of the size of your waist, it’s also your own personal gauge of the size of your stress.

YOU TIPS!

Let Food Fight the Fight. Your best weapon against fat isn’t a Tae-Bo video or a self-serve liposuction vacuum. It’s food. Good food. Inflammation-reducing food. To reduce obesity-causing inflammation, you need to eat foods with nutrients that can do just that-either by having direct anti-inflammatory or antioxidant properties, or by stimulating the do-good PPARs or inhibiting the party-throwing pledges in the NF-kappa B frat house. Antioxidants are often what gives a specific food its flavor, smell, and color. So eating more anti-inflammatory foods means eating more flavorful and brightly colored foods. (The foods you eat ought to be tasteful; you can magnify a flavor by doubling up on it with two different food sources. For example, add sun-dried tomato bits to tomato sauce, or eat dried apples with applesauce to bring out the flavor.)

Following is a list of nutrients that seem to have antioxidant and/or anti-inflammatory effects, and our recommended doses. While they may not help you lose a ton of weight, they’re known or thought to have anti-inflammatory effects, which will help you live healthier no matter what your weight.

Substances known to fight inflammation:

Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Omega-3 fatty acids-found in fish oils-seem to increase the number of PPARs, which will help reduce your inflammation. We recommend you get omega-3s in the form of three four-ounce servings of fish per week or a 2-gram fish oil capsule a day or an ounce of walnuts a day. (Saturated fats, by the way, increase inflammatory properties, and trans fat undermines the effects of omega-3s.)

Green Tea: The thinking is that catechins in green tea inhibit the breakdown of fats and also inhibit production of NF-kappa B. Studies have found that drinking three glasses of green tea a day reduced body weight and waist circumference by 5 percent in three months. It also increased metabolism (all nonherbal teas have substances that increase the metabolic rate).

Substances we think may fight inflammation:

Beer (in moderation, Tiger): The bitter compounds that come from hops derived from beer seem to activate PPARs in animal studies. But you have to get them in the form of only one drink a day. People who drink twenty-one eight-ounce beers, or twenty-one glasses of wine, or twenty-one shots of whiskey a week have a clear correlation predisposing them to belly fat independent of all other risk factors.

Turmeric: A gingerlike plant that has curcumin as its active ingredient, turmeric seems to activate more PPARs to reduce inflammation. Just add the right dose-a pinch ( of a teaspoon). Add any more and your food will taste like mustard.

Jojoba Beans (They are really seeds): They’ve been shown to tune up the system in the ways we want like increasing good cholesterol levels and raising leptin levels to curb hunger. The supplement jojoba extract (the supplement simmondsin is also made from jojoba) seems to work by stimulating CCK. The dose is about 2.5 grams to 5 grams for most people (50 milligrams per kilogram of weight).

The Main Ingredients

Though the effect is not completely proven, there’s some evidence that the following substances and ingredients have a meaningful anti-inflammatory effect:

Substance

Found In

Isoflavones

Soybeans, all soy products

Lignans

Flaxseed, flaxseed oil, whole grains such as rye

Polyphenols

Tea, fruits, vegetables

Glucosinolates

Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower, plus kale

Carnosol

Rosemary

Resveratrol

Red wine, grapes, red or purple grape juice

Cocoa

Dark chocolate

Quercetin

Cabbage, spinach, garlic

Drink Java. Coffee is Americans’ largest source of antioxidants (aside from caffeine, which has its own antioxidant properties). It is chock-full (pun intended) of polyphenols and is a great low-calorie fluid when you have cravings. You can drink decaffeinated versions to avoid the side effects. The second-biggest source of antioxidants? Bananas, which have seven times less than coffee.

Go through the Process of Elimination. To change the way you feel, the way you process food, and the way you store fat is to get at the root of the system: You need to figure out what foods may be causing you GI trouble, no matter how subtle your symptoms may be. The best way to do that is through the food-elimination test. What you’ll do is completely eliminate certain groups of foods for at least three days in a row. (Sometimes, the elimination of a food takes two or more weeks to show its benefits in how you feel.) During that time, take notes about all the different ways you feel: your energy levels, fatigue, and how often you go to the bathroom. Take notes when you eliminate foods and when you reintroduce them-that way you’ll really notice what changes make you feel worse or better.

Here’s the order we suggest: wheat products (including rye, barley, and oats), dairy products, refined carbohydrates (especially sugar), saturated and trans fats, and artificial colors (which are tough to get rid of because they’re in everythickg). While the experiment will help you ID your personal digestive destructors, it has an added benefit: Eliminating a group of foods for several days at a time will help train your body to eat smaller portions all the time.

Get Moving after a Big Meal. If you’ve made a mistake and gorged on a tub’s worth of food, make your body work in your favor. Stay awake for a few hours and take a thirty-minute walk to help your body with the breakdown of nutrients and so that it uses the food for energy, rather than storing it as fat. Once the calories are in your stomach, don’t try to vomit; vomiting can damage your stomach, burn your esophagus, and even discolor your teeth if you do it enough. Also, don’t eat sweets after gorging, because sweets will increase insulin and help deposit excess calories in your belly.

Pick Your Poison. High amounts of sucrose (sugar) cause inflammation; you can reduce the effect by using alternative sweeteners. Besides causing sudden spikes in blood sugar, foods with high sugar content have high calorie content and if not burned off or used as fuel, those calories will be stored as fat. While some sweeteners are low- or no-calorie, there is a downside: Sweeteners found in diet soft drinks, in diet foods, and on restaurant tables next to the sugar packets go unrecognized by the brain. They’re essentially invisible to your brain’s satiety centers, so it doesn’t count them as real food and still desires to be fulfilled by calories somewhere else. There’s no clear-cut proof on the effects of these sweeteners-either on a health level or on a weight-loss level-but we do know one thickg: Prehistoric man wasn’t putting Splenda in his water. Artificial sweeteners, while lacking calories, may have side effects like intestinal problems and headaches. If you’re having a hard time losing weight or don’t feel well, these are some of the first thickgs to cut out even though they can be an alternative to high-calorie sugars. There’s no clear-cut data on which sweeteners work most effectively, but here’s how we rate them:

Sweetener

The Scoop

Here’s the Skinny

Sucralose (Splenda)

Discovered in 1976 but not introduced for widespread use for many years. More than 500 times sweeter than sucrose, stored in body fats, suitable for baking, and does not affect levels of blood sugar.

The research is least complete on this one, but go ahead and keep it in the cupboard. Its widespread use is too new for us to know any of the long-term effects, but it appears the most promising—and it’s the best one to use for cooking.

Aspartame (NutraSweet)

Entered the market in 1981. Several studies have found that it has adverse health effects, but those studies were very limited.

It’s come under a lot of scrutiny and has basically stood the test of time. But it’s the sweetener that hangs around the longest in your body, and it cannot be heated—it turns into formaldehyde (which could help you save on funeral expenses). It’s also rumored to limit the brain’s ability to use certain vitamins, antioxidants, and the mineral magnesium.

Saccharin

Has been around since the early 1900s, and while some studies found a health risk, those studies have significant limitations.

It appears to be one of the safest sweeteners and the only one with real long-term data, even if some of the data is not positive. (If you consume more than eighty twelve-ounce diet sodas a day, you’re at an increased risk of bladder cancer-good luck!)

Agave nectar

It’s a hypersweet natural substance.

Try it. While it’s very high in calories, you need only a fraction of the amount of sugar needed to gain the same level of sweetness. You can order through veganessentials.com or blueagavenectar.com.

Stevia

A noncaloric natural herb. Taste isn’t ideal, and stevia seems to lower sperm counts in some studies.

For the taste and the potential side effects, no thanks. No diet drink is worth the potential of sterility.