Genius Foods

hormone called growth hormone becomes sharply elevated
when the body is fasting. Growth hormone serves many
roles, but its main function in adults is to preserve lean mass
in a fasted state—that is, to stop the breakdown of muscle
protein for glucose. After just twenty-four hours of fasting,
growth hormone can shoot up as high as 2,000 percent
(more on this in chapter 9), sending our bodies a signal to
suspend muscle breakdown and rev up the fat-burning
machinery instead.
Fat, on the other hand, is there to be burned. It’s the
body’s firewood, containing more than 3,000 backup
calories of brain fuel in just a single pound. An average-
weight person walks around with tens of thousands of
backup calories, while an obese person might carry
hundreds of thousands! Unlike with sugar, the number of
calories we can store as fat is virtually limitless.
When adipose tissue, the fat that sits underneath our skin
and around our waists, gets broken down during times of
starvation, fatty acids are released into the bloodstream to be
converted by the liver into a fuel called ketone bodies, or
simply ketones. Ketones are easily taken up by the cells of
the brain and can supply up to 60 percent of the brain’s
energy requirements. In a paper published in 2004,
pioneering ketone researcher Richard Veech wrote, “Ketone
bodies deserve the designation of a ‘super fuel,’” and you’re
about to learn why.

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