38 Joel Fuhrman, M.D.shocked at the dismal levels in supposedly "healthy" people. Our
bodies are not immune to immutable biological laws that govern cel-
lular function. Given enough time, disease will develop. Even bor-
derline deficiencies can result in various subtle defects in human
health, leading to anxiety, autoimmune disorders, cancer, and poor
eyesight, to name a few.^18
Fat and Refined Carbohydrates: Married to Your Waist
The body converts food fat into body fat quickly and easily: 100 calo-
ries of ingested fat can be converted to 97 calories of body fat by
burning a measly 3 calories. Fat is an appetite stimulant: the more you
eat, the more you want. If a food could be scientifically engineered to
create an obese society, it would have fat, such as butter, mixed with
sugar and flour.
The combination of fat and refined carbohydrates has an ex-
tremely powerful effect on driving the signals that promote fat accu-
mulation on the body. Refined foods cause a swift and excessive rise
in blood sugar, which in turn triggers insulin surges to drive the
sugar out of the blood and into our cells. Unfortunately, insulin also
promotes the storage of fat on the body and encourages your fat cells
to swell.
As more fat is packed away on the body, it interferes with insulin
uptake into our muscle tissues. Our pancreas then senses that the
glucose level in the bloodstream is still too high and pumps out even
more insulin. A little extra fat around our midsection results in so
much interference with insulin's effectiveness that two to five times
as much insulin may be secreted in an overweight person than in a
thin person.
The higher level of insulin in turn promotes more efficient con-
version of our caloric intake into body fat, and this vicious cycle con-
tinues. People get heavier and heavier as time goes on.
Eating refined carbohydrates — as opposed to complex carbohy-
drates in their natural state — causes the body's "set point" for body
weight to increase. Your "set point" is the weight the body tries to
maintain through the brain's control of hormonal messengers. When
you eat refined fats (oils) or refined carbohydrates such as white
flour and sugar, the fat-storing hormones are produced in excess,
raising the set point. To further compound the problem, because so
much of the vitamin and mineral content of these foods has been lost