31 January 2014

Oxidative Stress

Oxidative stress is caused by the overproduction of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Normal amounts of ROS are important to protect the body from pathogens, but high amounts of these ROS can lead to damage in healthy cells, leading to chronic diseases.

17 January 2014

Video Presentation: Fat Chance




Recently I've been quoting a lot from the book Fat Chance, by Robert H. Lustig (I borrowed it from the library), and here's the easy-to-understand presentation. If you watch this video, you don't even need to read the book.

Enjoy!

14 January 2014

Sugar in Disguise

Article: 16 Supposedly Healthy Foods With More Sugar Than A Snickers Bar

In this article I received today (thank you, Ross!) you can see that certain foods might not be as "healthy" as their manufacturers claim. We might be consuming more sugar than we think.

13 January 2014

Leptin, the Hunger Hormone

"The journey through obesity and chronic metabolic disease begins and ends with the hormone insulin, the energy storage hormone [...]. There is no fat accumulation without insulin. Insulin shunts sugar to fat. It makes your fat cells grow. The more insulin, the more fat, period." (my emphasis)
                                                  - Dr Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance

03 January 2014

Grains

Just a little message from the book Paleo Manifesto by John Durant:

"We Americans would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if we had never discovered the (overly) simple fact that a gram of fat contains more calories than a gram of protein or carbohydrate, which seems to suggest that, all things equal, any overweight animal should eat more carbohydrate and less fat to lose weight. Yet carb-heavy grains are exactly what farmers feed to livestock to fatten them up as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Let me repeat that, just for good measure: grains -- the base of the USDA food pyramid for humans -- are what American farmers use to fatten up their livestock." (my emphasis)