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Readings on Health

A Field Guide to Men's Health, Jesse Millis, MD

Key points

Fiber fuels good digestion and is found in stringy vegetables and in whole grains with husks. Fiber supercharges your gastrointestinal tract by bulking up the stool so that it travels through your intestines faster and more frequently.

Simple eating plan 70% vegetables, 20% lean meat like grilled chicken, turkey or pork chop, 10% complex carbs like whole grains. Stay away from fatty or fried meats- hamburgers, heavy starches- like potatoes, mac and cheese, white rice.

Stay away from fast foods. :-( Avoid sugar at all costs. Stay away from processed foods- (google processed foods for examples). Drink only water, tea and coffee with no sugar.

Whole food is anything not altered or minimally altered. A baked potato is a whole food. French fries is not a whole food. A baked chicken breast is a whole food. A fried breaded chicken nugget is not a whole food. Brown rice is a whole food. White rice is stripped of all its nutritional value and reduced to essentially a sugar.

Whole fruit is full of natural sugar, but it also has a ton of fiber and fiber blunts the effect of sugar on your body. Drinking apple juice is no different than drinking pure sugar.

Double check wheat bread. Stay away the ones with enriched wheat flour- which is the same as white bread. The only real wheat bread is bread made with 100% whole grain flour.

Different kinds of fats

  • Unsaturated (good) fats are found in plants and nuts. They are liquid at room temperature, such as vegetable oils.
  • Saturated (iffy) fats are found in meat and butter. They are solid at room temperature. The risk is these fats may cause plaque and heart disease. Eat less of these.
  • Trans (bad) fats not found in nature. Example- margarine. Trans fats most likely cause more plaque build-up.

Different kinds of nuts

  • Peanuts are not nuts. Peanuts are beans or legumes. Peanuts have good proteins and vitamins but high carbs.
  • Real nuts are almonds, walnuts, pecans, and macadamia nuts- full of healthy polyunsaturated fats.

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Intermittent Fasting, Amanda Swaine

What is intermittent fasting

Humans evolved to sometimes feast and sometimes fast. During the growth (eating) phase, your body burns sources of sugar, or glucose, for energy and focuses on growing new muscles and cells. During the repair (fasting) phase, your body uses fat for energy and repairs itself by removing and recycling broken or old bits of cells, a process called autophagy. Both phases are important to our health.

Intermittent fasting regularly switches between phases of eating and fasting. This ensures your body has the nutrients it needs and enough fuel stored in your liver and fat cells to power you through periods of fasting and trigger health benefits.

Type 2 diabetes

Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels- and "allows" blood sugar into cells to use as energy. In this fashion, insulian lowers your blood sugar level.

Without enough insulin, glucose cannot get into cells and builds up in your blood. This leads to high blood sugar and diabetes. The pancreas makes insulin. Over and under production of insulin leads to different types of diabetes.

Insulin resistance is when muscule, fat and liver cells don't respond to insulin- meaning they don't consume glucose even in the presence of insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a condition when insulin resistance is too strong- and the pancreas cannot make more insulin. The result is high blood sugar.

What causes insulin resistance

Insulin resistance means the cells are not responding to insulin- and are not consuming glucose in the blood, leaving high glucose in the blood stream.

Physical inactivity and food choices leads contribute to insulin resistance.

For diet, eat less of 1) white bread, 2) potatoes, 3) high sugar cereals, 4) cakes and cookies. Eat more of 1) beans and legumes, 2) apples and berries, 3) leafy greens, 4) nuts, 5) dairy and fish.

How does intermittent fasting (INTF) help

INTF helps to increase insulin sensitivity by giving the body regular breaks from foods that stimulate insulin's release. (If we eat less sugary foods, then the pancreas would have to make less insulin and your muscule cells would not be so used to insulin being around all the time and being resistant to it.) Fasting also restores pancreas performance through a combination of repair mechanisms and by burning through any visceral fat that may have settled around the pancreas and other organs. This combination of improving insulin sensitivity and pancreas function can improve or stablize the condition.

In addition, during fasting, the body eventually starts behaving in starvation model. The cells' recycling plants, lysosomes, degrade old parts of cells as part of autophagy and take them back to their most basic form, individual building books. These building blocks provide backup nutrients for the body to reuse to manage overall nutrient balance during fasting time.

Different diets for fasting

  • keto diet consists of 75% fat, 20% protein, and 5% carbs. With the high percentage of fat, the body enteres into a fat-burning state called ketosis, where the body consumes ketones (fat) instead of sugar for energy.
  • low-car diet consists of 60% fat, 20% protein and 20% carbs.
  • paleo diet focuses on food our caveman ancestors would've eatened- vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, but no sugars, farmed grains, or diary.

Common diet ideas are 1) reduce sugar intake from chocolates, cakes, etc, 2) reduce refined carbs from bread, pasta, etc, 3) add fat and protein from eggs, olive oil, butter, nuts, seeds, meat and fish, 4) add more vegetables and fruits.

No sodas, even diet. Coffee with no milk. :-( Tea is fine.

What happens when you eat

  • During digestion, your body converts the carbohydrates from your eal into a usable form of sugar-based energy: glucose. Glucose enters your bloodstream, raising blood sugar levels and triggering your pancreas to release the hormone insulin.
  • Insulin allows glucose to enter your cells, where it can be used as energy. Insulin also signals the brain your fullness state and to stop eating.
  • Left-over glucose is stored in two forms- 1) as glycogen stored in muscules and the liver and 2) as triglycerides, a storable form of fat-based energy and stored in fat tissues across the body.

After eating

  • 4 hours after eating- the digested food have already been converted into glycogen in the liver or triglycerides in fat. Insulin levels go down. The pancreas release hormone called glucagon, which gets the liver to release its store of glycogen - and convert it back to glucose. The glucose enters the bloodstream, raising blood sugar levels and triggering the pancreas to release insulin again. This cycle of high/low insulin repeats again.

  • 12 hours after eating- with glycogen depleted, the body starts to break down stored fat from triglycerides into fatty acids for fuel.

2024-12