ADD FIBER

“We all have neurons within our gut. These neurons have a name. They are called neuropod cells. Neuropod cells were famously discovered by professor doctor Diego Bohorquez at Duke University, and these cells respond to, among other things, to the presence of sugar within the gut. These neuropod cells send electrical signals through a particular highway within the vagus to the so called nodose ganglion.”

“For example, the average Pima Indian in Mexico eating their traditional high fiber diet centered around the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash, is normal weight. But the average Pima on US reservations has obesity.”

“lemon juice and lime juice, a couple tablespoons or so, if ingested before or even during or even after consumption of sugary foods, or I should say foods that sharply increase blood glucose or large carbohydrate meals can actually blunt the blood glucose response. And I did see that when I did my own experiments on myself with Continuous Glucose Monitor.”

“there are many people who are experimenting with supplementing with glutamine several grams per day, often even, you know, five grams distributed through three or four different servings throughout the day, you know, as a way to blunt their sugar cravings. Now, there has not yet been a large scale clinical trial using glutamine to reduce sugar cravings, but the results of the few studies that I looked at as well as my understanding of the logic of these neural circuits including the neuropod cells brings us to a conclusion that it makes sense why if there's a population of neurons within our gut that responds very robustly to the presence of sugar, fatty acids, or amino acids, that the intake of particular amino acids would allow the dopamine pathways that might otherwise be triggered by sugar to be triggered by something like glutamine”

“How much money can you make selling beans? So there are all sorts of fancy new fibers on the market with names like IQPG zero zero two a s. The IQP stands for InqFarm, the drug company that came up with it. Ironically, it was found to be quite effective according, of course, to the employees of said drug company who published the study.”

“Researchers in Sweden gave people beans for supper, and by the next morning, after their friendly flora had a chance to eat them too, their satiety hormones like PYY were up, their hunger hormone ghrelin was down, and they reported feeling less hungry. The researchers didn't measure subsequent food intake, but a similar study with whole grain rye for supper did and found a decrease in food intake at lunch the next day. Those who had eaten the fiber rich food the night before felt fully satiated with about a 100 fewer calories at a meal more than twelve hours later.”

“many people have experienced the effects of disrupted sleep on their appetite. And in particular, it's been reported that when people are sleep deprived or the quality of their sleep is disrupted, their appetite for sugary foods increases. Now we don't wanna leap too far from this study to sugar metabolism and the neural circuits controlling sugar metabolism, but I will say this. There is now a plethora of data pointing to the fact that getting quality sleep each night helps regulate not only appetite, but also the specific forms of metabolism that drive specific appetites.”

“fructose and specifically fructose has the ability to reduce certain hormones and peptides in our body whose main job is to suppress ghrelin. So although I, and I think pretty much everyone out there, save for a few individuals, agrees that calories in calories out is the fundamental principle of weight loss may weight maintenance or weight gain, ingesting fructose shifts our hormone system, and as a consequence, our neural pathways within our brain, the hypothalamus, to be hungrier regardless of how many calories we've eaten.”

“if you really wanted to adjust your sugar cravings and you really still want to ingest some sugary foods, you probably would be better off combining fiber with that sugary or sweet food. So what we're really talking about here is trying to reduce the dopamine signal that is the consequence of ingesting sweet foods, and we're talking about doing that through these different parallel pathways, not just by preventing sweet taste, but also by preventing the post ingestive effects of sweet foods.”

“Published in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine, a study entitled single component versus multi component dietary goals randomly assigned hundreds of people into one of two weight loss regimens. One simply encouraged people to get at least 30 grams of fiber each day, which is about the recommended minimum adequate intake. The other group was advised to follow a far more complex weight loss program recommended by the American Heart Association. Even though both groups were told to reach the same fiber target, the group whose sole focus was fiber intake ended up eating more than twice as much extra fiber as the multi component intervention, and surprisingly similarly improved the quality of their diets.”

“Not only did the study participants get an increase in their resting metabolic rate, the amount of calories burned just by existing, but specifically their fat oxidation shot up as well, increasing the amount of fat they were burning by more than 25%. This translates to about an extra third of a pat of butter's worth of fat burned off their body within two hours of the infusion.”

“cinnamon can be a useful tool for controlling blood sugar and indeed that's the case. It's very clear that cinnamon can adjust the rate of glucose entry into the bloodstream possibly by changing, the rate of gastric emptying. It might slow the rate of gastric emptying, and thereby also reduce the glycemic index of particular foods... Cinnamon contains something called coumadin, which can be toxic at high levels. So you don't want to ingest more than about a teaspoon, maybe a teaspoon and a half of cinnamon per day”

“One pathway in your brain and body is devoted to getting you to seek out sweet tasting things that you perceive as sweet, and another parallel pathway is devoted to getting you to seek out foods that lead to increases in blood glucose. It just so happens that the foods that lead to big increases in blood glucose typically are associated with that sweet taste.”

“Using berberine is a serious step, you should absolutely talk to your doctor about it. It is true that if you ingest berberine, your blood glucose will plummet. And I point that out because I've actually tried it before. It gave me brutal headaches, and I felt really dizzy. And I felt like I couldn't see straight. And actually, I couldn't see straight. Why did it do that? Well, it made me hypoglycemic. It actually drove my blood glucose down too far. And the reason it did that is that I took berberine on an empty stomach.”

“A cohort study of overweight youth found that the amount of fiber found in a single half cup daily serving of beans, about six grams, over about a two year period was associated with a profound twenty five percent difference in abdominal obesity. In about the same time frame in middle aged women, each two gram increase in daily fiber was associated with a weight decrease of about a pound.”

“Less than three percent of Americans reach even the recommended minimum daily adequate intake of fiber. There's so much fuss about protein, but for that, the stats are reversed. More than ninety seven percent of Americans do get enough protein, and more than ninety seven percent of Americans do not get enough fiber.”