2014 Cut, Part IV: Carbs and Fructose

So this is part 4 of my spring cut monster blog.  This is more a loose-ends before I post the actual diet/numbers I'm going to be running, but it's got some points regarding grains, carbs, and fructose. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again Grains are just not good for you; I know, I know, the cereal aisle is full of whole-grain goodness.  Well, whole-grain cat shit is still just cat shit.  I could write a whole separate 2,000 word piece on why grains are not good for you.  Things like gluten intolerance are experienced by pretty much everyone, but those with more prevalent forms will get the label. However everyone has an inflammatory response to grains. So those are still out. I may have them on fat-kid Saturday, but they continue to not have a place in my diet.  Humans are just not meant to consume them. Period.  Again, you have a ton of government subsidies pushing “healthy whole grains” or “heart healthy whole grains” [you can actually buy the American Heart Association endorsement by the way, it’s not based on science], just like you do with PUFAs.  It’s what’s cheapest for us to produce, so it gets pushed.   But I digress…

Fructose is another issue I’ve been thinking about and researching.   There is some evidence that beyond 25G of this per day can begin to cause toxicity in your body  and it is associated with fatty liver disease as well.  Now granted it’s probably better than mainlining cheeseburgers, but still.  Roughly half of the carbs in fruit like apples/kiwis comes from fructose.  Also, sucrose gets broken down in the liver to 1 part fructose and 1 part glucose, so that 25g comes from fructose, and half of the sucrose intake for a day.  Intense exercise can help raise this threshold, as it depletes liver glycogen and any fructose that makes its way there is promptly converted to glycogen.  My main concern is that sugar, particularly fructose, oxidizes LDL into pattern B (the smaller, much more lethal form of LDL).  1 medium apple contains about 11g of fructose in it, as well as another gram and a half from the conversion of sucrose.   Again, I’m not cutting out fruit obviously, but a couple apples per day and a couple bananas (bananas are actually slightly better since only about 1/3 of their calories comes from Fructose) is probably overkill. I will probably go back to 1 each per day, and carry on as usual with my other fruits/fruit juices. I’ll replace the calories from fewer bananas/apples with vegetables, and probably try to stick to around 35-40g of fructose on my high carb days.  

Also, another consideration, when I look at carb numbers, I’m looking at net from now on.  Shouldn’t be a huge difference, but it’s probably come up before.  Soluble fiber may give you one calorie in the gut after the bacteria that live off it digest it, but that’s negligible.   I’m also going to get more calories from red palm and coconut oil, both are healthier sources of fat. Coconut for instance is a medium-chain fatty acid and is processed more like a carb for energy purposes, just without the accompanying insulin spike.