Worried About Your Health This Holiday Season? Dr. Nappi Has Answers! CEO of Healthy Ride Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Dr. Rick Nappi Answers The Question: What Really Happens To Our Bodies After We Eat!

    MARINA DEL REY, CA, November 26, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Let's assume that you are following the current dietary recommendations that tell you to eat more than half of your daily calories in the form of carbohydrate. You fill your plate with a cup or so of pasta, topped with meatballs, some tomato sauce and cheese. From the minute the pasta is in your mouth, it begins to be broken down into simple sugar. Your body can only store a small amount of sugar at a time in the form of glycogen that is stored in muscle and liver. What's not stored as glycogen is burned off as quickly as possible, forcing you to burn sugar, but your cells can only burn so much off at a time.

What happens to the rest of the sugar that isn't being stored or burned?

It is converted into saturated fat. What about the protein and the fat in the meal that you just ate? Some of the protein is taken up by the cells for repair and maintenance, but your cells can only utilize a small amount of protein at a time. The rest, largely, is turned to sugar and stored as saturated fat. That leaves just the fat that is not burned when sugar is around to burn, which gets stored away as more fat.

Why isn't the protein and fat burned as fuel?

Because you must first burn up sugar if it is available. If you eat sugar and fat together, you have to burn sugar first before you burn the fat. Furthermore, your cells get used to burning a particular fuel, in this case, sugar. When you are younger, your metabolism is more flexible, and you can switch fuels more easily. As you get older, your cells get stuck in a rut, and if they are used to burning sugar, they will look for more sugar to burn when they need fuel. You have to burn almost every gram of available sugar before fat burning kicks in.

Your Cellular Addiction to Sugar

Being a sugar burner is not a good thing. Your cells begin to crave sugar, and they don't care where the sugar comes from. If you go to sleep and you're still in a sugar-burning mood, your body is going to continuing look for sugar to burn as you sleep. You won't like where it gets it.

When your cells are "hungry," they will quickly go through the starchy glycogen in your liver and muscle to get sugar, however, your body would prefer to save your stored sugar (glycogen) for anaerobic) emergencies, such as sprinting away from a lion, and therefore will only give up a small portion.

Do You Really Want to Use Your Muscles as Fuel?

Thus, your cells will continue to look elsewhere for sugar to burn by breaking down protein in your muscle and even bone, which it can also burn as sugar. This is a far more significant cause of osteoporosis than not taking calcium supplements.

Here's the kicker: As long as there is sugar to be had, and your hormones are telling you not to burn fat, your cells won't go into your fat stores. You can have pounds of excess fat just waiting to be burned, and your cells will bypass it to get to sugar. As long as you continue to eat a high-carbohydrate, high-sugar, or excess protein diet, your body will keep on burning sugar and storing fat.

As long as you are leptin-resistant, you will stay hungry because of the brain's inability to "hear" leptin. When you are leptin-resistant, your brain is telling your body to make fat, store it and, importantly, to conserve the fat that you have. You then have no choice: You must burn sugar.

Stop Eating Your Muscles

In order to break the vicious cycle, you need to retrain your brain to instruct your cells to burn fat as your body's primary fuel. When you are a true fat-burner, your cells eat fat even when you're not eating. When your cells need energy, they can get it from your fat stores. You're burning fat all the time, even when you're sleeping, and you don't eat your muscles and bone. Your brain doesn't care whether the fat just came from what you eat, or whether it comes from deep in your viscera by delving into your fat stores.

Your arteries will also be allowed to burn their own fat stores -- the plaque that ultimately can plug them up. If you start burning the fat you've stored, you feel satisfied and you won't get hungry because your cells are being properly nourished.

Our prehistoric ancestors actually ate a lot more fat than we do today, and did not routinely eat grains or much fruit because they weren't often available. They had no choice but to be fat-burners, and not surprisingly, their bodies were leaner, their bones stronger, and they did not appear to suffer from the same chronic diseases we do today.

I'm not suggesting that they ate an optimal diet. They had limited choices, but ironically, they probably ate better than most of the world's population does today. Once you become a proficient fat-burner, when your cells need energy, they will get it from your fat stores. Your brain doesn't care whether the fat comes from the food you just ate, or from the fat that is embedded in your abdomen arteries or other places in your body. It will start burning off the excess fat you have stored by feeding your cells the healthy fat they need. And, you will not be hungry: You will get healthier and you will slow the rate at which you age.

When we talk about what to eat, we must first realize who, or rather what, is eating.

In fact, we, ourselves, are not really doing the eating. It is our cells that eat. When we put food in our mouth, that is just a continuation of the transport of food from the farms to the grocery store then into our mouth; the food is then transported to our cells by our bloodstream. It is our cells that really do the eating and that need the fuel and the parts to regenerate themselves. And cells can only eat two kinds of food for fuel. They can eat sugar or they can eat fat, and their health and your health will be determined by the primary fuel that they burn.

Becoming a Fat Burn

How does one learn to, and how does one become a fat burner? How does one change their primary fuel from sugar to fat?

One gets good at most anything by doing it frequently. You can become a good tennis player by playing tennis frequently and a good golf player by golfing frequently. Likewise, your body becomes adapted to burning fat by burning fat frequently.

However, most people become very adapted at burning sugar; your body continues to want to "keep playing" sugar, to burn more sugar, even when you are not eating. When you're sleeping at night, your body then prefers to burn sugar and it gets that sugar by breaking down proteins in your body, which means lean body mass, which includes muscle and bone. I call that metabolic momentum.

Your body continues to like to do what it has become accustomed to doing. If you have burned sugar throughout the day, you prefer to burn sugar at night even when you are not eating. Your body does not store very much sugar and prefers to hold onto much of it and, therefore, you'll continue to manufacture sugar by a process called gluconeogenesis from lean body mass. You store fat -- and, in many people, lots of it -- in your "cupboard" and not very much sugar, because fat is the fuel that your body would prefer to store and later to burn to stay healthy.

However, when you eat sugar and fat together, your body will burn sugar first. I believe that it burns the sugar off because that is one way to get rid of it. Sugar causes damage by glycosylation and having it around too long is extremely damaging and accelerates aging.

Therefore, your body might get rid of sugar to minimize the damage caused by keeping it around. You'll have to burn off almost all the sugar that you eat before you can start burning fat and, in most cases, that means that the fat you have eaten with sugar gets stored. Your body continues to become adapted to burning sugar and not fat. People get fat not so much because they eat fat, but because they have forgotten how to burn it, and because of poor hormonal communication.

Leptin Resistance

Leptin resistance causes an increase in visceral fat. This smothers your liver from receiving proper hormonalsignals. Your liver is a very important metabolic organ and when it cannot listen to signals properly, for instance from insulin -- it makes too much sugar contributing to insulin resistance and diabetes.

Insulin and Leptin Resistance

Obesity is the price you pay to keep your blood sugars down. If you continue making fat out of sugar, it takes sugar out of your bloodstream, keeping your blood sugars low. You continue getting fat and having poor insulin sensitivity, but are not yet diagnosed with diabetes.

However, your fat stores start leveling off. When you stop making fat and finally stop becoming more and more obese, your blood sugars rise because you have no place left to dump it into. A popular class of diabetic drug (the PPAR gamma agonists) works by making more fat cells to dump sugar into. They make you fatter but, once again, do not address the primary problem. It is important to note that, contrary to the belief of almost everyone, the public and medical professionals alike, diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar: It is a disease of insulin signaling.

Lowering blood sugar without addressing the primary problem of insulin resistance gets you nowhere at best, and most of the time will make you worse. Just as you can become hard of hearing, so too do your cells become "hard of hearing." Two hormones that they have a difficult time listening to over time are insulin and leptin. Just as increased noise exposure can cause increasing deafness, so does increasing insulin and leptin exposure cause your cells to become more and more deaf to the life-promoting messages that insulin and leptin are trying to deliver to them.

A Note on Health

We are really a colony of cells. We are not a single individual. We are 10 to 15 trillion individual cellular lives that are trying to live in harmony. It is only a testament to the fine behavior orchestrated by hormonal orders that we perceive our 10 trillion lives as a single individual. We are really a finely tuned ant colony or beehive.

Our 10 trillion lives are like an extremely cooperating military. The military is controlled by officers handing out orders. The officers comprise a hierarchy; some are generals, some are corporals, and some are captains. There are sergeants and privates. Insulin and leptin would most definitely be considered generals giving orders to many other hormones, many other subservient officers, which in turn must give orders to others.

I would consider cholesterol to be perhaps a corporal only because cholesterol itself can be made into more prominent officers, into other hormones. Glucose is nothing more than a private listening to orders. It isn't the glucose that you want to change per se, but orders given to it. The same goes for cholesterol. If you want to be healthy, you must change the orders being handed out. That means changing hormonal signals as high up the hierarchy as one can. Fortunately, it is not that difficult to change those orders, or have those orders better heard and understood, especially of the two important generals: leptin and insulin.

I have been asked to summarize in a single sentence what would best promote health. It is this: Health and lifespan is determined by the proportion of fat versus sugar people burn throughout their lifetime. The more fat that one burns as fuel, the healthier the person will be, and the more likely they will live a long time. The more sugar a person burns, the more disease ridden and the shorter a lifespan person is likely to have.

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