By Mukaila Kareem
All behaviours, including consumptions, involve the brain and it does not matter the diet or calories source, “the dose makes the poison”.
As a proverb in my Yoruba language says: You can’t go to bed with fire on the roof. Fats and carbohydrates have common metabolic pathways and the ultimate chemical energy from carbohydrates and fats is no different. The diet argument without understanding the powerful influence of the brain on food intake is like going to bed with fire on the roof. All behaviours, including consumptions, involve the brain and it does not matter the kind of diet or the source of the calorie, at the end of the day, “the dose makes the poison”.
Man has always lived under the threat of food insecurity and therefore the brain is wired to gorge and hoard in times of plenty. The calorie dense foods in traditional societies were meat, honey and fruits, but they were not easily available. Glucose and fructose exist freely as natural sugar in fruits but unlike tubers, which are available year-round, fruits are seasonal and cannot be stored. That brings me to glucose, the primary nutrient used by all cells. But let me digress a bit: About two per cent of the earth’s water is frozen up in glaciers/ice caps, a whopping 97 per cent exists as salty ocean water, and less than one per cent fresh water is available for drinking. This perfectly fits the saying: “water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”.
The question is what has this got to do with glucose? Like water, the glucose molecule is the most abundant simple sugar and the building block for woods and plant stems as cellulose. A typical forest is therefore an “ocean” of glucose molecules “knitted” firmly in woods and living plant stems. Yet, despite its abundance, humans can only extract glucose from edible carbohydrates such as tubers, which are year-round, and from fruits in summer or the rainy season. Therefore, for several generations, before mechanised farming, glucose was everywhere but like fresh water, it was very scarce.
Given the natural history of glucose scarcity, human physiology and survival depended on raising blood glucose, as opposed to lowering it as we currently do in modern obesogenic environments, with high rates of prevalence of diabetes. In fact, there are several hormones collectively called glucogenic or counterregulatory hormones that help to release glucose into the bloodstream during foraging, fasting and sleeping. It is therefore no surprise that only one hormone, called insulin, is responsible for lowering blood glucose, which is infrequently secreted during the occasional consumption of carbohydrate meals in austere times.
However, in modern times, there is no such thing as a “glucose desert” as we joyfully swim in the “ocean” of man-made sugar with no need for the next fruit harvest. Sugar is now cleverly produced from corn starch, a grain product, by using enzymes to rearrange the shape of glucose to make for a mix of free glucose and fructose, called high corn fructose syrup, similar to honey and fruits. It should be noted that glucose is not particularly sweet but the fructose part of the glucose/fructose combo is the sweet sibling that drives the propensity for overeating.
According to Guyenet in The Hungry Brain: “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to burn 200 Calories collecting 50 Calories’ worth of salad.” As all mothers know so well, this is the reason why toddlers do not get excited about broccoli, asparagus, and other vegetables, as the brain places value on calorie dense foods and not so much on vitamins and minerals found in these plant foods.
Therefore, think corn, the next time you see ice cream, brightly coloured soda drinks, snacks, salad dressings, ketchup, etc. We can also raise weighty and fatty grass-fed corn finished beef in no time. We have therefore successfully been able to meet the two macronutrients (fat and sugar) and non-calorie salt that hyper-stimulate our energy hogging brain to overeat, even against our goal to keep a slim body.
The food industry, a $8 trillion behemoth in 2021, is taking advantage of the brain’s propensity to seek high dense calories by providing palatable and processed foods that contain sugar, fat, and salt. The efficient food-seeking behaviour still rules and the modern traditional societies have not been observed to purposely set out to collect vegetables and have not been noted to have a salad menu. According to Guyenet in The Hungry Brain: “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to burn 200 Calories collecting 50 Calories’ worth of salad.” As all mothers know so well, this is the reason why toddlers do not get excited about broccoli, asparagus, and other vegetables, as the brain places value on calorie dense foods and not so much on vitamins and minerals found in these plant foods.
Guyenet also observed that while you would obligatorily eat plain boiled yams or potatoes with no salts or butter when hungry, you need not feel hungry to eat potato chips or ice cream and definitely won’t feel too full for a dessert, and don’t need to be thirsty to have a soda bottle on your work desk. In case you feel the temptations for dense calories are all on you, all hunter-gatherers have been reported to be gluttonous on a few lucky occasions of honey harvest or big kills. They have been chronicled to “drink honey like a glass of milk” and “if they kill large animal(s)…they cut off the fattest parts, boil it down, and drink the soup”.
As someone who grew up in rural Nigeria with no fruit juice, no ice cream and who can still play the “video” scene of tasting Coca Cola for the very first time at the age of 12, I have witnessed a spectacular
