The (Actual) Basic Food Groups

Many people think their bodies run on calories. It doesn't matter the source -- put a "calorie" of any kind in your body and you'll either "burn" it or store it. It's a pretty simplistic view of the human body if you ask me. We don't even think about our cars the same way. Some cars take regular, some take premium, and some take diesel -- not to mention electric or solar-powered cars. You wouldn't expect a diesel engine to run on vegetable oil, even if you gave it the same "energy" equivalent in calories. Is the human body really simpler than an automobile?

What's the real story with your body? What kind of "fuel" makes it run efficiently and cleanly? Let's dig deeper into these the three main types of "human fuel" (also known as macronutrients) to answer this question: carbohydrates, protein, and fat. We also need to get intimately familiar with our food and what exactly it consists of by dragging up some chemistry that some of us (me) haven't studied since high school. I realize this is an extraordinary amount of detail on your food, but I think it's important in developing a solid scientific basis for good nutritional advice vs. bad nutritional advice.

The building blocks of nutrition (from your body's point of view)

Carbohydrates (aka hydrocarbons):

A "carb" is a molecule consisting of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O) atoms. In chemistry, a hydrate is a substance that contains water or its essential elements (H₂O). Your body sees crackers and bread and really any food containing carbohydrates as these more basic elements: C_m(H₂O)_n, where m is the number of carbon atoms and n is the number of hydrates.

There are many different types of carbohydrates such as fruit sugar (fructose), table sugar (sucrose), milk sugar (lactose), starch, and fiber.

Dietary fats:

Fat molecules are formed when a glycerol molecule bonds to three fatty acids. In chemistry, glycerol is classified as an alcohol with three carbon atoms (C), five hydrogen atoms (H), and three hydroxyl (OH) groups. When glycerol joins up with a fatty acid the hydroxl group gets dropped in the process. The fatty acid chain joins up with the carbon atom in the glycerol molecule.

Here's what fat looks like to your body

A universal property of fats is that they are not soluble in water, which is because of the the type of bonds in their molecular structure (nonpolar covalent). Nonpolar bonds have equal shares of electrons (therefore there's no extra electron trying to link up with a proton). Covalent bonds are by definition stable. This is an interesting and important property of fat and how your body uses it.

There are also many different categorizations of fats: saturated vs. unsaturated, polysaturated vs. monosaturated, omega-3s vs. omega-6s, and cis fat vs. trans fat. To truly do fat justice, I'll devote a whole post to these different classifications.

Dietary proteins: 
Proteins consist of one or more chains of amino acid residues. All proteins contain the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur some of these may also contain phosphorus, iodine, and traces of metals like ion, copper, zinc and manganese. There are approximately 20 amino acids that combine in different ways to make thousands of different types of proteins. The key elements of an amino acid are carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), and nitrogen (N). Some amino acids cannot be produced by your body, so it is essential that your diet include these. These are known as essential amino acids. From a molecular perspective, proteins are a bit more complex than carbohydrates and fats, but what's pertinent to know in relation to what you eat is what amino acids provide to your body.

Essential amino acids	Nonessential amino acids
Arginine	Alanine
Histidine	Asparagine
Isoleucine	Aspartic acid
Leucine	Citrulline
Lysine	Cysteine
Methionine	Glutamic acid
Phenylalanine	Glycine
Threoniwne	Hydroxyglutamic acid
Tryptophan	Norleucine
Valine	Proline
	Serine
	Tyrosine

The macronutrients referenced above are all in relation to what you ingest, which does NOT necessarily stay the same once processed by your body. In my next post, we'll delve deeper into the chemical reactions that occur during digestion of these different macronutrients and how your body uses them for different functions.

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Keep eating your brain food. :)

The Warburg Hypothesis

 "All science is all too human." 

—Hans Fischer

Our story starts in 1914 alongside a bright, young soldier in the First World War by the name of Otto Warburg. A talented equestrian and decorated cavalry solider in the Prussian Horse Guards, he receives a letter from a family friend -- by the name of Albert Einstein -- urging him to return to his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology. Einstein says in his letter, "I hear that you are one of Germany's most talented younger biologists of great promise." Einstein's remark was not mere polite flattery, as Otto Warburg went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1931 for the "discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme." Moreover, "the great number and magnitude of his discoveries [sic] rank him as the most accomplished biochemist of all time." (Encyclopedia.com). He was nominated 47 times for a Nobel Prize over the course of his career.

For our current purposes, Warburg's most interesting work involves the respiration of tumor cells versus the respiration of healthy cells. Warburg himself gives the best explanation of the momentous implications of his research in a speech to 1966 Nobel Laureates.

"Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar. All normal body cells meet their energy needs by respiration of oxygen, whereas cancer cells meet their energy needs in great part by fermentation."

Later in his speech he proposes an action item for this information: "To prevent cancer it is therefore proposed first to keep the speed of the blood stream so high that the venous blood still contains sufficient oxygen; second, to keep high the concentration of hemoglobin in the blood; third, to add always to the food, even of healthy people, the active groups of the respiratory enzymes; and to increase the doses of these groups if a precancerous state has already developed. If, at the same time, exogenous carcinogens are excluded rigorously, then much of the endogenous cancer may be prevented today." (more on this later)

Finally, he concludes, "These proposals are in no way utopian. On the contrary, they may be realized by everybody, everywhere, at any hour. Unlike the prevention of many other diseases, the prevention of cancer requires no government help, and not much money... Nobody today can say that one does not know what the prime cause of cancer is. On the contrary, there is no disease whose prime cause is better known, so that today ignorance is no longer an excuse for avoiding measures for prevention. That the prevention of cancer will come there is no doubt. But how long prevention will be avoided depends on how long the prophets of agnosticism will succeed in inhibiting the application of scientific knowledge in the cancer field. In the meantime, millions of men and women must die of cancer unnecessarily." (Emphasis mine)

Essentially, Warburg's point of view is that there are all kinds of carcinogens in the world and instead of trying to fight each one individually, we should focus on feeding healthy cells what they truly need instead creating a ripe environment for cancer to thrive. Furthermore, because we know of this significant difference in how healthy cells are fueled versus how cancer cells are fed, we should target this unique cancer metabolism in order to cure cancer.

The next logical question is of course, what should one eat in order to properly feed healthy cells (and thus prevent cancer)? You may have guessed from the whole "sugar fermentation" that cancer cells preferred source of fuel is glucose. Glucose is a simple sugar that is created by our bodies after breaking down carbohydrates in the food that we eat. Too much glucose wreaks havoc on our bodies in many ways: diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and many other diseases all have growing bodies of research on the role of glucose and insulin (the hormone that breaks down glucose) in their development.

The Warburg hypothesis is just the beginning of the story of how nutrition can be used as a medical tool to cure and prevent disease. Next time, we'll take Warburg's research one step further and learn about an alternative source of cellular energy called ketones.

Here's to 2015

 I find beauty in the blank page. Resembling a blanket of freshly fallen snow, I can hear my own thoughts and as they start to unravel I make a slow, measured path down the page. This could also be why I love the start of a new year. It's like a blank canvas from Father Time. Wipe the slate clean and begin again, only this time wiser than before. 

My amateurish ventures into nutrition have definitely made me wiser. Although, sometimes I feel like I fell down a rabbit hole and perhaps ignorance really was bliss. But most of the time I don't believe that. As Maya Angelou loved to say, "When you know better, you do better." I do better for the most part. Sometimes I have to put a blindfold on part of my brain just to enjoy a chocolate chip cookie like a normal person instead of thinking of sugar addiction and the massive sugar industry and its infiltration of our food system and the massive health consequences facing humanity (BE QUIET BRAIN AND JUST ENJOY THE DAMN COOKIE!).

There's also the frustrating fact that for every question I've researched, I have at least 10 more questions once I find the answer. And I'll dig, and dig some more, and email some random doctor halfway around the world and get a thoughtful-but-not-altogether-illuminating reply... and then my questions keep multiplying but my options for answers run out. It's like reading a really suspenseful murder mystery and never finding out whodunnit.

So this year, I'm reeling myself in a little bit and just posting some of my thought process and questions from my forays into nutrition and health. Maybe I'll find the big answers, maybe I won't. But I think a lot of what I learned along the way is valuable.  I'll begin the year with the story of one of my main obsessions that got me on this path in the first place: ketones, glucose, and their relationship to the "emperor of all maladies."