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. :)