Hello Health Champions.
Isn't it funny how some people say that you have to eat sugar and carbohydrate in order
to generate blood sugar for your brain and yet there are a lot of people who eat zero
carbohydrate in their diet and their blood sugar is too high. where does that blood sugar come
from? Well if you're not eating it it means that your body is making it from something
else. Now the questions we want to answer are; How does the body make sugar from other things? Where
does it come from? What type of foods? And why does it matter? Even though most people change
the way they're eating change their lifestyle or their diet because they want to change
their weight they want to lose weight for the most part there is more to it because
the same mechanisms that drive weight up are also associated with type 2 diabetes, insulin
resistance and disease. And the things we're trying to change are blood sugar and insulin. We're trying to lower
blood sugar lower insulin and you can find both of these markers on your blood test but
in order to change the blood test till next time you want to understand what sort of foods
are increasing those so that you can reduce those foods. So to help with that they have created
something called the glycemic index and the insulin index. Now the glycemic index is virtually
useless because they only created these values in glycemic index for things that contain
carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are not the only thing that can drive up blood sugar and Insulin
The other reason it's useless is that they only tested high-glycemic foods such as carbohydrates.
So they set a value for glucose which has zero fat, zero protein and 100% of calories, a hundred
percent of the weight is carbohydrate. And therefore it has a very high glycemic index
and a very high insulin index. But then they compare that to foods that have slightly less
glycemic index. So bread is in the seventies but that's still an extremely high glycemic
index and that's why we don't want to pay too much attention to glycemic index because
what they call low isn't really low. The problem with the insulin index is that the data is
almost non-existent. The idea of the insulin index is very very good because insulin is
really what we're looking for, but there's so little data to go by. So in this video we're going
to talk about the mechanisms, so that we understand and we can look past the numbers because you
don't want to really look in tables after insulin index because when they test it, people react
differently and some of those numbers are quite questionable. So if we look at skim milk, that's a product where
they have removed the fat, it has all the original protein and carbohydrates. So carbohydrates
are dominating in skim milk and therefore the glycemic index is pretty close to that
of glucose. It's not real close but it's it's fairly high. The insulin index is much, much lower
because the carbohydrates in milk is called lactose, which is broken down much, much slower
So some of this insulin index comes from carbohydrate which is broken down slowly and from protein
which is broken down even slower. When we look at whole milk it has more fat so it's going to have most
of the calories from fat. Now we get a glycemic index that is
much lower but we get a somewhat lower insulin index because a lot of the protein is still
there, but the fat is slowing it down. And when we look at full fat cream at 37% then the vast majority
way over ninety percent of calories are from fat so the glycemic index is often quoted
as 0 which it isn't strictly but it's really close to zero and the insulin index is very
very low. So the lesson is that carbohydrates drive it the most both glycemic and insulin. Protein can drive
it somewhat and fat slows it down. But what about these people on zero carb diets that still have high blood sugar. That is because
of gluconeogenesis. The body is making glucose from something else and often times they say
that glycogen contributes to gluconeogenesis and it's sort of does, but not really in my mind because
glycogen is already glucose. You're not making it from scratch and you're going to run out
of glycogen pretty quickly and then your body has to make it from something else and your
fat is bundled with something called glycerin that your body can make carbohydrates make
glucose from. And you can also make it from protein. Protein is made of little building
blocks called amino acids and they can be converted into glucose as well. And this is where I want to focus mostly today
to really understand how different types of protein are converted differently. They have
different impact on glucose and insulin. The main purpose of protein is to become tissue. Ideally that is
why we eat protein. We want to turn it into body parts and if we're successful then we
get muscles and bones and hair and skin and so forth and they're primarily made up of
protein. Now the protein that doesn't turn into tissue, the excess or the things that
don't fit. The things we can't match and use for tissue they become fuel. So the question
is which different proteins turn in more into tissue or more in to fuel. Insulin's role in the
body is storage or anabolism - means building up. Insulin can build up fat tissues
and muscle tissues. Insulin assists glucose into the cell and this glucose gets converted
to glycogen and stored which we can only store a little bit and then the rest gets turned
into fat. But the same thing happens with amino acids that amino acid also get assisted into
the cell by insulin and then they get stored as protein primarily as muscle . Now we have to
understand that this portion the amino acid portion of stimulating insulin. Its role in
stimulating insulin is minuscule. It is so small that we can disregard it in our discussion here.
The reason insulin gets triggered is by blood sugar. Now we need to understand a little bit about
protein. So you eat food. It has protein but your body has to break down the protein into
amino acids. So if you look at this picture these individual little components these are molecules
called amino acids and then we string these together by the dozens by the hundreds by the
thousands and then they form proteins and because of how the proteins have different charges
then these proteins fold themselves and create different shapes and that is what's unique
about protein. So we to have to break these individual pieces down because these can only pass across
the intestinal membrane. They can only be absorbed one by one if we don't break them down we
can't absorb them. And then once we've absorbed them we are putting them back into other proteins
that have specific purposes in the body. Even though there are hundreds or even thousands of amino acids
there are 20 that are used in the human body to configure these proteins and out of these
twenty there are eight or nine depending on who you talk to that
are essential, meaning that we have to add them in the diet we have to eat them because
the body can't make them, but if we eat these eight or nine then we can make the other for a total
of 20 and the reason they don't know quite sure if it's 8 or 9 is that it seems Histidine
which is the ninth one can be made from the other eight but today we'll just assume
that there's nine of them. We often hear about animal protein versus plant protein in terms
of the protein being complete or not and we also want to talk about how much what percentage
of the protein is being utilized does it turn into tissue meaning it's utilized or does
it turn into glucose and fuel and drive insulin and now we want to think of these nine essential amino acids as
building blocks or letters so if you are going to write, if you're going to spell out nine-letter words
You need 9 different letters in this case. Nine essential amino acids so this is a protein called prolamine
has nine letters nine different ones. But let's say that you're missing one letter. You have eight letters
you don't have the ninth one and now you go to spell a nine-letter word you're going to
build a protein with nine essential amino acids how many of those words how many of
those amino acids can you build and the answer is 0 you cannot spell this word unless you
have that letter and what this means then is all of the other amino acid gets turned
into glucose and that means this protein is not complete and that's why it's so important
to eat a variety of foods specially if you are a vegan or vegetarian. But it doesn't stop
there we also have to understand utilization and this depends on if these amino acids occur
in the write ratios. So let's say that we have two of this amino acids and four of us and three
of the O's and six of the L's and so on and now we go to spell as many words as we
can as many as nine letter words. We're trying to make this particular word how many can
we make? Well obviously the lowest denominator the toe we have two a's and two peas so we
can spell the word two times and all of the other amino acids are going to be converted
into glucose because they get left over for this particular word we can only use the combination
of these amino acids twice. They may be used for some other proteins down the road but
for this particular case most of it. This amount gets converted into glucose. And here is how they
measure this stuff. It's called protein utilization so it's very very simple. Protein has something called
nitrogen in it that doesn't occur in fat or carbohydrates. So you ingest a certain amount
of protein hundred percent of what you ingest and then they measure how much of this nitrogen
is excreted I know how much nitrogen you ate and then they measure how much went out in
the urine and the conclusion is whatever stayed in the body is being utilized as building
blocks - becomes tissue. And like we said that's the purpose is to become tissue so that's the
utilized portion. One of the best foods in terms of utilization is a whole egg almost half
48% of the protein gets utilized 52% become excreted when will look at animal meat products
like meat, fish, poultry, pork, virtually any animal protein they're going to be very very close
right around 32% right about one-third. And then when we look at whey, soy and plant proteins they are
only 17% absorbed. Only about 1/6th. Whey is a dairy protein but it's processed it's only a portion
of the protein in dairy. Soy is often quoted as the most complete plant protein that
some say that it's better than animal products but because of these amino acid ratios its
own used 17% of it. And the same goes for virtually any protein powder whether it's hemp or pea
protein or rice protein only a fraction get used and becomes tissue the rest of it becomes
glucose and will drive insulin. So the only other issue I want to talk about is over eating, because that is also a huge factor even if you eat
something that's supposed to be highly utilized but you eat way way more than the
body can you use there's only so much protein that fits into your body's amino acid pool
that can circulate in the blood and once you go beyond that, then any access will be turned
into glucose and fuel and be burned because your body can only use so much at a time but
now it gets really really interesting. Now let's start understanding some of these principles
We said a whole egg is one of the best ones it gets used about 48% but here is the kicker, Egg white
only gets used about 17%. Why is that? Because when we look at the composition and we start
understanding how the body uses this, egg white is virtually all protein and it has a very
high glycemic index of 55. What most people don't realize is egg yolk actually has more
protein than white. People throw away the egg yolk and they think - Oh egg white that's the
good that's the protein stuff, but it turns out the egg yolk has more protein but it doesn't
stop there the egg yolk has the pieces the amino acids that are missing in the egg white
and that is why that egg white is only partially used but the whole egg is used to a much much
higher degree and therefore the insulin index is 21 vs 55 the utilization is 48 vs 17.
So 83% of the egg white gets turn into glucose and that's why it drives so much insulin. Now let's look at
a few other foods and remember I said that there's so little data on this. They started
looking at this in 1997 and there's only been a handful of studies and they're very incomplete so
there's a lot of discrepancy in the numbers. Beef has been quoted all the way from 15 to
51 on the insulin index and fish has been quoted all the way from 12 to 59 and we can't
really find out what type of beef or what type of fish they won't tell us how much fat
was in there so it seems very unlikely if something has zero carbs and similar protein
that they would vary this much. And then we look at another list and we see cod comes in at
12. We see chicken is at 17, hot dog at 16, bologna 11, and bacon 9 so these numbers are
all very consistently low and they we see that they have zero or low carbs they have similar
amount of proteins except the processed hot dog and baloney which has less cuz it has
other stuff in it so basically we see that they're relatively consistent low numbers
and the proteins are similar and the fat slows down. And nowhere could I find any
numbers on ground beef. None at all so I tried to create. I tried to estimate some numbers based
on our understanding now. We know that most animal products, fish, beef, chicken, they all
seem to be utilized at about 30% so that's mean 70% gets converted to glucose. We also
know that that slows it down so we look at something like chicken at the one end of
the scale and we look at bacon on the other. They have similar amounts of protein but
the fat slows it down. Now if we look at something like 30% fat ground beef then the ratios of
fat and protein are similar to bacon the only difference really is the ground beef has a
little more moisture to it so the numbers the insulin index should be very very similar
so I just said in my estimate here, in my opinion I think that number would be somewhere between
8 and 12. if you look at 20%.
In the ground beef.
Should be a little bit higher cuz there's less fat to slow it down and there's a little
bit more protein by percentage so maybe 10 to 15 if we look at ground beef with 15% fat
it's a little bit higher and if we look at lean ground beef we might get up to about 15-20
which would be similar to the range of chicken. If you enjoyed this video then that would
be a great one next if you want to understand more about how the body works and how to truly
master health thank you so much for watching.