How food powers the body's metabolism
This article has a huge flaw: it only talks about glucose metabolism but completely ignores the fat metabolism.<p>For reference: fat metabolism is equally important, or maybe even more important than the glucose part of it. It should not be ignored, it should be taught.<p>Otherwise a reader may get a wrong impression that glucose is _the_ energy and then will go to a shop to grab the usual candy, thinking that sugar + oxygen is what makes cellular ATP. But this is only one half of the story. The full formula is:<p><pre><code>    sugar + fat + oxygen = energy
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But there is a trick. Sugar suppresses fat metabolism and vice versa. This suggests that eating sugar + fat is a bad idea, and it is. But what the average Joe does not know is that:<p><pre><code>    fat + oxygen = even more energy
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For example, 1 molecule of glucose leads to production of 32 ATP molecules, while one fatty acid molecule produces 48 ATP molecules. ATP is the energy currency in our bodies, so the more we have it the more healthy and energetic we can be.<p>The catch with fats is that they are slow to get going. Glucose action is instant while the fats need tens of minutes to be engaged in energy production.<p>Another catch is that fats can be relatively easily damaged rendering them unhealthy. For example, the production of refined vegetable oils uses high temperatures to &quot;squeeze&quot; the oil out of the seeds. This process inevitably damages long chain fatty acids breaking them into shorter pieces and oxidizing them along the way. Such trans fats cannot be consumed by our bodies: their chains are too short to be correctly processed and are too big to pass the mitochondrial membranes. This will gradually lead to a metabolic dysfunction while filling the cells with unprocessable &quot;junk&quot;.<p>But if you consume high-quality fats as a part of a daily low-carbohydrate diet it makes miracles: no belly, better cognition and you don&#x27;t need so much food anymore. For example, the following products are considered as the sources of high-quality fats: avocado, fatty fish, extra virgin oils, nuts, European round cheese.<p>The thing is that people don&#x27;t know this until they hit a health condition that makes them vulnerable and sensitive. We live our lives eating tons of sugar and thinking that this is the right diet because &quot;sugar = energy&quot;, but it is not. Articles like this fuel this wrong impression. As the result, we gradually loose our metabolic flexibility and may become seriously sick at some point of our life.