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I understand that some of this information may feel a little bit tedious, as if you are back in the classroom in grade-school, bored and thinking about boys/girls and how long it will be until the bell rings ending class.
Please do understand that some of this information upcoming is crucial to your success, like figuring out if you will be at risk of deficiency of a certain food compound, as well as understanding the effect that different food combinations have on the body. It is very important to have a solid foundational base of knowledge in terms of how the body processes foods, and also understanding the different types of foods, whether that is cooked/raw, acidic-forming versus alkaline-forming foods, and in this case we are going to distinguish between the different macro-nutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
Each have their role after all, and each have their own unique qualities which you should seek to understand in how each can help you or cause harm to you, if consumed in an unbalanced way.
If you recall the segment ‘Which Foods are Humans Supposed to Eat?’, you may have concluded that humans, like other primates, are well suited to eat fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Humans certainly have eaten animal protein/fat throughout history but are not as equipped in our anatomy to process this food source as efficiently. Nor are we really set up to digest grains and beans, although eventually humans became farmers and started eating these foods as well.
Looking at the big cats, the most carnivorous group on the planet, they have certain characteristics of their stomach, liver, and bowels which are ideally suited to process a high amount of protein and fat. On the other hand, we humans lack these digestive tools. The human body appears more suited to digest more of a diet of simple sugars, and you could even say especially fruits. If you look at the strict herbivore groups, you can see they are equipped to digest different grasses and very starchy vegetable foods high in cellulose, with their grinding teeth, multiple stomach chambers, and very long intestinal tracts (which are lacking in humans).
With all this in mind, like other primates, it seems highly likely humans are suited to eat foods which are probably mostly carbohydrates, in particular simple sugars consisting of fruits and vegetables. It seems viable that humans — much like primates — are also suited to consume some amount of fat and protein intake, considering the abundance of varieties of plants, nuts, seeds and even fatty fruits and high-protein vegetables (occasionally some primates also eat insect or animal tissue). While this seems like the most likely explanation of our physiological design, we can acknowledge humans have also survived and proliferated eating meat, dairy, and cultivated cooked crops like grains.
With all this in mind, let’s dive in more deeply into the differences between carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Be prepared to throw out all of the trendy ideas you have read in fitness publications about these three food groups. In my view, most of these articles are missing a fundamental piece of understanding of the science and chemistry behind these foods, and how they best fit in harmony with our bodies.
Carbohydrates:
Carbohydrates are the main fuel of our bodies. Cells run on carbon compounds — much like plants create carbohydrate matter within their own matrices, using carbon dioxide and water via photosynthesis, our own cells run their functions based off of carbon.
There are different types of carbohydrates, some agreeable and some disagreeable to the human body. For example, carbs which are very starchy are difficult to digest, like corn, potatoes, rice, and any type of grains (bread, tortillas, chips, crackers, pasta, etc.) are very hard to metabolize, acid-forming throughout digestion, and are mucus-forming, sticky and difficult to eliminate — these carbs are not your friends.
Starches are made from complex sugars which create many problems when your body tries to digest them. Complex sugars include polysaccharides (many sugars) and disaccharides (two sugars). Some examples of this are cane sugar, beet sugar, grains, starch, and also dairy products (AKA sucrose, maltose, starch, and lactose). One exceptional non-problematic complex sugar is fibrous vegetation, known as cellulose, which is actually beneficial as it moved through your gut mostly undigested, acting as a sort of broom.
Sugar gets such a bad reputation in the press today — almost as if it’s the devil’s secret ingredient. In fact, processed sugars and complex sugars are very damaging. But simple sugars are the most necessary fuel of the human body. There are two main kinds of simple sugars — glucose and fructose — which come from (you guessed it) vegetables and fruits. It’s amazing how simple health & wellness really is, when you get down to it!
Simple sugars are what the body runs on, with the body’s cellular carbon cycle consuming carbonic compounds from the carbon in simple sugars. Fructose (from fruit) is the best, containing the highest energetic levels — this allows the fuel from fructose to pass through the cell membrane wall via chemical diffusion, which saves a great deal of energy. Glucose (from vegetables) requires more cellular energy called ATP as well as insulin to get inside the cell (via active transport), while fructose requires little to none of this process. Please keep in mind that glucose is still a simple sugar, and so the body can still use it and it is still quite healthy.
This is one of the reasons why fruit is one of the most, if not the most, healthy foods on this planet. If you can consume food and avoid having to overwork your pancreas because it doesn’t have to produce near as much insulin, and your liver and kidneys don’t have much work to do either like they do with other food types.
Simple sugars are mainly digested by skipping the stomach and going into the small intestines — they are broken down using a simple, alkaline digestive process with little to no assistance needed from the stomach, liver or pancreas (especially with fruit).
Ultimately the body can only use simple sugars. If you feed it complex sugars, your body will first break down those compounds into simple sugars, before it can use them. With complex sugars, it creates very harmful processes within the body. When you get an overload of sugars in the body of too many different kinds of sugars, it creates excess carbon molecules, creating carbon dioxide and carbonic acid. These both create blowback via acidic reactions within the body which have to then be neutralized, creating extra work and energy for the body.
Also when complex sugars are processed, the pancreas is kept working overtime creating so much insulin to help utilize the resulting glucose molecules after the complex sugars are broken down — the liver has much work cut out for it to store the excess carbs as glycogen, and the kidneys have to clean up the mess in terms of filtering out the acids that are left over.
In conclusion, simple sugars are your best friend when it comes to health and nutrition, being the most easily utilized energy source (especially fructose from fruit). Complex sugars on the other hand are definitely not your friend — they are as bad as the media makes all sugars out to be. It’s just that the media are slightly off target and throw out the baby (simple sugars) with the bathwater (complex sugars). Sugars from vegetables and fruits are good for you, alkalizing, energizing, non-acid-forming, and easy for the body to digest, absorb, utilize, and eliminate. Sugars from fruits (fructose) are the absolute best fuel for you on the planet and will take you to incredible levels of livelihood.
Fats:
What about fats? They play a very important role in our body. There are two ways to get fats within the body: either we can consume them, or we can eat excessive amounts of carbs, which will then be converted by the liver and other systems into fat stores.
Fats are composed of fatty acids (for example Omega-3 and Omega-6) which play many different roles within the body, including:
— Helping with cholesterol formation and anti-inflammatory buffers
— Assist in the material lining of cell walls
— Maintaining body temperature
— Providing cushioning and insulation within the body
— Providing future energy stores which can be converted if the body needs food but can’t find any
— Essential for function of nerve tissue, as well as skin and hair
— And many, many other functions, some of which we do not even comprehend
It is safe to say that fats are definitely an essential part of the building blocks to health and vitality within the human body. It is important to understand how the body processes fats, because this process is much different from how carbohydrates are processed. Fats are more of a complex structure, especially compared with simple sugars like fructose or fruit sugar.
Fats are digested partially in the stomach, breaking down the fats with acid, and subsequently in the small intestine. The liver dumps out bile salts, making the fats water-soluble. The fats are then digested by the pancreas and small intestines, via gastric juices and enzymes, and broken down into fatty acids and monoglycerides. These fatty acids are distributed throughout the body and utilized for various functions as well as turned into fat storage, which can be converted back into energy in the future.
Keep in mind that when fats are being digested and transfigured from one elemental form to another, and also when fats are stored as excess energy and the later burned as fuel, this creates more acidic by-products, as compared with the body simply utilizing fructose or glucose (simple carbohydrate sugars) for energy.
In fact, while ‘ketosis’ may be all the rage within the dietary community, it is my opinion that this is a dangerous condition because of how taxing this is on the body’s organs. This trendy way of eating creates an extraordinary burden to simply convert these food materials into energy the body can actually use. An overly acidic condition occurs as a result of all this complex processing of excessive fat (and protein) and from the lack of giving the body any carbon-based energy to run on.
Fats and fatty acids are essential, but they come with more baggage and digestive complications than simple sugars, so please just be aware of this. When figuring out how to heal and regenerate yourself using raw foods, one of the big balances you will likely have to figure out is how much fats to work into your consumption. Fats can overload the body’s digestive process, create acidic byproducts, and ‘slow down’ the process of detoxification. This is not always a bad thing — it’s just something to be aware of.
The lymphatic system of your body is a water and lipid based system — think about it like liquid soap, part water and part oil. Fats get processed through the lymphatic system as well, before going into the bloodstream. So when you consume a lot of fats, the lymphatic system becomes much more oily, which creates more of an anti-inflammatory buffer, but also is more slow to really pull acids out of tissues. If your lymphatic system is more liquid and water based, you may notice that the detoxification efforts are much more effective and powerful.
Throughout your journey, you may slowly transition off of a lot of fats, to less over time until they are more of a ‘side dish’ on the menu of foods you normally consume. This is where my intuition tells me is the appropriate role of fats, just looking over all the evidence and the chemical consequences of the extra burden that it takes to process them.
It’s normal to crave fats as well. We have been conditioned by the food industry to do so, and over time, your cravings will change. It’s OK to indulge — just be aware of the effects and what your end-goal is. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, thinking you are eating super healthy just because you’re eating raw foods, but there may be things you won’t let go of, in terms of fatty foods, which are really holding you back in terms of your body ramping up its energy for detox and healing.
Don’t worry about all that too much when you’re getting started. Just know there are levels of vibrancy in the world of healthy foods, and fats are lower down that spectrum. The more you clean yourself out and get some momentum in your body’s natural rhythms, the more you may find yourself feeding yourself more simple fuels, like simple sugars, and eating fats more occasionally or in smaller portions.
Proteins:
Finally, let’s address the importance and role of proteins. This section might as well be called ‘Amino Acids’, because proteins are simply compound structures that are made up of — and broken back down into — amino acids.
The body cannot use a protein. There is nothing that a protein can do inside your body to assist it, feed it, or provide any value whatsoever, until it has been broken down into usable elements — these elements are amino acids. There are essential and non-essential amino acids, both of which help with various functions of the body’s organs and systems, including repair, structural support, building tissue (including muscle tissue), and various other functions. Amino acids are not a ‘fuel’ per se, like carbon inputs are such as simple sugars. They have their own role that is more or less non-nutritive.
The role of amino acids is important — no doubt. But so many people today with their opinions put the cart before the horse. They ask, “Where do you get your proteins?” And of course, the ‘protein on the plate’ is the star of any chef’s meal presentation, and people see it as the main squeeze, or ‘the meat of the matter’. In fact, we humans have become so obsessed with proteins — especially proteins from meat, with their stimulating and delicious qualities — without really understanding the constitution of what those foods are.
Let’s also seek to understand how proteins are digested, generally speaking. The process is not as simple as digesting fructose or glucose, and the body goes through an extensive process to digest proteins. As I mentioned before, proteins are not building blocks that the body can use. They have to first be broken down (hydrolyzed, to be specific) by the body before the amino acids can be utilized.
The stomach must secrete its acidic gastric juices (hydrochloric acid) to ‘pre-digest’ the protein and break it down via an acidic process. Then, the pancreas further digests the food matter, using enzymes, in an alkaline digestive process. Finally, the intestines secrete enzymes which convert the twice-digested matter into its final form, amino acids, which can then be used by the body.
This is an extensive process, requiring much extra amounts of energy by the body. Once again, the body goes through this to ultimately gain amino acids, which are not really energetic fuel for the body, but used for other functions. So, while there is a role to consume and use amino acids, if an individual is eating a diet extremely high in protein, the body will be exerting a lot of energy and creating a lot of acidic side effects. The benefits of eating excessive amounts of proteins have very diminishing returns. The body certainly needs and benefits from some amount of amino acids, but there is a price to pay to extract them when they are consumed via protein digestion, especially in excessive amounts, and that is important to understand.
You can consume proteins, but you should also have carbohydrates for fuel. If not enough carbohydrates are consumed, and a high amount of protein is, the body will resort to breaking down fat stores of the human body for fuel, resulting in weight loss. The risk of carrying on that way excessively without giving the body any carbon is that the body may start to break down its own organ tissues and burn them for fuel, including liver, pancreas, and kidney tissue — this can be highly damaging and should be alarming to people who promote the ‘keto’ lifestyle.
Knowing that there is a role and essential function for amino acids, it’s important to understand that there are big differences between amino acids that can be obtained from vegetables, nuts and seeds, and animal matter. Vegetables are the most straightforward, with nuts and seeds being slightly more complex. Protein that comes from a plant source arrives in a simple structure and, if uncooked, contains electromagnetic energy which assists with the digestion and utilization as the body converts the matter into amino acids and puts them to use.
Animal protein, as compared with plant protein, is much more of a complex structure that is more ‘built-up’ with its amino acids, and requires much more energy to be broken back down (back into amino acids). Not only does this use more energy, but meat creates more acidic by-products in the process. The result is a food that takes more than it gives, robbing the body of electrolytes, energy, and creating acidic conditions within the body including uric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide, as well as numerous other acids. The electromagnetic energy of cooked animal meat is zero, which also makes matters worse. This cooked food offers no electrical assistance or life force energy to help with the breakdown or utilization of the protein as the body transfigures the big hunk of stuff back into amino acids.
There is a big, big difference between animal protein and plant protein. Plant protein, such as from raw vegetables or raw nuts and seeds, for example chia or hemp seeds, can have extraordinary benefits and help gain great results with body strength, function, rebuilding, and structure (if consumed in appropriate amounts). On the other hand, animal protein is more of a shock to the body, acid-forming, cholesterol-forming, and results in throwing off the chemistry of the body including mineral balances of calcium, sodium, manganese, iron, chromium, and zinc. Animal protein is also irritating to the mucosa of the body, and creates conditions and after-affects of digestion that parasites and harmful organisms thrive on consuming, among many other issues.
This segment about proteins is not about telling you to never eat meat, fish, eggs or dairy. It is simply critical for you to understand, when figuring out the total purview of what different proteins are and how the body can use them, that there is a very important distinction between plant and animal proteins and between cooked versus raw proteins.
In Conclusion:
Ultimately, proteins and fats have their role, but carbohydrates, specifically simple sugars, are the main star of actually revitalizing your body. Proteins and fats are delicious, succulent, and habit-forming to eat, you might say. As you continue through your journey of getting yourself more and more vibrant and energetic, you might notice yourself eating less and less proteins and fats, and more servings of fruits and vegetables which are your simple sugars (especially fruit).
Don’t worry too much about trying to force yourself to give up proteins or fats, or weaning off them too much, as you start out. Just try and be aware of what these different elements are, how they can help us, and critically how they affect both the digestive systems and overall chemistry of the body when consumed.
Knowledge is power (the right knowledge) and this intel will take you far if you made it to the end here. I know this section was a bit dry and technical, but this is an important section to grasp, before we cover other important and more practical related topics in the world of food.
Keep arming yourself with knowledge and keep going!