There is more. You are slightly insulin resistant after a work out because growth hormone is an antagonist of insulin. Hence, any glucose that makes it into your blood stream will not be well-controlled and you will have excessive blood glucose, with all the consequences that this entails. It will be a mild form of elevated blood glucose, but it will be there nonetheless and it is to be avoided. Sports and gainer drinks are sold on the theory that exercise drains glycogen from the muscles and you must refill those stores. Nonsense. You want to drain the glycogen from your muscles, which you do through the glycolytic exercises that are part of the Evolutionary Fitness workout. One reason (and it may be the primary reason) people become insulin resistant and diabetic is because they never drain their muscles of glycogen and other energy stores. Muscle is the most insulin sensitive tissue in the body and you must have lots of it and drain it so that it retains its sensitivity and ability to soak up glucose from the blood stream. Replentishing muscle glycogen rapidly requires the ingestion of glucose in large doses. Once you compensate for the drained glycogen by refilling the muscle you lose the insulin sensitivity which the exercise produced. Athletes who supercompensate through carbohydrate loading to increase the glycogen content of their muscles, diminish their insulin sensitivity. Those who do no exercise have lower insulin sensitivity than more active individuals.

It is the progressive loss of insulin sensitivity that initiates the aging cascade. Aging becomes accelerated with diminishing insulin sensitivity as abdominal obesity begins to develop and glucose-triggered advanced glycation end products begin to accumulate. One of the main purposes of exercise is to enhance insulin sensitivity. When you ingest the gainer and replentishment drinks or attempt the supercompensation practiced by some endurance athletes (which was one of the things that started the pasta craze during the Berlin Olympics, a practice that has now been abandoned by elite athletes) you lose the sensitivity that was the objective of the exercise. You may even be worse off if you work out and practice compensation than had you just taken a walk.

The popularity of sports drinks and gainer protein supplements has a shred of physiology behind it and billions of dollars of commercial interest. These drinks and supplements rest on a reasonable physiological principle that is blown out of proportion into a vast business that has adverse health consequences. They destroy your insulin sensitivity and diminish the beneficial effects of exercise on sensitivity and total insulin action. They are also a source of excess calories that allows your growing insulin resistence to result in abdominal obesity over time. Sensitivity was one of the main objectives of the exercise in the first place. So, you nullify what is perhaps the most important benefit of the exercise. You definitely do not need the elevated blood glucose that comes from the many post work out drinks and bars that are sold out there.

Paradoxically, ingesting simple carbohydrates after a work out will cause an increase in your blood triglycerides (fats). This is because the growth hormone released by the work out releases fatty acids into the blood stream in preparation for using them as a source of energy to rebuild the muscle's energy stores and to fuel the clearance of damaged muscle cells. When blood glucose become elevated after the sports or other drink or bar, the body switches from using fat to using glucose, insulin is released in response to this and the effectiveness of growth hormone is diminished. The free fatty acids remain in suspension until the insulin response is strong enough to cause the fats to reesterfy and move back into adipose tissues. In the competition between fatty acids and glucose for scarce disposal pathways, glucose wins and the fat is left behind in the bloodstream where it can then precipitate onto the lining or enter the epythelium, with the help of insulin.

Another reason not to consume sports drinks is that they keep your sweet tooth alive and well. Sports drinks taste very sweet to someone like myself who consumes glucose so rarely that when I find it in a drink or food I am aware of it and find that it tastes peculiar and unpalatable. Small amounts of sugar produce a cloying taste response in me when they are not even noticed by others. Let's face it, every mass produced drink or manufactured food item has to be sweet in order to sell to the bulk of people whose food contains sugar in some form. They wouldn't sell if they didn't appeal to mass tastes that have already been conditioned to expect salt and sugar and fat. And it is an evolved adaptation to find glucose pleasant tasting. The brain lives on glucose for its energy and tastes evolved during a time when glucose was scarce. Take an energy-hungry brain that had to be protected during a time when glucose was scarce and you get a human animal with a strong preference for sweet substances.

So there is a natural, evolutionary basis for a liking of sweet substances. But, there is a cultural factor that has taken this to extremes. The American food supply is loaded with glucose and with starches that become glucose in seconds when digestion begins. People who are conditioned to American food, particularly in its manufactured form as frozen, canned, or pre-prepared foods or drinks, will not buy substances that do not taste pleasant. Pleasant to someone like this means with a lot of glucose or sweet tasting substitutes.

Mass-marketed foods and drinks appeal to our most basic preferences by offering too much of what was scarce and too little of what was abundant during the Paleolithic. American food is laden with fat. Fat was scarce in evolutionary times. Plants contain little fat and they formed the base of food in all but the Northern latitudes. Wild animals are lean because they expend large amounts of energy to forage for food and the foods they eat are low in energy per unit of mass. Our ancestors had to be skilled and lucky enough to have succeeding a hunting down game in order to get any fat. And even then they got very little. Only about 4% of the animal's weight was fat, barely enough to provide the conutrients required to metabolize the protein in the carcass and avoid protein poisoning. Every bit of fat in the animal was used in order to avoid protein poisoning; that is why brain and bone marrow were extracted and even fat in the feet and eye sockets was used. Without this fat there was too little carbohydrate in the plants to let the hunter successfully metabolize the protein content of the animal.

Chronic consumption of protein greater than 40% of total calories will result in ammonia poisoning from excess protein. So, modern humans love fat because this taste let their ancestors survive and food producers are anxious to fill this ancient taste to our detriment. Fiber on the other hand was abundant during the Paleolithic. Consequently, we don't care much for tough, fibrous plants which are the only sorts of plants one finds in this time period. Fibrous foods are hard to digest so their energy cost is high. Yet, they tend to be low in energy density. So, fibrous foods would have been far down the evolutionary menu in preferences. Yet, it was unavoidable in all plants, which were always the underlying nutritional fall back during lean times and seasonally.

The human colon is somewhat large relative to the stomach, which is suggestive of a fibrous diet. Hunter gatherers eat large amounts of fiber, about 400 grams a day. Modern humans do not. Even with urgings from every nutritional authority, Americans eat far less fiber than our ancestors and far less than medical research shows to be heathful. But, it all fits the strategy that would have kept a Paleolithic human alive: seek and eat foods that are dense in energy and metabolizable at low energy cost; avoid foods that are low in energy per unit and expensive to metabolize. These, of course, are vegetables. A sizable portion of the research the food industry funds is trying to change this by making vegetables and fruits that are sweeter and less fibrous. The more they succeed in raising the energy density and reducing the metabolic cost of fruits and vegetables, the more will public health suffer. Fiber speeds transit time through the gut and reduces the energy extracted from food. It slows the absorption of the carbohydrate in the plant. And it makes food heavy. Human appetite mechanisms seem to be geared to weight more than hunger or caloric intake. So, whatever reduces the weight of food and increases its energy density will be likely to contribute to excess energy intake.

Plants are important sources of minerals and phytochemicals. Abundant minerals and phytochemicals give plants strong tastes and may make them somewhat bitter. Again, since eating them was unavoidable, we did not evolve positive preferences for minerals and phytochemicals. Now, we avoid their strong tastes. When was the last time you had a brussel sprout? Modern versions of many vegetables are almost devoid of their original, strong flavors. With the loss of these flavors there is a loss of the nutrients, minerals, and biologically active substances that these strong tastes signal. Some gourmets ask, where is the flavor?, in response to the taming of American vegetables and the blanding of our foods in the store and restaurant.

The texture of our food is suffering as well as they become less fibrous. As we lose flavor and texture we also lose nutritional value. Our foods become more dense in energy and can be metabolized with less energy. Sweeter plants with less fiber elevate blood glucose and promote insulin resistance. The change in energy content relative to metabolic cost makes promotes a positive energy balance.

All these changes in American plant foods and meals promote weight gain and lower nutritional quality. Food in restaurants can be of excellent quality. But, there are few such restaurants. Most serve meals that are high in energy density because that is what our tastes demand. There is negligible fiber content in all fast foods and only a hint of it in the vegetables you may get in a good restaurant. The best meals feature quality and presentation, not quantity and energy density. Good meals contain fresh ingredients and a variety of vegetables with meat or sea food.

No quality meal, in my opinion, contains rice, potato, or pasta. If they do, they should be very small portions as a side dish in a meal primarily made up of vegetables with meat or seafood and fresh spices. Aroma and color are the signs of minerals and phytochemicals and good nutrition. Color is a sign of content in the plant food. Contrasting colors that are visually pleasing together are a signal of balance in nutritional content. Reds, greens, yellows and white of many hues are good signs of nutritional content and balance. A dominant color in American meals is the color of baked goods. The golden brown of a pie crust or pancake, muffin or toast is prominantly featured in the multicolor menus that chain restaurants use. This color is attractive to many people because they associate it with baked goods and sweet foods that are high in energy density. The color is the result of a chemical and thermal reaction that oxidizes the protein in the food. The combination of sugar and heat promote oxydation of the protein in the flour of the baked food item, an Amadori reaction that results in the production of what are called advanced glycation end products. This is the reaction that turns the baked bread crust brown and makes your toast brown and rigid. It is the same process that ages you internally when free radicals react with glucose and protein. The formation of these glycation end products is the result of too much glucose or oil and the free radicals under high temperature and they promote a more rapid pace of aging when they occur. The stiffening of your connective tissues is a result of this reaction forming cross bridges in the collagen of connective tissues and on the surface of muscle. The "browning" of proteins in your body accelerates the rate at which you age and become stiff, like your toast.

On the color menu in all of the popular chain restaurants, the brown color indicates that the food item contains the ingredients of the Amadori reaction---oil and or glucose and protein. The first two provide the free radicals to brown the latter. The brown color indicates the food was prepared in a way that forms free radicals, which baking and many forms of cooking do. Broiling or baking meat covered with oils also results in a browning. In this case, it is the fat that oxydizes and promotes the formation of free radicals that brown the meat. This would have been a good sign to our ancestors because browned meat is meat that has fat in it and, as we know, fat was an essential co-nutrient to the protein in meat. Game meats do not brown when they are roasted unless oils are basted on them. To brown turkey one must ladle butter or fat onto it. A steak with high fat content will brown readily when broiled.

· Evolutionary Fitness

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