According to everything I had been taught, the primary source of energy in humans is carbohydrate. Medical schools still teach this. But it’s wrong!
When I first started measuring how we make energy some 15 years ago, I discovered something very surprising. The best source of energy is fat, not carbohydrate. The better your fat metabolism, the healthier you will be.
And now a brand new study is showing an unbelievably effective way to improve your fat metabolism, as well as the best way to make it worse.
When I say that the best source of energy production is from fat, what do I mean? I mean that metabolizing fat into energy is easier on the body than metabolizing carbohydrate.
Since fat is where your body stores environmental toxins, burning fat is a great way to release and eliminate toxins. Furthermore, carbohydrate metabolism produces much more acid in the body than fat does.
Lastly, fat metabolism produces a steadier and more even form of energy than carbohydrate metabolism.
Healthy, young, athletic people produce most of their daily energy from fat. As we become older, more acidic, more toxic, and less fit, all that changes. And we start relying more and more on carbohydrate metabolism.
This leads us down the trail of weight gain, excessive carbohydrate in our diets, weakness, fatigue, rapid aging, and diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
In essence, one of the most important ways to stay functionally young and healthy as we get older is to maintain efficient fat metabolism.
But How to Do That?
Recently some researchers looked at the effects of exercise on fat metabolism. And I have to say that even I was shocked by the findings.
They took 10 lean men who were all couch potatoes. Then they measured how efficiently they were metabolizing fat. They also checked how sensitive their bodies were to the hormone insulin.
As you probably know, one of the major disorders that we face as we get older is a decreasing sensitivity to insulin. The less sensitive you are to insulin, the greater your chance for every chronic age-related disease there is.
Then they took another group of nine men. These men were also lean, but there was one big difference. The second group was very active in terms of exercise and daily activities. Just like with the first group, the researchers measured their fat metabolism and their insulin sensitivity. And then they did something very interesting.
For the next two months, they made the couch potatoes regularly exercise and increase their daily activities. And they turned the active men into couch potatoes. They had to stop exercising and limit their activity levels.
Once the two-month study period was over, they retested everyone. The results were amazing.
The fat metabolism in the sedentary men who went on the exercise program increased by 23% on average. That’s a very big increase.
In addition, their bodies became more sensitive to insulin. That’s good. Those are the kind of changes that will significantly slow down their rate of aging and reduce their chances of disease. But those kind of results aren’t all that surprising. Everyone already knows that exercising does all kinds of good things.
What is shocking to me is what happened to the second group.
The Problem With Being a Couch Potato
The second group shows us what happens to us when we stop all that exercising and hit the couch. And the results are scary.
Their fat metabolism decreased as much as 31%! And their insulin sensitivity also decreased. In only two months, their bodies were already starting to age faster and become more vulnerable to disease! Amazing!
Exercising and having an active lifestyle is not the only way to shift your body into the right direction, but it may be the most effective way to do it. The gains and losses in this study were huge. The other ways include hormone replacement and a diet low in carbohydrates.
If you want to know how efficiently your body is burning fat, there is an easy way to do it.
Go to www.bioenergytesting.com and find the closest doctor who is using Bio-Energy Testing. This incredible testing process not only measures fat metabolism, but also a host of other measurements that are important to slow down the aging process.
You can find out more about Bio-Energy Testing, hormone replacement, low carbohydrate diets, and exercise in my book Bursting With Energy.
Sources:
Bergouignan, A., I. Momken, E. Lefai, et al. “Activity energy expenditure is a major determinant of dietary fat oxidation and trafficking, but the deleterious effect of detraining is more marked than the beneficial effect of training at current recommendations.” Am J Clin Nutr. 2013 September;98(3):648-58.