A very modern phenomenon that has become oh so popular is snacking. Until the late 1800’s consuming any food that did not require proper utensils was considered uncouth and unhygienic. Snack foods did not establish themselves until the development of modern packaging. Logos and labels that folks trusted carried the image of respectability and cleanliness.
The first snack food in America was the peanut followed shortly by popcorn available at theatric gatherings. But other than occasions such as these, snacking was not a part of everyday life. It was not until the 1950’s that snack foods really took off. The 50’s were a time of abundance in America, and folks wanted to feel free to indulge in food, something that had been in short supply with the rationing during the war years. Modern shopping stores and the creation of the first convenience foods heralded the new food generation. It also heralded the onset of degenerative diseases in America.
Prior to the 50’s heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s were almost unheard of. I remember as a kid in those times hearing about diabetes as some rare genetic disease. That was of course type 1 diabetes; type 2 was completely unknown to us. No one we knew even knew anyone with any of these diseases. Now almost half the population either has diabetes or pre-diabetes. The rest of the degenerative diseases are just as rampant. Today 2 out of 5 people will get cancer. Almost everyone has cardiovascular disease and it is the leading cause of death. Prior to 1950 heart attacks were almost unheard of.
Why do I mention all this terrible news about chronic disease in an article about snacking? Because chronic disease is caused by diet more than anything else and snacking is one of the biggest changes to the American diet.
Sure, we all get it that the nutritional quality of most snack foods is atrocious. Most snack foods are made primarily of sugar, simple carbs, unhealthy fats, salt, a dictionary of chemicals, and not much else. But we are better than that, most of the time… maybe. We can try to eat “healthy” snacks that are made of organic sugar, gluten free simple carbs, healthier fats, salt, and organic chemicals, but they are still killing us. The super healthy among us stick to fruits and nuts – which are made of fruit sugar, simple and complex carbs, healthy fats, salt, but no added chemicals. But it does not matter. Almost any food between meals generates inflammation in the body, and that is the bottom line cause of degenerative disease.
Why is this? The answer is complex and only now really being understood, but Dr. Joseph Kraft first discovered the basics back in the 70’s. It comes down to this: when we eat food it gets digested and dumped into our blood stream. We don’t want this stuff clogging up our arteries, so our body releases insulin to open up the liver, muscles, and fat cells to suck up this food and either store it or use it. Insulin is a hormone, and the body has a very special relationship to hormones. In tiny amounts they stir the body up and make it do various things. But there is an automatic brake on this response reaction to hormones. If we produce too much of any hormone, the body’s cells start to ignore the hormone. This keeps the body from over working and burning itself out.
This is what happens with insulin. The body is fine with a shot of insulin two or three times a day. The insulin is released; it reaches peak levels in about 45 minutes then slowly returns to baseline in about another hour and a half. A healthy insulin response is roughly two hours long and the body really only tolerates about 6 hours of insulin running around per every 24 hours. But what happens when we snack? Every time we eat most anything we trigger another 2 hour insulin cycle. By the time you have your mid-morning snack, afternoon snack, and bedtime snack you have now doubled the insulin exposure to 12 hours or more each day. The body responds to this by forming insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance turns into inflammation. The process around how this happens is complex as I said, but scientists are unraveling the interaction between the storage cells and the immune system that go haywire when insulin goes too high, too often. What we care about is all the disease this creates.
Let me give you a personal example. Years ago I got on a fruit kick. I had cut everything bad out of my diet, but I snacked on fruit. I would eat a piece of fruit every hour or two figuring I was keeping my blood sugar stable this way. This went on for almost a year when I had a kidney stone. In taking an x-ray to track the stone, the radiologist asked me if I was an alcoholic. I said no since I never drink alcohol. He thought that was odd because the x-ray showed I had a fatty liver, something they usually only see in alcoholics. I did some research and discovered the link between eating too much fruit and fatty liver and stopped that crazy fruit snacking. Back then this was a rare finding. Now a days Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is common and found even in children because of the consumption of soft drinks.
The current myth is that we have to have snacks to keep our blood sugar up. This is completely bogus. Our liver manufactures all the sugar we need even if we don’t eat sugar or carbohydrates at all. It keeps our blood sugar very level all the time. The illusion of hypoglycemia has been marketed to death to scare us into snacking on crap all the time, much to the profit of the snack manufacturers. In my experience true hypoglycemia happens in less than one in 500 people. I see people all the time that get their energy tanking during the day, but blood sugar is not the cause, lots of other things are typically involved – usually adrenal stress issues.
One good piece of news: last week I did an insulin challenge on Ellen to see the effects of consuming just non-starchy vegetables on insulin levels. I gave her a bowl of vegetable soup I made with bone broth and veggies and then had the lab test her blood one hour later. The great news is that the soup did not raise her insulin hardly at all. So snacking on non-starchy vegetables appears to be ok. Nothing in the scientific literature has ever tested this. I guess nobody eats vegetables, so they never thought to test them. Everything else they have tested and it all raises insulin levels – sugars and carbs the most, proteins about half as much as the carbs, and fats a little bit.
A few weeks ago I thought all we had to do was get our fasting blood levels of insulin checked and if we were below 5 we were in good shape. With the ton of research I have done since then I now know this is not enough. We have to do a glucose challenge insulin test to know what is happening – similar to the glucose challenge test for blood sugar only for insulin instead. Fortunately we can get the essential information we need by checking the blood at just the two hour and three hour test points after we drink the sugar load. This makes the normal 6 hours sitting around the lab unnecessary. We can get what we need in about an hour. Don’t bother asking your medical doctor for this test, as very few doctors have ever been taught about the Kraft Insulin Assay. But as far as I know this is the only definitive way to assess how far along the path we have gone down the degenerative insulin inflammation cycle.
The key takeaway from this article – never snack on anything other than non-starchy vegetables. Confine your eating to three meals a day. And if you want to be proactive about your health, eat all your carbs and sugars in just one of those meals each day and stick to protein and vegetables the rest of the time. This will bring the insulin challenges to your system under control so it does not get worse. If you want to reverse any current insulin resistance, you will need to spend periods of time – several days to several weeks – without any challenge to the insulin system at all.