You are Never Really Alone- but its not what you think!
Today we are going to be talking about Weight Loss, Gut Bombs and the Microbiome.
What does that have to do with not being alone?!
Read on!
It’s a little-known fact that a calorie is not really a calorie- at least not the way we are led to believe.
Look at any package label and you will see Calories listed on the side.
Did you ever wonder how accurate that is?
Answer: not accurate at although still a useful ballpark.
The problem is that calories are NOT measured inside a living human. If they were then you would see something like a range of calories for a normal healthy human. Problems with that definition aside, it would be a mess since the range would be a lot wider than you might think.
Newton is often given credit for the Law of thermodynamics but for you history buffs it was Robert Julius Mayer who said, “Energy is Neither Created nor Destroyed”.
Does that apply to food and calories as well?
The answer to the above statements about Calories and Energy is found in the Gut Microbiome or the bugs that live in your gut.
Current estimates are between 40 trillion to 300 trillion bacteria and over 400 species.
So, the statement “You are Never Alone” is actually true since that is a whole lot of company albeit somewhat alien in life form speak!
Ok back to the Calorie Question:
Calories are measured by blowing up the food object in question and measuring the before and after difference in heat which is then equated to stored hear energy. Hence the calorie.
But unless you have a bomb calorimeter inside of you the actual number of calories you can absorb is going to be different- sometimes a lot different.
The amount and quality of that absorption (vitamins, minerals and food components like fats, carbs and proteins) depends a lot on the health of your gut bacteria and the gut itself.
Bacteria out of whack? Calories out of whack, and it’s not always less calories even if the gut and its bacteria are out of sorts.
Even though energy cannot technically be created or destroyed, the gut bacteria are responsible for up to 40% of the actual calories you can absorb.
This is because they make high calorie easy to absorb short chain fatty acids (SFA’s)from all kinds of different food stuffs. They reduce the thermic effect of food by a lot. The thermic effect of food is how much energy your body has to expend to get at the calories in what you eat.
The net equation of what you harvest and what you expend is the actual meaningful amount of calories you wind up with in your system after digestion.
These SFA’s are a huge source of calories and are dependent on the bacterial make up and number in your gut.
These are NEVER measured in bomb calorimeters. This is why some people can honestly go on significant calorie restriction and still lose almost no weight, at least in a reasonable time frame.
A note on that last comment: a week is NOT a reasonable time frame, 2 weeks is!
Ok so now you know some of the pit falls of counting calories. What can you do about it?
Take a probiotic and make sure it is a good one!
Restore your gut bacteria to normal and you will feel better, lose weight more easily, and big bonus, absorb your vitamins more completely.
Again this is over looked in the equation when people talk only about how their vitamins are in a “more absorbable form. That is also very difficult to prove in a live human so you almost always looking at very controlled studies from very controlled subjects that are often NOT Human!
I guarantee you the gut microbiome is by far the most important thing regarding the effect and availability of your vitamins in most cases.
Don’t cheat yourself! Try Pro Life Probiotic.
Even if you are happy with your weight, odds are you will feel better!
And stack all the odds in your favor!
And remember, you are Never Alone!
Dr Dave