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Protein—A Most Confusing Word

Published on January 2, 2019

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In the past few months, I have come to realize that some of the most common words are just downright confusing. Protein is one of them. I decided to write about it because the more involved in nutrition, metabolism, biochemistry and physiology I become, the more confusion I recognize among people in discussions about protein. I find most people are confused about the meaning of the words protein and carbohydrates. It is important to understand what protein is in order to be healthy—I will discuss carbohydrates in a future paper.

The Many Meanings of Protein

Depending on the branch of science, or even in everyday life, the word “protein” has acquired different meanings.

In Restaurants: meat or seafood

Metabolism and Nutrition: a macronutrient that is present in many foods

Chemistry: “any of a class of nitrogenous organic compounds that consist of large molecules composed of one or more long chains of amino acids and are an essential part of all living organisms, especially as structural components of body tissues such as muscle, hair, collagen, etc., and as enzymes and antibodies.” (see this google definition here)

Physiology: specially folded complex large molecular structures made up of amino acids, from which most everything is made in the human body (see here)

Biology: “Any of a group of complex organic macromolecules that contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and usually sulfur and are composed of one or more chains of amino acids. Proteins are fundamental components of all living cells and include many substances, such as enzymes, hormones, and antibodies, that are necessary for the proper functioning of an organism. They are essential in the diet of animals for the growth and repair of tissue and can be obtained from foods such as meat, fish, eggs, milk, and legumes.” (see here)

Origin of the Word Protein

The word protein first appeared in the journal Natuur by G. J. Mulder in 1838, who chose the Greek prōteios as the base for the word (see here). While he didn’t quite discover the entire concept of what protein was, he most certainly captured its most commonly understood quality very well:

“…This is the foodstuff of the whole animal kingdom…” (here)

Indeed, it is foodstuff, however, it is also the biggest component of our body after water. Most of us are unaware that we have protein in our body and would be hard pressed to point to something in our body that is protein. We do know that we need to eat protein for health but what exactly is protein?

Protein

I nearly dropped out of my first biochemistry class because I was unable to relate to protein—the way it was explained was quite insufficient. In college, most everyone is presented with a picture similar to this:

and we are told: this is what protein looks like. Other than looking like bad hair day due to inexpert use of a curling iron, not much else comes to mind. The curls are labeled as “protein folding” but few teachers do a good job explaining what that means, and why they look like that. And no one I know has ever explained to me how the shape of this protein relates to the protein in the food I eat. Let me approach the subject in the order of the many meanings I listed above, starting with the most common concepts and move to the more complicated ones.

Protein in Restaurants

How often have you heard a waiter/waitress ask: what would you like for your protein? This is an interesting question. We all seem to know that the question refers to meat or seafood. What if you order a salad or a pasta dish with no meat or seafood at all? Are you still ordering a protein?

Most every food type, including fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, dairy, poultry, meat, and seafood contain protein, though none is completely protein. The only food element that does not contain protein is fat. There is no food that is 100% protein, even protein powders are not 100% protein, so you cannot order 100 % protein for your meal, no matter how hard you try.

The confusion gains more importance when someone is trying to find out how much protein should be consumed a day. The USDA recommends a minimum of 0.6 protein grams per 2 lbs of weight for women and 0.8 grams per 2 lbs of weight for men. (see here) On average this comes to about minimum 50 protein grams a day. So how to calculate how much protein one actually eats? For example, if you eat a serving of chicken breast, or drink a glass of milk, or eat a bowl of salad: how much protein are you consuming? While a milk carton lists the protein content (usually 8 protein grams per 8 oz glass of milk), a serving of chicken breast and a bowl of salad most certainly doesn’t list any information. The next best place to look up protein information per each food item is the USDA database.

The USDA offers a standardized approach of protein value per 100 gr (3.5 ounces) of food stuff. For example, the amount of protein in this cooked chicken breast per 100 gr is 27.3 gr (here). If you prefer salad, it depends on the kind of lettuce, of course. I picked Romaine lettuce for an example: 100 gr Romaine lettuce has 1.23 gr protein (here). Since most everything we eat has protein, the question of “what would you like for your protein?” could be answered by ordering any food. While I do not want you to torture the wait-staff with your newly found knowledge, just remember, in reality we don’t eat protein, we eat foods that have protein.

Protein in Metabolism and Nutrition

Protein is one of the four macronutrients that encompass all foods humans can eat and drink, except for water: Carbohydrates, Protein, Fats, and Alcohol—I will ignore alcohol in this article. When evaluating a particular nutritional paradigm, such as the Standard American Diet (SAD), Mediterranean, LCHF, Vegetarian, Ketogenic, Carnivore, DASH, Whole30, Paleo, South Beach, Vegan, etc., we choose based on its macronutrient composition. Looking at two extremes for macro composition: the vegan diet is approximately 70-80% carbohydrates (Ornish plan), less than 10% fat, and the rest is from protein. A straight opposite to vegan is the ketogenic diet, which is 70- 90% fat, 4-5% carbohydrates, and the rest protein (see an example here). As you see, understanding what protein means in your diet is absolutely necessary in order to pick a particular nutritional paradigm and follow it correctly. Understanding what protein actually is, is also very important, so that you don’t get confused about what you are eating and why.

Macronutrients

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrate is also a misunderstood word, which I will cover in an upcoming paper to greater detail. In our common use in discussions about nutrition it refers to foods that contain glucose, starch, sucrose, fructose, galactose, and/or fiber. A typical carbohydrate is Romaine lettuce. As I noted earlier, most carbohydrates contain protein and fat as well. There are carbohydrates that contain only sugars, such as table sugar, honey, and candy. Fiber is often referred to as a carbohydrate even though we cannot digest fiber. Our gut flora can digest fiber and provide nutrients to us in exchange. The nutrient we receive is butyrate. Butyrate is a short chain fatty acid (here) and a ketone precursor (see here)—it is a fat.

Protein

As mentioned above, proteins are referred to as meats, seafood, poultry, and eggs. However, I have shown that they are not protein, they merely contain protein. Some seafood and most organ meats also contain glucose—something I just defined as belonging under carbohydrates. There are no foods in which the amount of protein takes up most of the food. When we eat meat or seafood, we also eat large amounts of fat and water. I looked through the USDA database for common raw foods protein value and found that turkey breast has the highest protein amount at 23.66 gr per 100 gr, salmon came in second at 22.25 gr per 100 gr (salmon protein differs widely among fish type, farmed or wild, and the geographic location it comes from), and chicken breast came in third at 20.85 gr protein per 100 gr.

Fat

Fat is a simple macronutrient. When we eat most fat types, we only eat fat.

Macronutrient summary: The confusion about certain macronutrients is that it is unclear at what point a food becomes carbohydrate versus protein, since just about anything we choose to eat contains glucose, protein, and fat, with the notable exception of sweeteners. Therefore, of the three macronutrients, only fat stands alone as a “pure” macronutrient as it has neither carbs nor protein.

Essential macronutrients are those that we must consume in order to stay alive and be healthy. We only have two essential macronutrients in our food: protein and fat; carbohydrates are not essential macronutrients (see here).

Protein in Chemistry

Protein is “a class of nitrogenous organic compounds that consist of large molecules composed of one or more long chains of amino acids and are an essential part of all living organisms, especially as structural components of body tissues such as muscle, hair, collagen, etc., and as enzymes and antibodies” (see this google definition here). There are 20 amino acids, of which 9 are essential and 11 are not.

Amino Acids

Table 1. Amino acid types

Some amino acids can only convert to glucose (glucogenic), some only to ketones, and some to either.

Each amino acid is a combination of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O). The total number of proteins that can be created from these amino acids by organic metabolic processes is not yet known, but it is certainly an extremely large number. In humans, it is over twenty thousand (here). Even our genes are made from proteins.

Translating amino acids to our foods: glucogenic amino acids convert to glucose, thereby stimulating insulin. Ketogenic amino acids don’t stimulate insulin; they are more “metabolically stable”. Metabolically stable in this context refers to the fact that ketogenic compounds decrease oxidative stress and inflammation better (see here) than glucogenic ones do. Since most foods that contain protein contain most amino acids but in various different amounts, it is wise to select foods that are higher in essential amino acids that contain more of the ketogenic kinds. Looking at the amino acid composition of foods is not an easy challenge but can be done using the USDA database’s “full report (all nutrients)”, such as I selected here for flank steak. The more nutrient dense foods will have higher levels of the ketogenic amino acids.

I have collected several popular foods, looked up their individual amino acid compositions, and then grouped them and created three comparison ratios: essential versus non-essential, ketogenic versus glucogenic or (ketogenic + either) versus glucogenic. The goal is to show that different foods have different values for our body in terms of their protein content. The table below is a summary of the following foods picked by popular eating trends: chicken breast, black beans, soy beans, brown rice, romaine lettuce, eggs, whole milk, Atlantic salmon, porterhouse steak, pork loin, ground beef, ground turkey, ground lamb, and tomato*.

Table 2. Amino acid content in food comparison

As can be seen by the green highlighted columns in table 2, the foods highest in essential amino acids are the same that are also highest in those amino acids that convert to ketones only or either ketones or glucose, and these are: chicken breast, black beans, eggs, whole milk, Atlantic salmon, porterhouse steak, ground turkey, and ground lamb. Notice how soy, a particularly favorite substitution for animal proteins for vegan and vegetarian diets, has nearly equivalently low-quality amino acid profile to brown rice and worse than romaine lettuce. Note also that ground beef has a pretty poor profile, similarly to brown rice and soy beans, and that tomato is negligible in amino acids.

*These foods were chosen by me. Not all foods contain full amino acid profile in the USDA database, but these do.

Proteins in Physiology and in Biology

Physiology deals with how our body works rather than what it is made from. Here protein is looked at for its special shape, the folds, and how it functions. It is looked in a more general term than we are familiar with in common use. Protein is a specially folded complex, large molecular structure made up of amino acids, from which most everything is made in the human body (see here).

Biology deals with the functions and the elements of each cell. In biology, proteins are fundamental components of all living cells and include enzymes, hormones, and antibodies, that are necessary for the proper functioning of an organism.

The physiology and biology of proteins is fascinating and extremely complex. Unlike my initial college class, I think I can do a better job at explaining protein folding and its significance. Protein molecules have polar arms. Polarity means that the molecule as well as its atoms can have either a positive or a negative charge. A positive charge repels something that is positively charged but attracts something that is negatively charged. So the protein folds are generated by these polarity attractions and repels between how the atoms of the chemical elements (noted earlier as N, C, H, and O) are lined up within a particular amino acid and how the amino acids are lined up in a protein molecule. Because all amino acids we call Lycine, for example, look and function alike, it follows that all Lycine must be folded identically. If there is damage to a particular amino acid, it may change its shape, thereby lose its function and the protein in which it is found will also lose its ability to function.

A protein damage can be local or systemic. By local, think of having a scalding hot water spray on your arm and damage your skin in one spot. Since your skin is high in protein, the hot water had damaged a few protein cells on your skin. One can also envision a local protein damage by cooking. Heat-damaged protein in foods we intentionally heat (cook) end up with “untangled” (unfolded) proteins. This makes the food easier the chew.

What can cause such damage to proteins in our body in general? Proteins make up a large part of all of our organs, skin, hair, and just about everything we can think of. So anything that can cause damage to our body will damage our proteins. A simple example is a sunburn, where we burn the skin, which contains a lot of protein, we damage the protein structures. More common modern nutritional examples are metabolic diseases, which affect many organs, such as the liver (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), arteries and heart (atherosclerosis), metabolism (insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and obesity), some cancers, various cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune diseases like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s disease, Hashimoto’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, etc.

Conclusion

The goal of this paper was to help you see the many meanings of the word protein and the importance of understanding the various meanings. Selecting the right food to eat based on its protein quality (amino acid constituents) is a complicated business. Not only it is important to understand based on what we should be selecting our diet (such as carnivore versus vegan, for example) but also the foods within each diet. It is often brought up that some nutritional regimes are less healthy than others. It is easier to determine the facts, if we can look at the nutritional components of the particular regime at the molecular level.

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Carbohydrate Addiction

by Angela A Stanton, PhD

Published on March 13, 2018

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With the nutrition wars going on (explained well here), recommending the key macronutrients and their proper proportions for our health, the two dominant camps that have emerged are the carbohydrate proponents and those that oppose the consumption of carbohydrates—some oppose only in “excess” (low carbs, ketogenic, Atkins, etc.,) and others “completely” (zero carbs). Between the members of these groups, angry words are exchanged, and competencies, educations, and other personal nonscientific arguments are bandied around. I call this nutrition bullying. And then there are the substantive conflicts and inconsistencies. Like the following confusing statements – 10 pages apart in the National Academies of Sciences Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) guideline book.

In the chapter titled Clinical Effects of Inadequate Intake on page 265 the opening statement is as follows:

“The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for carbohydrate is set at 130 g/d for adults and children based on the average minimum amount of glucose utilized by the brain.”

Going to page 275 in the same chapter, we read:

“The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amount of protein and fat are consumed”.

As you can see: on the one hand, dietary carbohydrate is needed for the brain, and on the other hand, the carbohydrate need is zero for life (thus, zero for the brain). If we had a third hand, I would like to hold in it the USDA recommendations passed on to all nutritionists, suggesting that the ideal carbohydrate intake is 45-65% of the daily Calories. For a typical 2000 Calorie diet (as it is on all food labels) this comes to 225 – 325 gr carbohydrates a day. Thus, we are told that the human body needs zero carbohydrates to stay alive, provided that fats and proteins are consumed in adequate amounts, and also that the RDA is 130 gr carbohydrates for the use of the brain that needs no carbohydrates, while the USDA recommends 225 – 325 gr carbohydrates. Major confusion! Even worse, this confusion is not well known; it goes unnoticed by almost all scientists, dietitians, and nutritionists—not to mention the general public. I would like to shed some light to the sources of this confusion, hopefully providing you with much needed clarity on this hot subject.

Let the Carbohydate War Commence

From an academic perspective the war makes a lot of sense. After all, those who have supported the high carbohydrate paradigm of the Standard American Diet (SAD) have built their careers on its credibility. Whether they themselves follow the recommendations of the SAD or not, they have a vested interest in maintaining their stand in the high carbohydrate field. Similarly, those whose lifelong research has been in the low or zero carbohydrate fields have a vested interest in sticking to their guns.

Those not members of either camp (many scientists, nutritionists, and almost all people in general) can be forgiven for feeling like spectators on the sidelines of a tennis match, during which one’s head ends up spinning from looking left and right nonstop. Many people decide to just jump head first in and test the waters to see where they end up. This causes a lot of problems because macronutrients represent life sustainment and are not up for games and self-experimentation—people can get hurt. Each macronutrient has its very specific quality. Some are necessary for the body to keep it healthy and others are not needed at all or can even be harmful. An educated choice is a better approach but beyond the above described controversy, there is much misinformation on the internet, creating further confusion.

Macronutrient Choices: What They Do and Do Not Do

There are three macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are all plant matter: all fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and grains. While many people think that vegetables, fruits, and whole grains are “not carbohydrates”, only sugar and desserts are “carbs”, in reality, all carbohydrates turn into sugar in our bodies. In this sense, there is very little difference between eating 4 grams of sugar from a teaspoon or 4 grs sugar equivalent from an apple or a slice of bread.

Carbohydrates can be “free glucose”, such as the teaspoon of glucose or the amount of glucose in a fruit, or they can be attached to fiber and need separation, or to other carbohydrate forms that need to convert to glucose, such as fructose, starches, galactose, or lactose. Those carbohydrates that need any type of conversion by the body into glucose are not listed as “sugar” on product labels. In general, on every food label you find sugar (free glucose), fiber, and carbohydrates. Since fibers don’t convert to sugar, to find out the total amount of sugar that will become active sugar in the body, we need to subtract fiber from total carbohydrates.

Here is an example to help you understand what I mean: take a slice of unsweetened whole wheat bread from the USDA database. You will see the following on the label and in [] are my explanations:

Carbohydrates by difference: 12.11 gr [total carbohydrates]
Fiber: 1.7 gr [both soluble and insoluble]
Sugar, total: 1.23 gr [free sugar].

We know that a slice of unsweetened wheat bread like this doesn’t taste sweet, yet, if you subtract the fiber from the total carbohydrates, the actual sugar amount in the slice of whole wheat bread is 12.11 – 1.7 = 10.41 gr. This amount truly represents everything that is either glucose or that converts to glucose in the body and not only the sweetness value the slice of bread has by its free sugar content. The actual sugar amount for the bread is 10.41 gr, or almost 3 teaspoons of sugar, in a food item that nobody considers sweet.

Every single carbohydrate item you can think of provides mostly sugar to the body in terms of macronutrients—very little protein and fat. Carbohydrates can also provide micronutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, and various antioxidants, plus fiber. However, we must remember that, according to one of the above quotes, supported by the real-life experiences of many ethnic/tribal societies and those individuals who have followed a carb free diet, carbohydrates are not essential for life at all. We can completely live a healthy life without a single slice of bread, without a single apple, or any other carbohydrates. How about the micronutrients in carbs and fiber: do we need those? The answer must be “no” if we have zero need for carbohydrates—therefore, carbohydrates are not an essential macronutrient.

Proteins

Proteins are mostly in animals and seafood. I created a table listing all amino acids—proteins are made from amino acids.

We have two types of amino acids: essential and non-essential. Within the non-essentials, most are glucogenic (meaning they convert to glucose), and one can be converted either to glucose or to ketones. Among the essential amino acids, three can only convert to glucose, two only to ketones, and four to either. Two questions should pop into your mind immediately: 1) Is there a reason why some of the amino acids convert to glucose and others to ketones and 2) why do we have amino acids that only convert to ketones? The answer is quite simple: the body can use two fuels for energy: glucose and ketones and it needs to have the ability to move between these two metabolic processes seamlessly. Thus, amino acids that can only be used as ketones, can be used by our body very well. The reason for some to only convert to ketones is that some cells in the body (including the brain that controls Parkinson’s disease¹ and Alzheimer’s disease) work better and improve while using ketones.

Lastly, plants contain little protein compared to animal/seafood sources, therefore, those with a mostly vegetarian or vegan diet are greatly disadvantaged in the essential amino acid category.

Fats

The third macronutrient class is fats (fatty acids). Fatty acids are found is all animal sourced foods, including seafood and, in some carbohydrates—not all. Unlike carbs or proteins, all fats are essential. We typically discuss fats as saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats, but in reality, these three fat types are always found together in nature, so it is best to discuss fats from the perspective of what type of omega fats they are. There are several but the most well-known are omega 6 and 3. Omega 6 can be found mostly in plant-based foods and some in animal fatty acids, and omega 3 is in mostly animal/seafood sourced foods. There are three types of omega 3 fatty acids: ALA (from plants only), EPA and DHA (from animal and seafood only). The human brain is over 60% fat, much of it is DHA (EPA is a precursor to DHA) and since that is only found in animal/seafood sources, eating meats and seafood is essential. Those who get their omega 3s as ALA from carbs are in trouble, because the human body is not capable for quantity conversion of ALA to EPA or DHA. This causes some major problems for vegetarians and vegans—males and females differ slightly in conversion rates^2,3.

Are We Eating Foods or Drugs?

You are thinking “how silly is this question? Of course, we are eating foods.” Hold that thought. We need to understand the hormonal connection to be able to answer the question if certain foods can be drugs. If we eat something that is not needed for our life and survival, such as a carbohydrate, what role will it play? There is a battle going on inside your body as you eat; the battle of hormones, how macronutrients affect them, and how your brain reacts to what you eat. This is currently a highly controversial topic between the two warring camps of scientists. I want to present here some of the arguments in this debate.

Let’s talk about hunger and what drives hunger considering the macronutrients we discussed—focusing on carbohydrates, the subject of the most heated debates.

A scientist colleague, Dr. David Pendergrass, describes what food is and what it does in terms of our metabolic and endocrine (hormonal) system very eloquently on his blog:

“Clearly carbohydrates are not drugs in the same way that heroin is. They are indeed nutrients. Yet they activate the dopaminergic mesolimbic pathway (so called rewards or saliency pathway depending upon the neurobiologist you happen to be talking to…), in the same way heroin, nicotine, and alcohol do. To that end…, it has drug-like capacity. The neurobiologist perspective to addiction is that down-regulation of receptors MUST occur and that withdrawal syndromes occur. Heroin and opiates are addictive under that qualification as the opiate receptors downregulate via intracellular Ca++/phosphorylation events, decreased receptor expression and receptor withdrawal mechanisms…So by this definition, carbohydrates may indeed be considered addictive because of the insulin receptor down regulation (AKA insulin resistance) that occurs with chronic hyperinsulinemia. Since insulin is considered an anorexogenic peptide, then you would need progressively more carbohydrate to induce satiety as more and more insulin is needed to bind to insulin receptors to achieve the same results. This particular description might well merit the term addiction in the down-regulation sense.
Addiction by a behavioral definition is different. It suggests that anything drugs (carbs, alcohol, sex, gambling, food) that is patently ‘bad-in-excess’ or to the point that it affects health or work or relationships and is difficult to stop, would be an addiction by psychologists. In these cases, there is neuronal reinforcement of the behavior by the compulsion. This neural plasticity is accompanied by specific changes in neurotransmitter release and receptor organization across the synapse. Indeed, increased numbers of synapses occur with such compulsions. Again, this is a function of the behavior-causing neuronal rewiring in the dopaminergic mesolimbic pathway that supports the compulsion. In this manner and definition, carbohydrates by a psychological definition would also be considered addictive.”

It is important to recognize the differences between – let’s say – opioids and carbs. The process of down-regulation, the reduction in receptors in numbers and sensitivity, takes significantly longer for carbs, allowing for the development of a chronic condition we know as type 2 diabetes, considered to be a terminal chronic disease if left untreated. Actually, type 2 diabetes can be reversed in most cases—this is a subject for another article in the future. Studies show that some foods—those with high glycemic index (GI)—seem to activate those reward pathways in the brain that are also activated by street drugs. Furthermore, ghrelin, a hormone involved with hunger and satiety is also involved with the reward brain circuit in both food and drug-induced reward mechanisms.

In any case, both with street drugs and carbs, the receiving hormone or neurotransmitter (in the brain) loses its receptors or their sensitivity to deliver the drug or carbs to the target cells⁴. With such identical mechanisms and ultimate consequences, eating carbohydrates suspiciously looks like an addiction. Furthermore, we must ask what makes quitting carbohydrates so difficult. Many people struggle to quit—often quitting for some time and then returning, unable to hold sweet-free life. This table, “relative sweetness value”, shows some really scary numbers. Natural sugars, such as sucrose and fructose, are significantly sweeter than glucose by taste—is sweetness the driving factor? Apparently, it may just be so⁵. It is worthy to note that while fructose is the sweetest of all natural sugars at 110 in relative sweetness factor, glucose is only 74, so there is a significant difference between them—compare this to lactose in milk at 16. Aspartame, a very common sugar substitute has a relative sweetness factor of 18,000! Wow! If relative sweetness value alone drove sugar addiction, then sugar substitutes would elicit an addiction as well—and indeed they do. “Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward.” And while my initial hunch was that since fructose has a higher relative sweetness value than glucose, it would elicit a higher reaction in terms of addiction, this is not the case. A specific scale, the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) was developed to assess food addiction.

From an evolutionary standpoint, getting addicted to something is not a good thing as withdrawal (withdrawal is a necessary component of addiction) produces weakness and works against the survival of the fittest. In the long history of human evolution, glucose/fructose were not available in big quantities, and so addiction danger was never present. This also immediately implies that because of the short/seasonal availability of glucose and fructose, it would have created an evolutionary advantage to those whose carbs cravings was strong and could gobble up all that was available when it was available. Therefore, what we now label as addiction, at one time may have had a different role and vastly different manifestation—without withdrawal—serving as a benefit to human kind. Research also found that reactive hypoglycemia (RH), a form of insulin resistance where glucose levels drop drastically after eating, initiate a different brain response from those subjects without RH. RH subjects seek higher carbohydrate and caloric content foods. In addition, there are “brakes” in the intestines and the gut area of human. Such brakes serve to cause satiety or hunger, which is based on factors of BMI, age, and gender.

Only in the very recent past have been high glucose/fructose containing foods and drinks readily available. Over-consumption of highly sweet carbohydrates don’t activate our satiety hormone (ghrelin) the same way as protein or fat does. “[G]hrelin activates an important reward circuit involved in natural- as well as drug-induced reward, the cholinergic-dopaminergic reward link”. It also appears that co-factors are involved: people with higher level of alcohol consumption may crave more sweets and those with higher consumption of sweets may crave more alcohol.

There is much more research needed to understand the exact mechanism of sugar and sweet carbohydrates cravings, though it seems clear that highly processed, fast-absorbing carbohydrates share pharmacokinetic properties with drugs of abuse. While sugar or processed carbohydrates are not likely to be classified as drugs in the near future, further evaluation for what they do to the human body is warranted, particularly given the obesity and metabolic syndrome crisis we are facing. As stated all through, carbohydrates—including both highly processed and non-processed types—are not essential for us to eat.

The biggest question we need to ask is how can something that takes up such a large percent of our caloric intake – and does so unnecessarily – be ever eliminated from our diets. Should carbohydrates be regulated by taxation and advertisement controls similarly to tobacco and alcohol? Or are we ready to continue long-term chronic disease treatments at astronomical costs because eating carbohydrates is so culturally ingrained?

Sources

1             VanItallie, T. B. et al. Treatment of Parkinson disease with diet-induced hyperketonemia: A feasibility study. Neurology 64, 728-730, doi:10.1212/01.Wnl.0000152046.11390.45 (2005).
2             Burdge, G. C., Jones, A. E. & Wootton, S. A. Eicosapentaenoic and docosapentaenoic acids are the principal products of α-linolenic acid metabolism in young men. British Journal of Nutrition 88, 355-363, doi:10.1079/BJN2002662 (2002).
3             Burdge, G. C. & Wootton, S. A. Conversion of α-linolenic acid to eicosapentaenoic, docosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids in young women. British Journal of Nutrition 88, 411-420, doi:10.1079/BJN2002689 (2002).
4             Figlewicz, D. P., Bennett, J. L., Aliakbari, S., Zavosh, A. & Sipols, A. J. Insulin acts at different CNS sites to decrease acute sucrose intake and sucrose self-administration in rats. American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology 295, R388-R394, doi:10.1152/ajpregu.90334.2008 (2008).
5             Murray, S. M., Tulloch, A. J., Chen, E. Y. & Avena, N. M. Insights revealed by rodent models of sugar binge eating. CNS Spectrums 20, 530-536, doi:10.1017/S1092852915000656 (2015).

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