

How to Fatten Pigs and People - georgecmu
http://www.wellfedhomestead.com/how-to-fatten-pigs-and-people

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mistercow
>The fat in the milk minimizes the impact of the sugar in the milk when it
hits your body.

You guys, this sounds like some pretty hard science.

Also, the study mentioned about children and skim milk was a longitudinal
study, and in the conclusion the authors recognized that it is likely that
parents give their children lower fat milk _because_ they're obese, not the
other way around.

Edit: Also, the list of "disguised corn" is hilariously misguided. Those are
predominantly highly refined compounds that are produced from corn (except for
some like lecithin, which mostly comes from soybeans, but I digress), and
there the resemblance to corn ends. Saying propylene glycol is "disguised
corn" is like saying that paper is "disguised sunlight".

Is the author trying to convince us that corn contains some kind of pig-
fattening essence, and that essence is somehow passed to any product derived
from it?

~~~
strangestchild
Homeopathic obesity – what an intriguing idea...

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qammm
I like the submitted blog post although the blog post does not really try to
explain why pigs get fat when fed milk, corn or sugar. Actually I am not a pig
specialist but I heard a lot of times that the pig body chemistry works quite
similarly to human body chemistry. So I will try to explain why people get fat
when fed milk, corn, sugar.

The central mechanism to understand is insulin. Quoting
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin):
"Insulin is a peptide hormone, produced by beta cells of the pancreas, and is
central to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body. Insulin
causes cells in the liver, skeletal muscles, and fat tissue to absorb glucose
from the blood. In the liver and skeletal muscles, glucose is stored as
glycogen, and in fat cells (adipocytes) it is stored as triglycerides.

Insulin stops the use of fat as an energy source by inhibiting the release of
glucagon. ... Porcine insulin is especially close to the human version."

That means whenever you consume a meal that produces a high insulin response
your body stops burning fat immediately and in addition stores all the fat in
the meal you just consumed in the form of fat. That is what makes pigs and
people fat (in addition to another phenomenom which makes you hungry again
much quicker).

You can index food by the insulin reaction it causes. This index is called
insulin index. Different food has a different index value. See e. g.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index)
Unfortunately there are no really detailled insulin index tables as there are
for the glycemic index. The glycemic index measures how fast your blood sugar
will rise after consuming a specific food. In most cases however high glycemic
index will also mean high insulin index and you can substitute the missing
insulin index data by using the glycemic index data with one exception: milk.
Milk although having a low glycemic index (caused by milk sugar/lactose) has a
high insulin index! See e. g. [http://www.marksdailyapple.com/dairy-
insulin/‎](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/dairy-insulin/‎)

Corn and Sugar have high glycemic (and thus insulin) index. Milk protein
causes an abnormal high insulin index.

There are a lot of diets that can be explained by optimizing mostly this
insulin effect: Atkins, Low Carb, Sears/Zone, Paleo. Although I am not an
expert in any of them. All I can say is that by only taking care for what I
ate I lost 60 pounds over the course of 1.5 years (I used a similar german
diet called "Schlank im Schlaf"). The interesting thing to me is: When I am
eating food with a low insulin effect I stay satisfied for much longer. When I
eat food with high insulin effect I get hungry again in 1-2 hours. It feels
almost like drinking salt water against thirst...

