Can fat be good?

Fat has been sentenced to a lifetime of being guilty and has been in a dungeon for decades! Unrightfully so?!

Let’s exonerate it and exculpate our innocent well meaning fat cell!

There have been a few things and characters throughout human history more vilified than fat! Is the fat guilty of the doing and worthy of the sheer consternation? That’s what we are going to find out by embarking on that journey of exploring the facts vs fiction about our body fat!

Why do we pile up fat?

Because back in the old days humans had no consistent guaranteed source of food all the time for a variety of reasons including wars, famines that old life was rife with! So humans have developed a way to store excess energy during abundance of food for obvious good legit reasons! To use during those sure to come days scarcity of food!

How long can a human being live off his/her own fat storage with just water intake?

Interesting question? Yet what’s more interesting will be the answer! Wouldn’t it surprise you dear reader to learn the answer is as long as you still have fat stored on you! Knowing that a pound of fat equals 3500 Calories, with a simple calculation one could live for roughly two days off a pound of body fat serving that very purpose it was stored for in the first place! And also with another simple calculation one could come up with the number of days a human being can survive starvation and famine without food or any Calories at all, by calculating approximate body fat using a plethora of ways to do that, and then multiply the pounds of fat by 2 days and there you have it, how king that person can live off own body fat should famine come assuming water is not an issue! Nowadays that’s an adopted way of losing weight by some, and jumping in the band wagon if Autophagy by others to glean all the growth benefits purported by Autophagy to its fans, including decreasing Alzheimer’s risk, slashing the risk of autoimmune diseases and many cancers, and Kasr but not least losing weight and shedding the fat that’s been in us for eons when it’s been stored to be shed!

A world water fasting record was achieved by Angus Barbieri in 1971 who fasted for 382 on water and vitamins only and lost 125kg!

So is the problem having stored fat? Or having lots and lots of it?

In theory, fat is there for a sole purpose which is getting rid of the overflow of energy when we have food abundance, but make no mistake back in the old days it was a matter of time before something happened that made the fat storage a very good endeavor that’s worthwhile, like famine, war, poverty etc

What are you saying?

I am saying that our problem is our food abundance! There has never been an era in human history where food abundance has been this much like now, it’s unparalleled actually! Yet that came at a hefty price that humans of current modern age are paying dearly! That price is called OBESITY due to very low quality of foods due to being impoverished by design to meet the pressing needs ranging from shel life to food additives to hook customers to come back! Which is reported to be very closely tied to 236 diseases, an ever so not slightly increasing number we found out!

But why? How? When? Has all this happened?

Unfortunately our bodies are designed to store fat but doesn’t know what to do with a ton of it (No pun intended), and when that happens it changes an innocent body serving cell to a menacing enlarging ferocious self serving cell! One that eels out certain substance that exemplify the epitome of loss of balance that human body once had! The body and brain and rest of organs lose control of the fat cells and their storage and the rift grow deeper with time, and the bigger the beast the deeper the chasm! To a point of no return? Possibly! Fat is the largest endocrine organ in our bodies, and we have learned that actually over the last couple of decade, as in the days of yore we used to think that the liver is! Yet a lot of burgeoning and now maturing body of literature supports that each fat cell secretes a lot of messengers called ADIPOKINES, one of them is adiponectin, and also hormones most celebrated of which is called LEPTIN for a good reason, it’s supposed to thin us out, but even that function gets disrupted and we develop Leptin Resistance as far likes on and Leptin levels go up incessantly! And simply what used to be a litmus test for our brains to gauge our fat storage, has become dysfunctional and what used to be our friendly hormone has become arguably a part of the problem by enlarge! Fat cells also secrete TNF-Alpha which is called tumor necrosis factor which is implicated in many disease processes and actually targeted by a new generation of medication that are very expensive, and also secretes resisting and others that are beyond the scope of this article!

So it’s clear now we have a diseased fat cell with a very dysfunctional cell machinery that’s ballooned instead of increasing in number by proliferation which could be a much heather storing fat, yet this doesn’t happen these days because we have been eating all the wrong types of unnatural foods, while artificially delicious to our tongues and most satisfying to our palates, yet truly and poignantly unsavory (no pun intended) to our immune, nervous, endocrine, gastrointestinal systems, and the whole body by enlarge.

This where the problem lies, lack of real nutrients in our FAKE & MAKE BELIEVE FOODS that at best can be called a FOOD PRODUCT, certainly unworthy of the word FOOD! Examples of nutrients lacking despite arguably sincere yet wasted and unappreciated “Enrichment Processes”

            ⁃ Vitamins

            ⁃ Enzymes

            ⁃ Phytonutrients

            ⁃ Antioxidants

            ⁃ Fibers

            ⁃ Prebiotics

            ⁃ Good bacteria

All of the above while very very lacking in current modern age foods available in most super markets that sell in average 70% processed foods in the US, yet if natural and preferably organic foods are rife and brimming with all of the above, all those ingredients work together to make fat cells fu croon properly and know how to dispose of excess energy with alacrity that no fake food can match!

We have brought on the onslaught of disease like obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, Alzheimer’s, Fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Stomach Ulcers, and last but not least of all a myriad of cancers onto our selves by compromising our foods, which is our most precious asset when it comes to longevity and leading to the healthiest lives we are supposed, designed, and created to have!

Last but not least,

Is LEAN the only way to being healthy?

So do we want to have fat on us or we should have that sought after and ever tantalizing beach body? After examine the evidence by reading books on the matter an example of which is “The Obesity Paradox” by Dr. Lavie, and similar books and literature, one could be slightly overweight because that’s the healthiest weight for them abs if they lose that little over weight their chance of surviving diseases like a heart attack etc could be actually worse! Yet it’s very true that with a BMI above 40+ which indicates severe class III obesity, the highest class, in those people when they lose most of the excess body weight like 70-80% of it they could add 8 years to their longevity! That’s in lat with how much smokers gain in years when they quit that very bad habit!

I hope that I have managed today to take you on a journey with one of our most feared and dreaded cells called FAT CELL!