Fat people are the fittest?

[peter]

Lets just think about V.'s post above. The daily calorific need's of a mediun sized, resonobly active male are about 2000 calories. This is needed in order to perform the 'work' the body does in moving around, carrying out it's biochemical procesees and keeping the correct balance re the bodies homeostatic mechanisms [temp regulation etc]. If the intake came all in the form of fat [eg say a 1lb block of lard], but the entierity of the lard was metabolised and utilised in the above processees then it's not going to do much harm. [caveat; are there 'waste' breakcown products of the lard that are harmfull {eg cholesterol} that the body stores when they are present in excess rather than excretes - say in the form of arteo-sclerotic plaques].

Say the 2000 calories cane all in the form of protein eg fillet steak. Again - no problem if all the protein is utilised [via conversion in the liver to carbohydrate] and large excesses of protein are not left over to be deaminated into urea - again not such a problem as with shed loads of excess fat - but still not good. [caveat; excess protien can I believe be chanelled into weird biochemical pathways that produce things like acetone and ketone bodies [observable as a sweet smell on the exhaled breath] and medical conditions such as ketosis result].

Lastly if your 2000 calories comes in the form of carbohydrate and you use it all up - bingo, job done. The byproducts here are water and carbon dioxide which you pee and breath out. BUT you cant build bodies with carbs because they can't be convertyed into the 12 or so [?] essential amino acids that we must get from protein in our diet - so no repair, no replacement and no growth.

So this is the form re the various types of food we take in re their food value considered as energy. The problems start by and large not when various food types are utilised - but when they are stored. Excess protien is poorly stored by the body, so is deaminated and excreted as urea BUT if that system becomes overloaded it is diverted into uric acid and stored in the joints and other places where it hurts like hell. Excess fat - well we all know about that, and excess carbohydrate is converted first to glycogen and then when the livers glycogen stores are full up thence into the fat producing pathways. So a calorie is a calorie is a calorie but indeed whence it comes from and wence it goes is a long and tangled story.