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Dietitian Conny Hoek about the effect of carbohydrate restriction
Connie Hoek is a dietitian and sees in her practice that many diseases are caused by the metabolic syndrome. Think of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity. Hoek says in the podcast Healthy Conversation that dietary advice such as carbohydrate restriction, a good eating rhythm and choosing pure products can suppress the metabolic syndrome.
“If you eat something, food travels a long way in your body. In healthy, active people, this process runs in straight lines,” says Hoek in the podcast Gezond Gesprek. “But with metabolic disruption, those lines look more like a tangle of wool. The metabolism is disrupted, with the result that you store belly fat very easily.” Belly fat is the fat in your abdominal cavity, around the organs. It is one of the hallmarks of the metabolic syndrome. Hoek mentions 4 other characteristics: “The good cholesterol – this is the HDL – starts to fall, bad fats in the blood – the so-called triglycerides – start to rise, the fasting blood glucose goes up and the blood pressure rises. If you have 5 characteristics, then you know that you have the metabolic syndrome.”
Belly fat leads to problems
According to Hoek, you can think of fat cells as balloons. If these fat cells grow a lot, they can almost burst. This causes stress in the fat cell. Belly fat is active tissue. A stressed cell is also active. A stressed cell produces inflammatory substances that enter the bloodstream and affect all kinds of systems, which can lead to metabolic problems. This creates a vicious circle.
The role of insulin
Carbohydrates from your diet are converted into glucose in the body and released into the bloodstream. The body therefore measures a rise in glucose in the blood and sends insulin into the blood. Normally, insulin is the hormone that ensures that glucose is transported from the blood to the cells and then served as fuel. Hoek: “Insulin determines where the glucose goes; it’s a steering mechanism.”
If you are metabolically disrupted, it is more difficult for muscle cells, for example, to absorb glucose, but the visceral fat cell remains relatively sensitive to insulin. As a result, you have a forced fat storage, the cells are bursting even more, they are stressed and they produce even more inflammatory substances.
Limit carbohydrates
According to the dietitian, you can try to reverse a metabolic disorder by limiting carbohydrates. “If you eat something with carbohydrates, those carbohydrates are split into glucose particles that enter the bloodstream via the intestines. Insulin is then needed to distribute that glucose among body cells. If you consume a lot of fast carbohydrates, glucose enters your bloodstream very quickly. pancreas, makes extra insulin because your body wants to keep your blood glucose within the range. If you keep repeating that, so if you often eat a lot of fast carbohydrates, you keep stimulating your pancreas. Some people have as much as nine eating moments a day and that is an overload on your metabolic system. What helps is eating less carbohydrates and eating less often so that you have rest between meals. That keeps your system in balance.” After a period of not eating between meals, your body uses the belly fat and the pressure in the stressed fat cells decreases.
Choose pure and unprocessed
The best basis is pure and unprocessed food. Hoek: “Not a strict diet, but a diet in which you adjust your switch in such a way that you use stored fat in your body. So eat less often and choose unprocessed products such as full-fat dairy, nuts, olive oil, a knob of butter, eggs, fish, vegetables and fruit with every meal. With such a complete diet you will also experience that you can easily go without snacks until the next meal.”
According to her, pure and unprocessed is not only fuller and more nourishing, so that you can eat less. There is another advantage. “There are hormone-producing cells in the small intestine. There are different cells at the beginning of the intestine than at the end. Carbohydrates that have been preprocessed by manufacturers quickly reach the small intestine as glucose. Think of white rice or fluff factory bread that you can eat in the small intestine. the supermarket. When cells there signal glucose, insulin production is increased by as much as 70 percent. At the end of the small intestine, the cells also measure whether there is still glucose in that part of the intestine. The hormones that are there at the end, make muscle mass more active, inhibit appetite and thus actually have beneficial effects on the body.So if you eat broad beans and firm, coarse-grained rye bread, which you have to chew well, you ensure that the glucose does not enter the small intestine until later becomes available, so physiologically it can be explained why pure and unprocessed and slow carbohydrates work.”
Would you like to hear in plain language how Conny Hoek in her practice ensures that patients with diabetes get rid of their insulin and see their belly size decrease? Then listen to the podcast below. Then you also hear how a patient, who weighed 150 kg and had been injecting insulin for 25 years, can now be insulin-free.