I don't understand Peat's fundamental reason for preferring burning sugar over fat, as I'm reading a lot of conflicting evidence online. Below is the background as to why I'm questioning Peat's tenets:
I'm only 20, and I got a A1C test just a few days saying I have very high blood sugars (far above the threshold for diabetes, but I have no symptoms, which is why I just got a glucose tolerance test done and am waiting for the results) because of the Peat way of eating. Before Peat, my blood glucose was perfectly in range even though I had never experimented with low-carb/low-fat/low-anything my entire life, so I attribute this new problem only to my diet change, which involves eating far more sugar than before.
I want to do my best to understand on a fundamental, scientific level what went wrong instead of doing something rash and emotional like doing a 180 and switching to a low-carb/no-carb diet. Most likely, I'm healthy enough to just go back to eating as I used to eat before Peat for my high sugars to go down, but now that I've seen how Peat's principles worked like nothing else for my mood and my hair, I want to understand his theories in more depth and figure out what I hadn't understood before.
Peat's main suggested benefit related to burning sugar seems to be an increase in CO2, which offers multiple benefits. Is this it? Or is there any other concrete reason? The reasons I read for burning fat seem a lot more compelling.
(1) fundamentally, it makes sense that we are meant to burn fat instead of sugar considering how much more fat we store than sugar (assuming that fat's sole purpose is energy storage and not insulation, which I believe is a reasonable assumption to make)
(2) fat provides much more ATP
(3) I read that burning sugar produces a lot more free-radicals
So what am I not understanding about why burning sugar is better?
I'm only 20, and I got a A1C test just a few days saying I have very high blood sugars (far above the threshold for diabetes, but I have no symptoms, which is why I just got a glucose tolerance test done and am waiting for the results) because of the Peat way of eating. Before Peat, my blood glucose was perfectly in range even though I had never experimented with low-carb/low-fat/low-anything my entire life, so I attribute this new problem only to my diet change, which involves eating far more sugar than before.
I want to do my best to understand on a fundamental, scientific level what went wrong instead of doing something rash and emotional like doing a 180 and switching to a low-carb/no-carb diet. Most likely, I'm healthy enough to just go back to eating as I used to eat before Peat for my high sugars to go down, but now that I've seen how Peat's principles worked like nothing else for my mood and my hair, I want to understand his theories in more depth and figure out what I hadn't understood before.
Peat's main suggested benefit related to burning sugar seems to be an increase in CO2, which offers multiple benefits. Is this it? Or is there any other concrete reason? The reasons I read for burning fat seem a lot more compelling.
(1) fundamentally, it makes sense that we are meant to burn fat instead of sugar considering how much more fat we store than sugar (assuming that fat's sole purpose is energy storage and not insulation, which I believe is a reasonable assumption to make)
(2) fat provides much more ATP
(3) I read that burning sugar produces a lot more free-radicals
So what am I not understanding about why burning sugar is better?
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