Real Talk | Fiber

26 Jun Real Talk | Fiber

Dr. Murphy talks about the non-digestible carbohydrates, known as fiber.

We can be hungry, okay, and we can take Phentermine, but how do we combat the times when we don’t have access to it, I guess is what the question is. And there is things we can do to combat the hunger and not really have to worry about the calories. We haven’t discussed this yet, but it is an interesting topic. The difference between digestible and non-digestible carbohydrate. That is a real interesting topic and a lot of people don’t quite understand what that means. And what we’re talking about here is fiber. Fiber is non-digestible carbohydrate. So we’re going to use an example of my BlueJeans. Okay, my BlueJeans come from a plant. That plant’s name is cotton and all cotton and like any plant is one of three things. It’s either a carbohydrate, protein or fat. If you were to take out a thread of my BlueJeans and look at it underneath the microscope to determine what it is, what you will find is my BlueJeans are 100% pure glucose. The same glucose you have floating around your bloodstream. There is no difference, but there’s a problem with this fiber in my BlueJeans, this glucose. It’s in long, tight, complex chains humans cannot digest. The interesting thing is if goats eat my BlueJeans, they can get energy out of them. Their digestive tracts are three times the length of ours. They’re true herbivores. We’re omnivores. They’re true herbivores. With a digestive tract three times the length of ours, the fibers sit in there. The bacteria ferment them, break the bonds of the glucose, release the sugar. They get energy. If we try to eat cotton, well, it goes in like cotton, comes out like cotton. But that is the purest sense of fiber, and pretty much all carbohydrate foods have a certain degree of fiber. If you look up the percentage of fiber in foods, it’s really remarkable. Some foods have so much you didn’t realize it, and I will give you an example of how we can tweak a certain type of food. Raspberries, 40% fiber. That’s a real interesting fact that raspberries would have 40% fiber. How can I use this against my body? Well, I could put raspberries in the freezer, lower the temperature of a raspberry to 25 degrees. It will not freeze because of the carbohydrate, the sugar content in it, but will crunch like a popsicle. But that raspberry that is two calories at 25 degrees will hit my stomach at 25 degrees. I will get one calorie of sugar out of it, but it has to be heated up. So that’s burned off as fuel just from heat generation. The other calorie, that’s non-digestible carbohydrate. That’s going to go right on through me. So theoretically speaking, if you ate 1500 raspberries, you would lose a pound. It is a math problem. It applies to grapes, although grapes don’t have that much fiber in it. Then if you want to look at foods that we can eat that I don’t care about, that have almost 100% fiber content, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, celery, almost 100% fiber content. So when I go to eat at a restaurant, I always get the cucumber salad if they have it. Almost 100% fiber. Cannot really gain weight off cucumber salad. Here’s where it gets crazy. Cucumber salad actually has protein in it. And people are looking at me like, how does cucumbers have protein? It is the seeds. Seeds are protein. So that’s a good source of protein in cucumbers is the seed part. Relatively insignificant part. It’s not unlike a tomato. Tomato is roughly 5% protein because of the seed content. Rest of it’s water and carbohydrate. Not a lot of calories in tomatoes though. So they’re another good source. The skin on a tomato is the fiber component. So we like that idea. But yeah, cucumbers, the matrix of the inside of a cucumber, almost 100% fiber. Eat all the celery you want. Just don’t dip them in peanut butter. So those are foods you can eat during the day to satisfy your hunger urge that I don’t have an issue with. So fruits, but they have to be frozen. Okay, we really can’t freeze an apple or an orange. I hear you can freeze mangoes. They’re not that bad. But freezing fruits, I don’t have issue with those. Anything pickles, you want to pick up a jar of dill pickles, or those of elastic pickles, pickles in general, not a problem. Eat all you want. I don’t care. You can’t gain weight from them because of my blue jeans. They’re the cotton fiber. They’re just going to come out. They’ll be broken down, but not absorbed. It’s really kind of an interesting thing when we speak of fiber, because if you look at what five pounds of dehydrated cucumbers outside the human body, five pounds of pure cane sugar outside the human body, the calories are the same. If you light them on fire, they give off the same energy. That is how we determine calories. But inside the human body, it’s totally different. Sugar, absorbed like a sponge. Fiber, passes completely through you. Non-absorbable. And even some sugars are actually like that. A lot of people don’t know this, but Splenda is what we call an L-isomer of sugar. It’s actually bent a different way. Glucose is a, what they call a D-isomer. Splenda is an L-isomer, so it’s kind of got a crazy bend to it. But it’s a natural occurring sugar. 10% of the sugar in a bag of sugar is actually Splenda. It’s naturally occurring, but it’s non-absorbable. Your body cannot absorb an L-sugar. Doesn’t want it. It rejects it. So it’s a sweetener. It’s natural. It’s produced artificially too. So, but it is a natural occurring sugar and people are like, oh, that stuff causes cancer. All right. All right. Wait a second. How does a sugar that occurs in nature that cannot be absorbed cause cancer? Answer, it can’t. Quit saying it. Okay? It’s not a cancer-causing. So if you want to know if you’re so sweetener that I think is incredibly safe, use Splenda.