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triathlon, but their diet has left them, in some cases, heavier than when they started, in spite of the fact that they’ve expended hundreds of thousands of calories during their training. Usually, they themselves are baffled by their weight gain.
    I can’t begin to tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from amateurs in the middle of training for a triathlon, desperate to know how they can possibly be gaining weight. And when I tell them why, you know how they usually react?
    They don’t believe me, because they’ve spent years being conditioned by magazine ads and commercials to think that they’re doing it the right way. The truth is, our bodies react differently to different kinds of calories, which is why the simple calorie in, calorie out concept is fundamentally flawed. So let’s talk about how your body reacts to calories from sugars and grains, which will help you understand why they’re killing you.

Chapter Five
    THE FOOD PYRAMID SCHEME
    First of all, when I say grains, what am I talking about? Wheat, corn and rice. And not just in their pure form, but in any product where they’re used. Bread, pasta and crackers are just a few of the grain-based foods that are generally thought of as being good for you. They’re also the basis of a million other products that we instinctively know aren’t good for us, like pop-tarts, corn chips and kid’s breakfast cereals.
    And those are just the products that are obvious about it. There are a ton of others that are a lot sneakier.
    Grains are used as fillers in most processed foods, like ready-to-eat microwaveable meals and frozen entrees. Even more insidious is when they’re converted into sugar. Ever wonder what high fructose corn syrup or maltodextrine is? It’s corn that’s been chemically altered to turn it into a sweetener. You’ll find it in candy bars and pasta sauce and most other processed foods.
    And when they can’t get us to chew it any more, they get us to drink it.
    The sugar in soda? In most cases, it’s high fructose corn syrup. Remember those sports drinks we were talking about? Check the labels. I bet you find high fructose corn syrup in a majority of them.
    But what’s really so bad about sugar and grain? Why is a calorie from them different from any other calorie?
    It’s different because your body processes it differently. Since the dawn of man, we were designed to handle protein, fat and natural carbohydrates because that’s what was naturally around us. That’s what the cavemen ate to survive. What they didn’t eat was the crap we have now—processed carbs and sugar. In fact, you want to know why we’re born with a sweet tooth?
    To save our lives.
    Poisonous plants usually have a bitter taste in contrast to the sweet-ish taste of the ones that aren’t deadly. Our natural sweet tooth was designed to be a line of defense to steer us away from the plants that could kill us. But nowadays, if you were to turn a caveman loose in a grocery store, he’d think he was in heaven and eat himself into a diabetic coma without ever realizing he was actually swallowing poison.
    After a couple hundred thousand years of our bodies processing the foods they were designed to process, the last two decades have seen us flood our bodies with carbs and sugar. Will we eventually evolve to be able to deal with that stuff? Maybe, in another hundred thousand years or so. But, for right now, we have a problem. We’re getting fat.
    You want to know what I blame for this?
    The food pyramid!
    You’ve seen this ridiculous thing. Since the early nineties, the USDA has been telling us that the foundation for any nutritious diet is grain, which they show as the base of the pyramid. The whole thing is nothing but a pyramid scheme. They’ve been asking us to buy into this bullshit high-carb lifestyle for decades but it’s now finally collapsing under the weight of all the Americans who’ve gotten fat as a result!
    But that can’t be true, you say. Because if it