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is, that means the government is wrong.
    Guess what? They know they are. That’s why they recently redid the pyramid and removed some of the grain that they want you to eat. But not enough. Not even close. And there’s a reason for that. We’re supposed to have checks and balances in this country, right? Would you like to know who checks on the USDA?
    The USDA.
    That’s right, they answer only to themselves. There’s no balance there, but there sure are plenty of checks—being written to farmers. Since the Great Depression, the US has been paying farmers to grow grain to keep the economy going, because back then it was agriculturally based. But all these years later, we’re still doing it, which means we’re producing huge amounts of grain. We don’t want to let it go to waste, so we’ve found ways to use it in every corner of our lives. Our food, our beverages, even our gas tanks.
    The truth is, it was all pretty harmless when it was just a little extra corn and bread. Our bodies could handle it. But, over time, it’s ended up in everything. Like the Kardashians. And now that we’re flooded with that garbage in such unprecedented quantities, our bodies don’t know what to do with it and so we convert it to fat and store it.
    That’s the simple answer. The more complicated one involves how sugar and grain is immediately converted to glucose once it hits your bloodstream, which triggers the release of insulin, which begins the process of storing the glucose as fat in your cells.
    If that sentence bored you when you read it, don’t feel alone. It bored me to write it. But if you’re interested in learning more, there are plenty of great books out there by scientists and doctors that go into this in detail. Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes is good. So is The Art And Science Of Low Carbohydrate Living by Dr. Stephen Phinney, along with Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Dr. Robert H. Lustig.
    What’s important to understand is that sugars and grains enter your body and are stored as fat. You don’t want that.
    But they give me energy, you might say.
    For a few minutes, yeah, until you crash. You can get all the short-term energy you need from the unprocessed sugar in the fiber of natural fruits and vegetables. The fiber slows down its absorption into your bloodstream, preventing that nasty glucose-insulin spike, giving you all the short-term energy benefits but not the fat-storing downside.
    And if that wasn’t enough reason to hate sugar and grains, they screw you in another way. Hunger. The second they enter your body, your blood sugar spikes, which makes you feel great. You know the feeling. You’ve been there. It’s like a drug. But that spike is followed by a crash and it leaves you jonesing for more.
    In other words, you get hungry.
    So you eat more carbs. Chips, another slice of pizza, one more scoop of ice cream. This triggers another spike, followed by another crash. It’s a vicious cycle, not unlike a cigarette or heroin addiction. And each time this happens, you’re taking your body on an insulin roller coaster and storing more and more fat.
    Speaking of fat, what happens when we eat fat? Does it make us more fat? Seems like it would if we believe the theory that “you are what you eat.” But we know that’s not true. Eating a chicken doesn’t make you grow feathers. That reminds me of another Vinnie-ism.
    The biggest problem with fat is that it’s called fat .
    Just like being out in the cold doesn’t give you a cold, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. We’ve taken the word fat and demonized it to the point that it sounds as bad as the other F-word. Come on, give fat a break! It’s not fat’s fault it’s called fat! So what is it then?
    Energy.
    At least that’s how our body recognizes it. In fact, let’s pretend for a second that we call fat something different. Let’s change the word “fat” to “energy.”