#COVID and the Doughnut
Let’s talk doughnuts.
The Original Glazed (OG) Krispy Kreme doughnut contains 190 calories. Calories, by the way, are neither good nor bad. The question is what do they deliver in terms of macronutrients (protein, fats and carbohydrates) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).
Roughly half of the calories in the OG doughnut come from fat and half from carbohydrates. Protein makes up only 5% of the calories. In terms of micronutrients, the OG doughnut doesn’t really provide any of the essential vitamins and minerals we need.
Whatever the nutrient profile, it’s a very tasty doughnut.
But is it too tasty? Is there such a thing as too tasty?
Before answering that, let me tell you about what Dr. Aseem Malhotra recently described as the “Elephant in the Room” when it comes to COVID-19.
Most if not all of the patients who eventually succumb to this disease seem to also be suffering from one or more pre-existing conditions. Among the most common are hypertension (high blood pressure), type II diabetes, heart disease and obesity. What do all of these diseases have in common? They’ve all been linked with hyper-insulinemia, also known as insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome. One study estimated that in the USA only 12 percent of adults are metabolically healthy, meaning that as many as 88% of people could have metabolic syndrome. Countries like India and South Africa are not far behind.
So really we’re talking about one pre-existing condition (with many symptoms) that makes people more likely to get a bad case of COVID. (As an aside, I should mention that smokers also manifest many of the conditions associated with metabolic syndrome, which may be why smokers are also much more likely to have a bad time with this disease.)
That brings us back to Krispy Kreme. Scientists have a term for foods like the OG Doughnut — hyper-palatable. That basically means that they’re too tasty for humans. It’s really hard to overeat broccoli or spinach or eggs or tuna or steak. These real foods are digested in such a way that our body knows when to stop. They’re tasty, but they don’t make us want to keep eating and eating.
The doughnut, on the other hand, seems to exploit certain weaknesses in our biology. From a biological point of view, it makes some sense that we’re designed to overeat certain foods. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors would never have had the kind of food environments that we have today. If they came across a huge stock of calories — a bee hive full of honey or berry bushes in season — it would have been a huge evolutionary advantage to be able to eat all of them. Food the body doesn’t immediately use — carbohydrates like berries and honey especially — gets stored as fat. That fat would have gotten our ancestors through the leaner months when there wasn’t much to eat.
So Krispy Kremes would be an ideal food for us if we were about to go into a hibernation or if we were preparing for a lean season. But is there ever a lean season at the supermarket?
When our entire diet is “doughnutified” we have a serious problem. We are constantly in feast mode — with ready access to calorie dense foods that spike our insulin and our blood sugar — and never really using up the excess stores of fat. Insulin is always high, meaning that we can’t burn our fat (insulin signals to the body to store fat, and you can’t store something and burn it at the same time). And eventually our body — which evolved to have these periods of feast and famine — starts to go haywire.
Insulin is a multi-purpose hormone and one of its purposes is to play a role in our immune system. When it’s out of whack we may be more susceptible to have a bad time with infectious diseases like the flu or a coronavirus. And it’s hard to think of a non-infectious disease — hypertension, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and even some cancers — which can’t be linked back to the doughnut in some way. If you don’t believe me, just do a web search for “insulin resistance” and any chronic disease. Science has been aware of this for a long time.
Because food companies know that we’re susceptible to hyper-palatable foods, they market them incessantly. It’s one reason that companies like Krispy Kreme and McDonalds now have a global footprint. The result is that a huge chunk of the world’s population has a compromised immune system and is therefore at greater risk of complications from COVID.
But there is good news. This is all reversible. And it doesn’t take years or months or even weeks. There are steps you can take today that will strengthen your immune system within a few days.
What are those steps? In terms of nutrition, we can look for clues in the OG doughnut. The doughnut is the opposite of what our diet should be. It’s nutrient poor, meaning it doesn’t have many of the essential amino acids (proteins) or the essential fatty acids (fats) that we need to survive, nor does it have the micronutrients (minerals and vitamins) that we need. And it’s this hyper-palatable combination of fats and carbs which we know we should avoid. Perhaps most importantly, it’s going to cause a big insulin spike which we can measure by testing blood sugar levels.
So as much as possible, we want to be eating the opposite of a doughnut. Instead of nutrient poor foods, we want to eat nutrient dense foods — foods that are high in all the nutrients essential for life. We want to do so in a way that avoids mixing fats and carbs — the doughnut teaches us that that’s a hyper-palatable combination to be avoided. And we want to find a way to do this without big insulin spikes which tend to give us too much blood sugar and then too little blood sugar, making us tired and hungry yet again.
Now at this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: What should I eat? Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) that’s a question only you can answer (though health coaches like myself might be able to help you figure out your own ideal diet). Any restrictive diet (Vegan, South Beach, Keto, Paleo, etc) can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on the needs of the person who’s doing it.
What I can offer are these principles for navigating what for most of us is a highly toxic food environment: a) eat nutrient dense foods, b) avoid the hyper-palatable foods rich in both carbs and fats (let’s just call them junk food, because that’s what they are), and c) trust foods that your grandmother or great-grandmother would have recognized as food. That includes things like eggs, butter, meat and cheese (saturated fat does not clog the arteries) but doesn’t include highly processed cereal bars or “vegetable oils” (corn, soy, sunflower, etc.) even if those products are being marketed as nutritious.
Whew! It can be a bit overwhelming I know. But the toll this disease is taking on our societies does not have to be so heavy. I think it’s important that we all prepare for the possibility that we will be exposed to this virus before there’s a vaccine. And that means taking steps to improve our immune systems. That’s hard enough now, but it will be much harder as our lives begin to return to normal and we’re again exposed to the toxic food environments that set us up for compromising our own immune systems. Environments riddled with doughnuts.
Solidarity,
Sameer.
PS. Why do you think our food environments are so geared towards the hyper-palatable junk foods? This might be something to discuss with your kids, your spouse or your friends. There’s something to be learned from the fact that so many of us are so susceptible to this disease because our immune systems may be compromised by the toxic food environments in which we live.
PPS. For those who need some help getting over their doughnut habit, have no fear. You don’t need to give up everything tasty in the world. There are plenty of alternative recipes out there whether you choose to go the low-carb high-fat route or the high-carb low-fat route.
