"How do I gain weight? Let me count the ways."

Okay, so it's not the most ingenious knock off of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous love sonnet, but it is an accurate assessment of last week's and this week's columns.Last week alerted you to the irony of living in a "culture of convenience" where the gizmos and gadgets we create to make our lives easier can also make them unhealthier and you much heavier. The guy who abandons the rake for the leaf blower provides a prime example of how convenience often equates to fewer calories burned immediately and a bigger belly developed eventually.A related concept that is just as troubling is a big part of this week's column. Convenience in the form of easy-to-make or ready-to-eat foods often equates to more calories consumed. The more calories consumed, especially the wrong kind, creates weight gain often to the point of obesity.Yet ironically enough, eating in excess doesn't always mean you receive an excess of nutrients. In fact, many obese people spend a good part of their day hungry.How's that? Convenience foods, the vast majority of fast foods and many if not most! processed foods, are not only convenient for the consumer to prepare but are also convenient for the consumer's digestive system. There's not as much digestion to be done it's been done, in a sense, in the food factory and this ultra-quick digestion of added sugars and unbleached flour causes your blood sugar to spike. Insulin is secreted to solve that by escorting the blood sugar out of the bloodstream and to the muscle cells. But unless you just worked out, your muscle cells probably don't need as much energy as the insulin provides.Insulin, the storage hormone, doesn't rest until its job is done. So the blood sugar gets stored all right stored as body fat.But the problem doesn't end there. When your blood sugar spikes, the pancreas often sends more insulin than what's needed to negate the spike causing too much blood sugar to be taken from the blood stream.The result is now, ironically, a lack of blood sugar soon after an excess of it, and this lack of blood sugar causes you to get the sensation of hunger again. If you eat more processed food to battle that, the process simply repeats itself.The quickly digested, processed food creates an excessive insulin secretion, which creates the storage of blood sugar as fat and the removal of too much blood sugar from the bloodstream, which creates the sensation of hunger again about 90 minutes later, which causes the pattern to replicate 90 minutes later and 90 minutes later and ....Meanwhile, you're getting fatter and fatter and fatter.Dr. Arnold Slype, a pediatric endrocronologist quoted in a Tim Darragh column published by The Morning Call last spring, summed up the situation this way: "It is not only the quality of food that people are eating that predisposes them to obesity but the quality."And the end result of any food processing is a reduction in food quality.Statistics supplied by Slype for Darragh's article reinforce his belief. While working at the Lehigh Valley Health Network, Slype found that 62 percent of the 127 obese patients he questioned claimed to be "always or frequently abnormally hungry," which was more than double the percentage of a group of lower-weight patients.Slype provided a partial explanation for the difference. Highly refined foods don't quell hunger because of what has already been mentioned about the effect of insulin. Slype especially feels eating complex carbs instead of simple carbs a suggestion that you've been reading in this column for 20-plus years is crucial to long-term health and weight control.In a related matter, this spiking of blood sugar that's given as ones of the reasons to avoid consuming processed foods could possibly be triggered by substances specifically created to prevent it.Research published in the September issue of Nature has linked the artificial sweeteners saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame to an increased risk of glucose intolerance in rats. At its best, glucose causes weight gain; at its worst, type 2 diabetes.Because co-author Eran Segal, computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and his colleagues found "very dramatic increases," a follow-up study with seven human volunteers who normally eschew saccharin was performed with only saccharin used as the substance of study over the course of a week. In this instance, four subjects recorded a significant intolerance to glucose, but three did not.This small-scale study and the split result seems to verify something I've claimed in the past: that while artificial sweeteners are usually safe when used in moderation, there will be individuals who react poorly to them in the same manner that certain people react poorly to certain seemingly healthy foods, like peanuts and shellfish.