Carbs digest faster than fats.
But is that because carbs take less energy to digest? Or because the body goes into overdrive like a high intensity workout to digest them quicker?
Maybe fats take just as much energy, but that energy is distributed over a longer period of time, making it a less intense “workout” for the body to digest it.
Curious, thanks!
It’s not really clear what you mean by energy to digest. If you are talking about the bioavailability of the calories, so how many of the calories you are ingesting will be burned for energy or stored as fat, then it depends much more on what you are actually eating. Eating pure macronutrients is not very common, yes you could drink pure oil or pure sugar water and that would have the most bioavailable calories. Getting calories from nuts and beans (mixture of carbs, fats, and proteins) would provide less calories to the body than is contained in the food, because it is more complex to digest and some components will pass through you undigested.
Conversely, if you mean more “how quickly can the body convert the calories into energy” then the answer is above and beyond carbs. Glucose is the primary energy source for the body and what it is most comfortable burning for energy. Yes you can enter ketosis where you burn fat, but this is a more indirect metabolic pathway and will provide energy slower. This is why athletes all favor carbs as a source of energy except for long distance very slow endurance runners, because they are spending energy slow enough that ketosis can provide what they need.
I’m definitely not qualified to answer this extensively but one thing to consider is the effect of high carb diets on insulin sensitivity. Too many carbs will lower insulin sensitivity which is a problem you don’t have with fats.
I don’t know if this is directly relevant to your relatives disease, but carbs and fats are digested at different points in our digestive systems as well.Carbs are the first to begin being digested, as soon as we start chewing. Carbs are broken down by the enzyme amylase, which is present already in our saliva and stomach. Fats are broken down by lipase, an enzyme which doesn’t come into contact with our food until it reaches the duodenum.
So fats take longer to digest however with POTS it gets more complicated.
Higher sodium intake is required.
Low carb diet is definitely required. Carbs has been linked to causing POTS symptoms to get worse.
Smaller meals frequently throughout the day.
Basically fats would be significantly better for her to eat since it won’t cause blood pooling to be more frequent.
So you’ve heard that fats stay longer or take longer to digest right? Why has science advanced that far to know the answer? I don’t know. However I do know that after the Thanksgiving meal I get food coma. I think everyday regular food it does not expend so much energy to digest. Unless you’re overeating a lot.
However absorption is key too. For instance my body can’t handle a lot of oil. So that is an absorption point too. So if I do way more oil then I feel awful and fatigued so I would imagine it takes more energy to try to deal with the overload.