Propionate

www.healthline.com/nutrition/calcium-propionate#:~:text=Calcium%20propionate%20is%20a%20food,propionate%20is%20safe%20to%20eat. 

What is propionate?  It is a food additive used as a preservative.  In what?  Dairy, baked goods, processed meat, in particular.   Is it safe?  Well, more or less.  It raises insulin levels.  So?  When insulin levels are elevated one is not able to use energy stored in the cells as fat until the levels go down.  "Normal" people, who seem to be a minority anymore, experience elevated insulin levels when eating meals.  The insulin levels stay elevated for maybe an hour and a half.  During that time the body, and the brain, are using the energy from the food that was just eaten for fuel.  Then the insulin levels go down to the level they were before the meal, and the body switches to using fat stores for energy.  This happens for people that are not necessarily fat.  Everyone has body fat, and the purpose is to tide you over between infusion of energy from food.  Therefore, in a perfect world, one eats a meal, uses the food for energy and maybe some fat storage, and then uses the fat stores of the body between meals.   This would happen maybe and hour and a half after eating.  In this perfect world, the person would feel pretty satisfied until the next meal.  

But for those that don't live in the perfect world, insulin levels may not return to the pre meal levels for eight to twelve hours.  After the energy from the last meal is used, this imperfect individual would be getting signals from the metabolism via chemical messengers activated by the brain.  These would be messengers strongly encouraging this screwed up person to eat.  And so, between the eight and twelve hour window from the last meal when insulin levels are, sad to say, abnormally high, the person would need infusions of food every couple of hours to quell the alarms being sent by the brain and metabolism.  Otherwise?  Otherwise they will feel hungry and like their blood sugar is crashing, and cranky and not so good.  But then another meal or snack will cause the cycle to start all over, so there will only be a time when one isn't overproducing insulin during sleep.  Probably the insulin doesn't normalize until sometime the next mornings.  And the person never utilizes fat stores.  

What to do?  Number one, I would say, is the ketogenic diet, since it would cause a much smaller insulin spike with meals.  

 But wait!  Sometimes that doesn't work completely.  Why?  I have puzzled over this.  I am now turning my suspicions toward propionate, for one thing.  What caused me to believe this? 

I have been told that I am allergic to dairy.  Not just lactose intolerant.  That too.  Outright allergic.  It began to cause enough trouble that dairy just had to go.   So for the past year I have cut out dairy.  

But strange magic happened.  With no effort or reduction in calories especially, I began to lose weight, until I had lost more than 30 lbs.  Nice.  Why? I wondered.  

Then anti magic happened.  I didn't regain the weight, but I stopped losing.  About this time I had begun to eat processed meat at meals because it was so easy to prepare.   Even though my calories still didn't increase, the weight loss was over.  Weird.  

Then I happened upon an article (link above) about the use of propionate as a food preservative.  Baked goods have a lot to prevent spoilage.   I was surprised once that two slices of bread that I was testing to see how long it would take them to spoil, looked fresh two months later.  Probably due to propionate.  I have heard people say that a McD hamburger left in a coat pocket was still fresh looking a year later.  Propionate?  Maaaaaybe.  

And what other uses has the food industry found for propionate?  Dairy and processed meat.  That might explain the lose of weight when I quit eating dairy, and the stall in weight loss when I began eating more processed meat.  

That's crazy!   I don't know.  I'm going to restrict processed meat and see what happens.