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James, what do you say to Rob Wolff’s column disputing your claims that insulin is anorexigenic? He says you are confusing acute and chronic effects?
http://robbwolf.com/2010/02/04/insulin-anorexic/
According to Dr. Lustig,
http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/2112/dr-robert-lustig-episode/ (1st 15min are all about insulin)
the evidence against insulin is pretty good… not just a traffic cop…
There is actually no evidence against insulin, people lose weight on an hypocaloric diet of candy bars if needed. Insulin make no different and serious isocaloric controlled studies have proved this over and over.
Bull. Type II diabetics will starve to death on a high sugar diet while their fat mass grows.
Mike, I suggest you provide some evidence that type II diabetics will “starve to death while their fat mass grows.”
According to Gary Taubes from Why we get fat and what to do about it in chapter 9 the laws of adiposity. The only reference I cant find is the one by Greenwood, M. R et al, called Adipose tissue metabolism and genetic obesity published in Recent Advances in Obesity Research 1981 which appears to be a book.
I think it might be a bit of a stretch to claim obese rats died from starvation still obese as they were genetically obese rats anyway. would be good to see if there is any more research out there that supports this.
It is really beautiful work I read here. But I can’t find an answer on the question how type 1 diabetics should match their insulin administration to their diet. When administering too much insulin (on a high protein meal) they become hypoglycemic. I really want to understand that mechanism.
James Krieger….you are an absolute certified nutritional badass and an excellent debater! Keep up the great work you kick ass!
Thanks, Matt!
Ahmed, imee, Todd, Fredrik, Jamie, everyone else who I may have missed…thank you for your comments, and I’m glad you are getting value out of these articles. I will try to address some of your individual comments soon.
how does one know is he/she is glucose intolerant?
how does one know if glucose/insulin is matched in a good way to promote muscle vs fat?
how do you test for insulin resistance vs insulin sensitivity?
Mallory; For the first and second question; Visit your doctor, or buy yourself a blood glucose tester. You can find the classifications for resistance vs. sensitivity on Wikipedia.
1) glucose intolerance= prediabetes. test for fasted glucose level. above normal but below diabetic level=glucose intolerance.
3)poor insulin sensitivity=prediabetes. v poor insulin sensitivity=diabetes=insulin resistance. normal insulin sensitivity= no diabetes. so, similarly, test for fasted blood glucose levels. insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance are not completely 2 seperate things
I must say I really liked this article (all of them really). Given me many ideas to writing one of my own 🙂 I wrote an article earlier this year (in norwegian that is) about lowcarbdiets effect on weightloss and reduction of fatmass. Its actually very clear that they dont increase weightloss or reduction i fatmass. The short version is that about 70 % of the studies doesnt show any additional effect compared to traditional lowfat diets. The carbohydratecontent of the diet simply doesnt matter that much when diets er match for energy. If you look at studies that lasted… Read more »
Iben,
This is an excellent compilation of work that you have done here.
Well, now it was just copy-paste from the article 🙂 And a little translation.
You make the common error of conflating efficacy with effectiveness. The majority of the studies you cite describe a low-carb arm which, upon close examination, turns out to be anyting but. Researchers unfamiliar with the nuances of administering carbohydrate restricted diets make common mistakes that reduce compliance. Then, an intention-to-treat analysis is done which tends to wash out the evidence of the diet’s efficacy by including the results of those who were not compliant. Then, what are essentially effectiveness data are interpreted as though they were efficacy data. To understand the efficacy of a low-carb diet you must look at… Read more »
Hey Wortman! Well, I guess it all comes down to your defenition of lowcarb. In the original article I used both the definition of Wilkinson & McCargar (2) and the team of Volek (1). However, excluding the definition of Wilkinson and McCargar stating that a low carbohydrate diet has less than 45 % of the energy consumed from carbohydrates, some of the studies I sited must be excluded. Volek and his coworkers (Feinman, Westman, Wortman (related?), Yancy, Phiney, Mavropoulos, Sharman) define a lowcarb diet as getting 50-150 gram of carbohydrates daily. < 50 gram carbohydrate a day they define as… Read more »
“Yes, insulin inhibits lipolysis, but it only takes small elevations in insulin to do this, and this does not address what happens over a 24-hour period.” When comparing isocaloric diets that stimulate high or low insulin secretion weight loss is the same between groups. “This individual then stated that insulin “makes you hungry because it leads to insulin swings and hypoglycemia a few hours later.” In reality, research has shown that insulin helps to decrease hunger. But, as James mentioned a variety of factors are involved with hunger and appetite regulation. “This critic also states that nobody said that “carbohydrates… Read more »
thought this was interesting i regards to dairy: Nutr Metab (Lond). 2009 Jun 5;6:26. Leucine modulation of mitochondrial mass and oxygen consumption in skeletal muscle cells and adipocytes. Sun X, Zemel MB. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, 37996, USA . mzemel@utk.edu. Abstract ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The effects of dairy on energy metabolism appear to be mediated, in part, by leucine and calcium which regulate both adipocyte and skeletal muscle energy metabolism. We recently demonstrated that leucine and calcitriol regulate fatty acid oxidation in skeletal muscle cells in vitro, with leucine promoting and calcitriol suppressing fatty acid oxidation. Moreover, leucine coordinately regulated… Read more »
This is very interesting material. Speaking as a physicist, however–and I am–I have to say that I’m extremely tired of statements about calories in and calories out as a means of predicting fat gain and loss, and am especially bugged by the refrain that you “can’t trump the laws of physics.” Well, of course you can’t. But people’s descriptions of how calories relates to weight gain, and how weight gain relates to fat gain, tend to be vastly oversimplified. It isn’t just that the human body is more complicated than an engine. Most of the descriptions I read of how… Read more »
David, you are exactly right about the triteness of “calories in = calories out”. People say this as if to imply that every calorie of food either gets converted to body mass or gets converted to energy and expended. But there are several other “ins” and “outs” in the coupled mass and energy balances, including two major outs: (a) what gets excreted as incompletely digested; (b) what is lost in respiration. There is also at least one other “in”: the air that is breathed in, which is a source of oxidation. My experience is that (a) and (b) account for… Read more »
But there are several other “ins” and “outs” in the coupled mass and energy balances, including two major outs: (a) what gets excreted as incompletely digested; (b) what is lost in respiration. The two major “outs” that you mention have been found to not be major outs. First, in regards to excretion, changes in digestive energy absorption only account for very small changes in the energy “in” side of the equation. Fractional energy absorption tends to be fairly consistent in humans at around 95% of ingested energy intake (this paper reviews the literature on this). There are small variations of… Read more »