What the Science says

What the science says

There is a war going on around us, and the health of type 2 diabetics is the battleground. One side will insist that conventional wisdom and orthodox dietetic advice is world best practice. It's the best we can do. Diabetes is a progressive disease in which the symptoms and outcomes become progressively worse.

The other side, my side, challenges the narrative that diabetes will cost us our feet, our eyes, and our lives. We challenge conventional advice to consume large amounts of the carbohydrates that we know to make us sick, and the conventional wisdom of "Calories in, Calories out" - CICO. This is the belief that obesity is due to an imbalance of calories - too many consumed and too few expended.

Healthy Carbohydrates

First, let me be clear, for non-diabetic, non-insulin-resistant people, some carbs may be healthy. But there is a cost. Carbohydrates stimulate the production of insulin in the body. [carbohydrates and blood sugar]

Normally, in healthy individuals, insulin is produced in a pulsatile manner, meaning that some is produced every 3 to 6 minutes. This allows the cells to remain insulin sensitive.

However, when large amounts of carbohydrates are regularly consumed, insulin is produced constantly in order to signal to our cells to store the glucose in the bloodstream. The longer this large amount of insulin of produced, the more resistant our cells become to the signal. For some years, the increase in insulin production and resistance goes unnoticed.

For some of us, we reach a threshold where the cells' resistance to insulin becomes so great that we can no longer effectively control our blood glucose levels. This is usually when we are diagnosed with diabetes. The reality is that by the time we realise we are diabetic, much damage has already been done to our vascular system by insulin itself.

Calories in, Calories out

There is a pervasive belief that the laws of physics dictate that obesity is due to an energy imbalance. Proponents argue that the laws of physics always apply and for people to lose weight they have to reduce their intake of calories to below their expenditure. [caloric balance]

This may seem quite pervasive, and in fact, many can't see any way that this can be wrong.

In opposition to this view, I maintain that the body is a complex biological system with many degrees of homoeostasis that invalidate simple assumptions about its ability to balance itself. Simply put, when the body senses an imbalance in one or more inputs, it works to correct that imbalance - even if there is a metabolic cost. This is why weight loss from calorie reduction alone always slows and eventually, reverses.

What is true?

The perfect (I think) refutation of the CICO hypothesis espoused by dietitians and Jillian Michaels and her "Losers" is the sudden effect of insulin deprivation on the adiposity of T1 diabetics.

Usually, everything remains the same - activity levels don't change. Calories consumed don't change. Nothing changes, except that insulin drops off to zero or nearly zero and weight just falls off. This is usually the first sign that a person has T1 diabetes.

Are we then to believe that there are calories associated with insulin?


If not, then the insulin hypothesis that we espouse is proven!