Confused by the Big Fat Truth

[eric]

After listening to episode 71 “The Salt Fix” I watched an episode of the Big Fat Truth (the biggest loser contestant one as mentioned in the episode). It really confused me. They had these people eating pasta and other grains; definitely NOT low carb. Yet the show said that the participants had their diabetes reversed. This seems to fly in the face of everything I have been learning here about how diet affects the body. How can a person reverse diabetes on a high carb diet?

The biggest loser also made similar claims but they severly calorie restrict. This episode of the Big Fat Truth claimed that they are not doing the caloriy restriction and crazy workouts that the biggest loser prescribed.

[djindy]

Years ago when first testing out a nutritional ketogenic diet, I did a bit of research into other diets, including radically different (or even opposite) ones, like the Starch Diet.

Interestingly, among the various diets I found a lot of similar, sometimes essentially the same arguments in favor of them and reported outcomes (historical/evolutionary arguments, people now not dying of diseases, etc). All seemed to agree on a few things, but particularly that the middle ground Standard American Diet seemed to be just terrible one way or the other.

I just ended up finding the science, evidence and arguments for the ketogenic diet more convincing, and also felt it was an easier route to avoiding sugar anyway (which at that time I was convinced was a problem more than I was convinced of anything else), since then, a lot more evidence has pointed to the flaws of the other findings and support a ketogenic diet, but I’ll admit I haven’t kept as up to date on the research and arguments in favor of other diets.

I do still hold the impression though that there are multiple ways to properly construct a diet that may be radically different and still all yield pretty good results, at least for some amount of time (there is evidence of over time certain ones having various unexpected disadvantages for some people, like weakening of bones, for instance). But, the rules seem to shift depending on what you are working with.

The understanding of Insulin relating to Type 2 Diabetes seems pretty solid to me though, as does reducing carbs to reduce insulin. However, even with a high carb diet I’d speculate some may reduce insulin, or improve the use of insulin, by eating ‘better carbs’ perhaps (rice has a lot less fructose and other problems than, say, wheat, for instance) or otherwise setting an environment where perhaps the body is more efficiently moving everything through the system (a raw potato diet where that is the only thing someone eats, for instance, as mentioned on the show a couple times).
This is to say, an improvement may be made as opposed to what a person was previously eating (a bunch of sucrose and fructose?), and that may be enough, at least for some.

[richard]

I do still hold the impression though that there are multiple ways to properly construct a diet that may be radically different and still all yield pretty good results

Yup. Diets with deficiencies will eventually show up as disease. But you can go on a diet almost the polar opposite from keto - like the Kempener rice diet, which is just unsalted rice and fruit (as much as you can eat) and you can see diabetes reverse. And we’ve known this since the 1940s.

BTW: The mechanism for action of the Kempener diet is that it drives insulin high enough to inhibit fat release from fat cells and then the absence of fat in circulation attenuates insulin production. That then sets us a 3rd feedback system. Where glucose burners use varying insulin production to control glucose, ketogenic dieters use on demand glucose manufacture, ride dieters use the a trickle of fat from fat cells to control insulin and that to control glucose.

The problem of course is that it’s a very strict diet and any deviation will totally blow up the glucose and insulin in your circulation - so Dr Kempener used to bull whip his patients to make them stay on the diet. In court records he claimed they asked him to do that … strangely there is no record of that ever happening.

Any diet that restricts calories will slowly draw down body fat (although if insulin is high you won’t get much of that from fat cells). If you can reduce the ectopic fat in your pancreas, which can be as little as 1g of fat, you can reverse insulin resistance in the pancreas. So the biggest loser type diets do appear to reverse the high glucose that is diagnosed as diabetes, but it steals the metabolic rate to do it which not only makes the process pretty awful to go through, it results in a significant weight boomerang and over correction.

[Chris_W]

which is just unsalted rice and fruit (as much as you can eat)

And white sugar, too, IIRC. If keto is a ‘hack’ then that’s just crack.