The notion is bunk. Complex carbohydrates are broken down to their component glucose molecules in the digestive tract and absorbed as glucose into the bloodstream. The resulting high level of glucose in the blood is what signals the pancreas to produce more insulin, with the purpose of driving excess glucose (i.e., more than about a U.S. teaspoon in the circulating in the blood) into muscle and fat cells to be either metabolised or stored, respectively.
An excess of glucose in the bloodstream (hyperglycaemia) is a dangerous condition, because excess glucose causes damage by producing advanced glycation end-products (AGEās), i.e., damaged proteins that cause further harm. For example, glycated haemoglobin makes red corpuscles far likelier to clot, thus raising the risk of a cardiovascular event (heart attack or stroke). The elevated insulin level, especially when it becomes chronic, is itself damaging in a number of ways (including raising blood pressure and stiffening arteries by interfering with the production of nitric oxide).
These are the reasons that elevated insulin tells the liver to halt gluconeogenesis and ketogenesis, because (a) the body has no need of even more glucose, and (b) we donāt want the body to be metabolising ketone bodies when there is excess glucose to be gotten rid of.
The three macronutrients are by definition protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Micronutrients are by definition vitamins and minerals needed for complete health. By definition, then, a macronutrient cannot contain a micronutrient. They are both components of foods, especially real foods.
Processed foods often lose their micronutrients in processing, although sometimes these micronutrients are added back during manufacturing, a process called āfortification.ā
As I understand it, dietary fat is actually metabolised, not stored (especially when we eat a ketogenic diet, of course). It is the excess carbohydrate we eat that gets converted into triglycerides and stored, at least according to one paper I read.
It is rather difficult to eat ketogenically on a strict vegan diet, and the effort would certainly require dietary supplements (I believe a vegan diet might require supplementation, regardless, Iām not sure). It is easier to eat keto on a regular vegetarian diet, especially if the diet includes eggs, and even more easily if one eats fish, as well. (Some vegetarians consider fish low enough on the food chain to be acceptable, and most eggs sold commercially are unfertilised, so there is no issue of taking a life by eating them; a hen produces eggs regardless of whether she has mated with a cockerel or not.)
Apparently āmeat causes Type II diabetesā is a fairly standard trope in vegan circles. I would be interested in digging deeper into the claimed science and mechanisms. It doesnāt seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Iāve seen vegan activists claim that keto only works because people lose weight (body fat). To which I would reply, āso what - itās an effective way to do that!ā In my understanding, everything that reverses Type II works because it reduces body fat. This includes keto diet, bariatric surgery, fasting, WFPB diet. The more the visceral fat gets consumed, the better.
The only thing is that reversal of Type II occurs much faster than weight loss. For instance, in bariatric surgery, reversal of T2 occurs within a very short time (a week?), but weight loss occurs more slowly.
I think thatās also the way it occurs on keto. HbA1c and other markers plummet, but weight loss can take a while. So, itās not the weight loss.
See this, for instance:
Acute Improvement in Glucose Control
The rapid improvement and resolution of glucose intolerance and T2DM was noted early in the literature among patients who underwent gastric bypass.11 These improvements were noted to occur before the onset of significant weight loss; therefore, factors other than simple weight loss were needed to explain this phenomenon.23,51 One study that documented the time course of improvement of insulin resistance after RYGB found that it improved within six days of the operation, and the improvement lasted throughout the 12-month study period.4 Several theories have been put forth to explain these findings, including calorie restriction, hormonal changes, and exclusion of the upper gastrointestinal tract.
Hmm, good point. I wonder if itās due to a withdrawal of the āstressā associated with carb metabolism. That seems to be the main common ground between bariatric surgery (leading to enforced fasting of several days because your digestive tract has just been surgically scrambled) and going keto (āfastingā with respect to carb only).
Dr. Fung and others ask why should you āmakeā yourself fast via bariatric surgery when you can try fasting first. Makes sense to me.
Thatās what I mean by sly fox, if you take the eggs and throw a bunch of refined sugar on top it (what Bernard purposely does not mention) then the eggs can be bad for you but the choline (lecithin) in the eggs is going to reverse visceral fat and thus reverse the diabetes?
āā¦As it turns out, saturated fats increase the choline requirement a bit more than PUFAs do. Take a look at the results of this 1957 paper that tested the effect of butter and corn oil on the choline requirement (15):
Youāre right. I think sometimes people speak/write imprecisely about this stuff (not referring to anybody in this thread, just speaking generally).
Sometimes people refer to a carb-heavy food as a carb, but itās not. Itās a whole food that happens to contain mostly carbs. Rice isnāt āa carbā.
You also see it in restaurants where they do things like āmake your own bowlā: choose your protein (tofu, beef, chicken, shrimp). Even though, again, none of these things are āa proteinā, they are all whole foods that contain varying mixes of the three macronutrients, with a higher level of protein than the other ingredients. Of course, my pedantry wonāt help sell burrito bowls even if itās technically more accurate ā¦
If I were more of a conspiracist, Iād suspect the plant-based industry loves this blurring of the lines because it makes people think of tofu as identical to and interchangeable with meat.
Asians have been eating rice for perhaps thousands of years? Rice is a complex carbohydrate (even domesticated rice), if you start mixing that with simple carbohydrates (refined sugars and foods) then that is where the metabolic dysregulation comes in and then confusion and hysteria then ensues and then the the rice gets demonized?
No, PUFAs. If you donāt believe me, eat nothing but rice for a month. No oils save maybe butter if you like that. That is, eat butter laden rice for a month.
Then switch the butter with soybean oil. Eat soybean oil laden rice for that month.
You cannot escape the amount of PUFAās you consume no matter what you do (you may think you are?), you also have the necessary enzymes to break it down.
If your talking about a partially hydrogenated PUFA then you cannot (trans fatty acids) break it down.
If your talking a fully hydrogenated PUFA which is an attempt to artificially turn it into a saturated fat, you wonāt (trans fatty acids) break that down either.
Just add lots of sugar to any of the above long-term and you will soon have diabetes.
Yeah, but I am not much on board with how the mainstream assumes on that topic.
I know people who had this surgery, ālostā their diabetes, but eventually gained back weightā¦ and diabetes. But obviously a piece of their gut is still missing. So it isnāt the missing-portions-of-digestive-tract that ācureā diabetes.
I was bedridden until I had heart surgery (for a birth defect), and I had reached the point where I reacted with intolerance to nearly every food except about 3, which resulted in me eating carbs in a big way (Iād been keto before). By the time surgery arrived, I had resumed the serious blood sugar swings that Iād left behind with keto long before. And I reacted hugely (for me that means massive asthma, bloating) to nearly all foods, but of course all the primaries I did a little bit even prior to that era, like wheat or rice.
And then I had open heart surgery. And got sent to a recovery center for a couple weeks which was only slightly better ā or maybe the same ā as hospital food. And I discovered there and for the next nearly year that I had zero blood sugar issues and I had zero gluten/grain reactive intolerance issues.
It was like somehow heart surgery magically cured me of everything ā or rather, at least, cured the immune response to some things, and seemed to āmore harshly regulateā other things like the blood.
I could not eat keto due to massive diuretics required at that point (too low a water table for the needed force-drop) and I was so delighted to be able to eat normally again after years so sick (and keto prior) I was on the see-food diet for awhile.
And then eventually it came back ā the same intolerance reactions, the same blood sugar swings, and so on.
I eventually suspected that this is currently being misunderstood.
Let me give an analogy. Right now Iām intolerant to grains (except corn and oats). I eat zero of them generally as a result, not even tiny amounts āinā something. If I get accidentally glutenād as I call it, like I am unaware there is some trace amount in a food Iāve eaten, I know it when I wake up the next morning, and even what it was. If itās rice, I think Iām gonna die. I canāt even move to get out of bed for a bit. I whine and moan and whimper and wail. Itās immense pain in what feels like every one of maybe hundreds of thousands of lymph nodes throughout my body. Massive bloating and my lower back is killing me. Itās intense. By end of the day, though, itās over.
Wheat has the same initial effect except only about 1/3 the degree of it ā bad but not THAT bad. But then it will continue as lung flegm/asthma for days before I finally cough it out. Suffice to say, eating a tiny bit of the stuff when I havenāt been doing so, means my immune system is at full strength, and itās like the bloody 5th Regiment marched in and destroyed me in the night.
But if I am choosing for some insane reason to eat it, I have learned: I have to eat a LOT of it. Not just a bite, not just a serving. Just completely overload if Iām going to do it at all. The next morning, I merely feel āpretty crappy.ā I do have the lung follow-on from wheat. But my immune system is overwhelmed. Maybe it feels like it has less power because itās had to spread itself thin in some way, I have no idea, but I think of it like a little army inside me thanks to how it feels.
I think heart surgery temporarily ācuredā my gluten intolerance and my blood sugar issues ā for quite some time, at least six months ā because of the shock to the body of the surgery. I think it went into some kind of lock-down to the basics as a process ā minimal āflexibility in reactionā to the variance of experience, just the basics on rote assembly line.
Since then Iāve talked with someone who had a major gut injury and was hospitalized, sewn up and was ok, and they described the same sudden cessation of a whole list of common medical things related to basically, food processing and immune response, for them for a long time, literally from one day to the next, at the point of the injury.
So I think itās possible that gastric bypass ācuresā diabetes because of the massive shock to the system especially in the torso. And eventually as healing is finally resolvingā¦ unless they have actually done an end-run around it by eating so much better that, while its behavior and symptoms were in remission, they actually resolved their diabetes the normal way via eating changeā¦ unless they did that, it (and the fat) is likely to return.
Obviously I could be wrong. But if people re-develop what it allegedly cured, then it didnāt cure it, it merely suspended it, or the bodyās reaction/immune response to it. Maybe because it had other priorities.
When one has no torso-trauma involved, the body āflexibly respondsā to intake. Eating keto or fasting can radically change all kinds of markers so fast.
I would be interested to see if the trauma element is genuinely part of that, but I wouldnāt want to subject animals to the experiment. Still, if there turned out to be something more specific (in-torso trauma is rather generic) ā that did not require massive trauma but could someday just be triggered on purpose ā this could go a long way toward saving lives without having to cut out pieces of gut or saw open your chestā¦ and it could be done intentionally for some other higher-needs, like say helping reduce immune response after organ transplant or something.
Gastric bypass surgery for patients with type two diabetes, in most cases, is either remitted or relapses within five years, researchers from the Group Health Research Institute reported in the journal Obesity Surgery .
The authors explained that after gastric bypass surgery, diabetes symptoms may disappear for some patients - in many cases before they lose a lot of weight. Does this mean, therefore, that gastric bypass surgery is a ācureā for diabetes? Not necessarily, they wrote, after gathering and analyzing data from the largest community-based study that looked at the long-term outcomes after bariatric surgery among diabetes patients.
For two thirds of the participants in the study, their diabetes initially disappeared after gastric surgery - however, symptoms returned within five years among one third of them. They added the proportion of patients whose diabetes never went away after surgery, and found that 56% had no long-lasting diabetes remission.
Surprisingly testosterone levels skyrocket to mind boggling levels on carnivore even more so than supporting production with supplements.
Dr. Baker makes me laugh he now has this saying ācarnivore is a species appropriate dietāā¦lol
I also notice some of the other Doctors he interviews are resistant starch meat eaters like myself and also eat fermented grains or breads and varieties of organ meats and sea life.
This might be unrelated, but I had an offbeat experience this morning. Yesterday I was experimenting with making a keto breaded chicken chunks, a couple different ways. Over the course of about 5 hours I ate two chicken breastsā¦ which might not seem like much, but they were huge (even with 15% subtracted for injection), and my ingredients for the crisp coating included pork rinds, and the second experiment included some mozzarella. Not counting a protein drink Iād had in the morning, I managed to eat about 300g of protein, which is more than Iāve ever had in a single day in my life Iām pretty sure. I felt crappily overstuffed until 3am, serves me right LOL. I just wasnāt paying attention to quantity and was suckered into it being all about that creole-seasoned coatingā¦
So seemingly unrelated, I have fibroids in my uterus like a ton of women my age (mid 50s). My doc says when my hormones crash with menopause (which Iām early into) theyāll deflate and no need to worry about them. Itās like an irregular, very heavy solid softball just behind (and a little to the left for the main swelling) of my belly button. This grows and shrinks (weight not just volume) with hormonal cycles, I have learned, and I ignore it.
Today, from this morning, that was larger and heavier than it has ever beenā¦ ever. The rest of my gut was unhappy just because it was being the rhino in a closet, taking up too much space, giving too much pressure due to its weight. (This reminds me of when I discovered I was pregnant at 7 months along, age 30, because the baby kicked me and turned over. I nearly fainted. Then I told my husband, āHoneyā¦ either Iām pregnant, or an alienās gonna eat its way out of me any moment.ā) It grew to a whole new level overnight.
I have spent this entire day thinking that maybe the massive protein dose yesterday (~331g pro <20 ecc ~130g fat) has created some big āhormonal bolusā in me that sparked this.
Then I see your comment on testosterone on carnivore which is surely pretty high protein yeah? ā so maybe there is something to this.
All those things (heavy fibroids, hormonal bolus) are probably referred to in the literature as estrogen dominance.
Strange thing about the adrenal medulla above the kidneys in both males and females is that it resembles the composition of the male testicles which also produce progesterone, testosterone androgen, estrogens; estriol, estrodiol and esterone from progesterone, just like the adrenal glands but the pituitary gland also produces the same hormones as well as the gut microbiome. It is like the pituitary gland is always on stand by ready secrete a mixture of hormones to secrete along with the adrenal gland (HPA-Axis) if it senses there is not enough hormone and the same with the gut microbiome.
Complex and vast subject this may be Iām thinking when you only eat protein, fat and 0 carbohydrates and animal protein or even plant proteins and fats or sterols, that the adrenals are going to produce more progesterone to manufacture more of the hormones needed for survival (testosterone) irregardless of biological sex.
The key to this is a vegan diet without bread , pasta ,potatoes essentially no high starch food, and of course no sugar.
It isnāt fun, or sustainable but do it a 3-4 days and you will be burning fat. If you a burning fat it is generating ketones
