Jason Fung’s newest. So far I’m finding it relatively dumbed down and, as is usually the case, exhaustively repetitive. He needs an editor. Nonetheless, he does cover the basic points including hammering home the idea of what he calls a fat thermostat: rather than simple CICO, the effect of various foods (and meal timing, and food matrix, and acidity, and glycemic index and so on) on hormone production, digestion and absorption, and then the effect of those various hormones and immediacy of available nutrition on fat storage vs. energy expenditure.
If you want to believe that you can eat (some) carbohydrates with moderation and intent and still lose weight and keep your insulin under control, this is up your alley. So far I have not come across anything novel, but he does wrap it up nicely for the layman. I have not encountered the word ketone yet, and I assume I won’t.
The thing that I still find infuriatingly muddled is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary processes. “The fat thermostat (that is, the body’s preferred weight set point) will maintain a specific weight of the body by either stimulating hunger, or reducing metabolism.” But satisfying hunger is still something that is voluntarily controllable. It may sincerely suck and be unsustainable in the long run to be hungry but not eat, but this activity will create weight loss. Theoretically. But if you flip this over and say your metabolic rate will drop if your fat thermostat is set high and you are not consuming enough caloric input to maintain your body’s desired weight set point, that’s an entirely different circumstance of entirely involuntary weight gain - in other words, the ‘not eating’ behavior won’t create weight loss. So which is it? He seems to weave in and out between these two concepts as if they’re just two sides of the same coin.
I think what he’s saying is that if you resist your hunger, it still won’t work to reduce your body’s weight set point, because of the metabolic compensation. It’s necessary to reduce the body’s hunger and/or drop in metabolism through hormonal manipulation which is based on the specifics of the food being consumed, not just the caloric value.
I still find his distinctions frustrating. For example when speaking about women and menopause, he says,
“Estrogen reduces appetite, so the lower estrogen during menopause increases appetite. Women eat more, and so tend to gain weight. Perimenopausal weight gain is not about “eating too many calories”.”
Is it just me, or is he basically contradicting himself? The technical result of this “eating more” whether you judge it from a moral standpoint (absurd, like perimenopausal women have simply randomly decided to gorge themselves because it’s enjoyable) or simply a practical one (basically stated right here, lower estrogen = increased hunger), is that They Eat More, which means more calories, which causes weight gain. WTF, Jason.
I wonder if this is really true. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense. One would think it is more important to maintain body weight and a certain level of fat percentage during the childbearing years. So, while estrogen is high, keeping calories up would keep a women in prime health for growing a child. Once we are in menopause with lower estrogen levels, we no longer need to maintain that fat percentage.
I wonder if what really could be the cause of eating more calories during perimenopause is just the fact that women don’t eat enough protein and they end up eating more carbs and just more in general to compensate? That would be more in tune with the protein leverage hypothesis.
Does he talk about insulin? I am of the opinion that that is the one hormone that has the most influence over weight. If a person becomes insulin resistant (which most here have), then hunger, etc. are at the mercy of insulin. No?
I agree, playing with metabolism and giving hunger signs are very different, we have some control over one and not on the other, why to talk about them together?
It seems to me it’s the latter…
Not randomly decided, due to increased appetite. If my appetite is high, I jump food, it’s how things work.
I can resist hunger to a pretty impressive extent now (if I want to) but appetite? That’s zillion times harder.
Or it’s where they mean hunger when they write appetite? As some people have the two synchronized, I never know what they mean…
But whatever of the two is increased, it’s usually an urge to eat so there is a serious chance of eating more. Unless one is smart and compensate with better food or whatever works for them.
I think it’s more complex than insulin. Take GLP-1 agonists, which supposedly do the following:
“GLP-1 agonists help manage blood sugar levels by stimulating the pancreas to release more insulin when blood sugar is high. They also reduce glucagon secretion, which helps lower blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes.”
They cause more insulin to be released, which I assume means they’re adding to insulin resistance. But they decrease hunger through modification of hormones, among other possible mechanisms.
The problem with hormones is that they can drive things like hunger (or no hunger) or fat storage (instead of release). Say your hormones become such (eg, through menopause) that your body wants to store fat instead of burn it. Then you could eat the same amount of calories and still gain weight.
They did a cool study on mice and a GLP-1 agonist. They split mice into two groups. One got the GLP-1 agonist and one did not. They determined how many calories the mice getting the GLP-1 agonist ate, and fed that to the mice not getting the GLP-1 agonist. The mice getting the GLP-1 agonist lost more fat. Gary Taubes said this meant the GLP-1 agonist was causing energy to be released from fat cells. The SAME calories caused two different results in fat loss.
I think insulin and insulin resistance is a factor, but the human body is so complex, there are likely many other factors.
One, that glp-1 agonist group simply eats less, because they’re either nauseated or satiated, and eating less equals losing weight. If both groups are eating the exact same amount, it’s not that.
Two, more confusing. Common wisdom, insulin in the blood moves glucose into the cells for storage as fat. If a glp1 agonist is causing an insulin rise, you would expect it to cause weight gain, not weight loss. So either the understanding of what insulin does is incorrect / incomplete, or the understanding of what a glp-1 agonist is doing is incorrect or incomplete.
Edit: Fung’s big thing is that the body has a weight set point. Assumably meaning a fat set point. His analogy is the manager of a lumber yard. The issue is not how much lumber is being delivered to the yard (that is, how many calories you eat), or how much is being sold and removed (that is, how many calories you burn), it’s the manager’s instructions that dictate how much lumber will be stored at the yard. Of course a vast delivery overage will have to be dealt with, but it’s unlikely to occur in the first place without hunger, a hormonal instruction. There are a large number of different instructions, but insulin is probably the biggest. It’s a bit circuitous. Eating specific foods triggers / doesn’t trigger insulin production, which is the instructions for what to do with the energy. Store it, burn it, or somehow excrete it. And according to Fung, you can’t override those instructions simply by eating less or moving more. Your body will compensate by making you very hungry, or slowing your metabolism.
The reason I’m getting so frustrated with Fung is that he’s throwing the kitchen sink at this. On one hand he’s saying it’s the manager of the lumber yard, it has nothing to do with number of calories and everything to do with hormonal reaction. On the other hand, he’s going in 700 directions at once about how to reduce what boils down to caloric intake, everything from avoiding hyper-palatability to going to bed earlier so you’re not tempted to eat later in the evening. Either plain old calories are an essential part of the equation, or they aren’t. I feel like he’s just rehashing everything I’ve ever read and the bits don’t necessarily add up to anything useful or new .
It’s becoming one of my primary problems with Fung. He asserts things with great and impatient authority, of course we know this, of course we know that, everyone’s an idiot but me, to the point where I’m nodding along, and then suddenly I’m thinking uh, wait, what? At one point during his rambling analogies about thermostats and homeostatic biological process, how our bodies basically manage all sorts of processes from pupil contraction to breathing rate without our intentional interference, and how other animals maintain more or less optimal weight with obviously no calorie counting, he tossed in peeing out glucose if the blood level’s in excess of what we need. Uh, wait, what? WHAT? As far as I know, glucose in urine is a screaming red flag, not a casual homeostatic adjustment to donuts.
We’re on to the troubles with processed and ultra processed foods. Not a big fan of processed food myself, but something suddenly occurred to me. When our cultures shifted from homemade to food that was purchased ready to eat, we shifted all of our social norms. Food prepared in the home comes with expectations. How much you should or shouldn’t eat. How much is your share. When you should be eating or you aren’t supposed to. There are Witnesses, and potentially consequences. Anyone can purchase processed food in any quantity, and eat it however they please. Perhaps the weight shift had less to do with the food content and more to do with the lack of rules. Even if we don’t think we were “disciplined” in terms of food, someone was watching. A family was probably reined in by their social pattern. I think that makes a difference.
Having been overweight since puberty, but having had some scientific training, I knew it couldn’t be a simple equation of Calories In / Calories Out. As a 5’4" female having weighed around 180# for most of my adult life… it made no sense. In order to “get fat” all it would take is 100 extra calories per day (one apple, or a tablespoon of butter), or 50 extra, or 20 extra… to become exponentially fat!
But the vast majority of fat people are not on an exponential trajectory, so it’s unlikely that 5/50/100 extra calories per day is their real issue (right?). There is some other mechanism at work. Call it “set point” or whatever.
Nothing “boils down to caloric intake”.
First off, let’s examine how we even know how many “calories” are in a specific food. I could be wrong, but I remember reading somewhere that these figures came from literally burning food in a lab and measuring the heat output.
YET, our bodies are not the direct analogues of fireplaces. To digest 100 kcal of steak versus digesting 100 kcal of butter or 100 kcal of celery is going to take a different amount of energy from within our own bodies. Our food is infinitely variable, so these are infinitely variable values!
Again, nothing “boils down to caloric intake”.
This whole issue is fascinating so I hope to keep learning more from the Keto/LC community.
