Is the insulin theory of obesity over? Well I'd say it's over when people with diabetes using exogenous insulin to cover high-carb diets no longer have to worry about weight gain, and not before. But this is interesting research, and it proves if nothing else that Gary Taube's NuSci research initiative wasn't just set up to confirm his every thought.
Kevin Hall discusses his new study
here with Yoni Freedhoff.
This research contradicts two things - one, the metabolic advantage theory of ketogenic weight loss.
It never made sense to me that wasting energy would make it easy to lose weight. That's "run off that coke" type illogic. The only thing that makes obese people lose weight sustainably is the repair of the appestat. The LCHF diet is great for this because without the carbohydrate foods that stimulate cravings, and with a belly full of fat, it's easy to get eating right again.
The second thing it contradicts is Taube's statement - more a guess or rule of thumb than a hypothesis - in GCBC that all weight loss diets that work, work because they restrict carbs and thus lower insulin. This is how a lot of weight loss diets work, but this study shows that, if calories are held even, the rate of weight loss needn't be proportionate to the lowering of insulin in every diet phase.
It also contradicts the idea that a ketogenic diet causes significant muscle loss. This happens at first, to a small amount, then it's reversed. It's not an ongoing problem that results in people wasting away - and these subjects were in a metabolic ward, so very limited in how much exercise they did.
There are two things the study does not do. It's an isocaloric comparison, so there's no test of which diet would have been more likely to cause free-living people to spontaneously eat and move the right amount to normalise weight. And it's not a study of weight gain, so says little about the metabolic and dietary conditions that made the subjects obese in the first place.
It is likely, but not clear from this report, that the subjects had lower insulin levels in both diet phases than they had while gaining weight or at baseline. If that is true, then the insulin hypothesis of obesity is doing just fine, but is in need of a little adjustment.
What's interesting to me is that what this study doees say about LCHF diets confirms two statements in the 1950s and 1960s work of John Yudkin that I've been reading - there is no low carb metabolic advantage, and therefore they can only work as well as they do for weight loss if people spontaneously tend to eat the right amount when eating fat and protein.
Hendersonin mukaan ilman lisätietoja ei voida sanoa, että tutkimus osoittaisi Taubesin insuliinihypoteesin vääräksi.
Se kuitenkin ilmeisesti tuo uutta tietoa koskien karppauksen metabolista etua.
Mutta: Karppaus joka tapauksessa toimii niin kauan kuin karppaavat ihmiset spontaanisti syövät vähemmän kaloreita.
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