As a medically obese person, I’ve struggled with weight loss. None of the diets really made sense, and even though I lost 45 pounds on Atkins, I never understood why, and it bugged me. There were theories, but I hadn’t ever seen a strong study show why the diet actually does work for people.
My current hypothesis with one data point (myself) is that Atkins counting carbs wasn’t right, and that “ketosis” wasn’t the key, but rather it was all about keeping your blood sugar levels steady throughout the day. This happens to mirror Atkins quite well, but with the side effect that you look at glycemic load instead of net carbs.
Today I noticed a news report Factors Other Than Genes Could Cause Obesity, Insulin Study Shows. Reading through it, it shows a strong correlation with what my hypothesis was.
Findings indicate that the faster a cell processes insulin, the more fat it stores.
Other researchers have suggested that certain “fat genes” might be associated with excessive fat storage in cells. However, the Purdue researchers confirmed that these fat genes were expressed, or activated, in all of the cells, yet those cells varied drastically – from nearly zero in some cases to pervasive in others – in how much fat they stored.
Combine this with the existing knowledge of how we regulate insulin in the body: we reduce “simple” carbohydrates by limiting intake of high-glycemic foods.
As I’ve been starting back up my quest of removing high-glycemic foods partly for health and partly for weight loss, I’m happy to see studies coming out lining up with my suspicions about being healthy and losing weight.
This was a point I struggled with as I started becoming more skeptical of things, and more trusting of science and medicine. Where do you draw the line of what to be skeptical about? All along I knew that Atkins worked better for me than a specifically low-calorie diet did, and no one could explain why. If I were to trust established science which hadn’t really researched this as much as you are to led to assume, why didn’t it work for most people (referring to many studies referenced in Rethinking Thin and Good Calories, Bad Calories)?
Anecdotal evidence is some of the worst evidence, and so while I was trusting of my hunches, I’m glad to see scientists investigating this further.
Tags: medicine, science, skepticism
