There is only one extended fasting myth - that it's a viable treatment for obesity. Everything else negative that is said about extended fasting are not myths, they are facts.
An intermittent fasting myth is that these negative effects of extended fasting apply to it as well. Intermittent fasting does not cause the negative effects extended fasting does.
2. It's sugar and carbohydrates that cause heart disease, not cholesterol.
There are many reasons for the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD), as it’s a multifactorial disease. It’s considered a "disease of civilization", because many of the factors involved, in the development of CVD, are directly the result of modernity, such as living longer, being more sedentary and having higher body fat. All of these affect metabolism. Certain metabolic states put you at risk for the development of CVD.
Diet quality is one determiner of your metabolic state. But, sugar and other carbohydrates are not the only culprits in a bad quality diet. Fat is as well. The difference in the fat intake of hunter/gatherers, who have none to low levels of CVD, and Westernized humans, who have high levels of CVD, is primarily in the type of fat and how it's eaten.
- Hunter/gatherers eat the saturated animal fat that comes along with protein. They do not consume isolated and/or refined plant fats, such as "oils".
- Hunter/gatherers do not add fat to their food. They do not cook with fat, nor add fatty sauces or other condiments to their meals. Food is cooked over an open fire or pit, so no isolated cooking fats are required.
The bottom line is that there is no one "cause" for CVD. There are only causes. Be leery of anyone making claims that any one thing is the culprit for such a complex disease, such as CVD. If there was only one cause for CVD, across the board, it would have been eradicated a long time ago, just like smallpox. But, CVD is more of a "syndrome" than a disease, as it manifests differently in different people and has multiple contributing causes.
3. Carbohydrates are not fat, so they don't contribute to body fat.
Carbohydrate is turned into palmitoleic acid, through denovo lipogenesis. This has been found to be true irrespective of caloric amounts, in high carbohydrate diets, particularly in people who have insulin resistance. Some people make more of this fat than others, so there is a genetic component to fatty acid management that also comes into play.
Palmitoleic acid is the main fatty acid that contributes to cardiovascular disease (CVD) and predicts metabolic syndrome. The production of this fatty acid is most responsive to carbohydrate consumption and tends to drop significantly when carbohydrates are reduced to less than 50 grams a day. This is why a typical low fat/high carb diet is not necessarily "low fat" at all. The saturated fat is being produced endogenously, instead of being consumed as fat in the diet.
As long as the fat being consumed is not being stored, this is not the case for low carb diets.
4. Are retinopathy and neuropathy the consequences of high blood glucose?
Chronically high blood glucose damages tissues vascularly. In other words, the excess glucose molecules are like shards of glass, which begin shredding the microvascular system and eventually this leads to organ malfunction, as tissues are unable to supply themselves with sufficient oxygen due to impaired blood flow. Though this occurs peripherally, the damage spreads and eventually the entire organ fails. This can be described as a result of glucose toxicity and why some doctors believe diabetes is primarily a vascular disease.
But, conditions like retinopathy, neuropathy and kidney damage are oftentimes detected long before glucose reaches very high levels. In fact, most diabetics experience these pathologies while maintaining "controlled" blood glucose. While this supposedly "controlled" blood glucose range is not considered normal or low, it is also not high enough to cause such extensive damage to tissues. There are people with certain genetic conditions, which cause them to always run blood glucose in a hyperglycemic range, but yet they never experience these "diabetic" pathologies. This means that something else is causing this damage to Type II diabetics besides high blood glucose. Usually this is where insulin toxicity comes in.
Insulin toxicity is described as chronic insulin action on tissues, producing damaging inflammation. Even though this is a fact of hyperinsulinemia, it is still not the exact cause of damage, as there are certain genetic conditions that cause chronically, higher than normal, insulin levels and no damage to organs and/or tissues occurs. So, what's really going on? What makes diabetes different? Why is there damage with diabetes and not with isolated high insulin or high blood glucose?
Retinas, nerve cells and kidney cells all have one thing in common - they are dependent on glucose. Red blood cells do not even contain mitochondria, so they cannot use fat for fuel, at all. People who have had chronic high insulin, for years, due to abnormalities in blood glucose regulation, develop insulin resistance in various tissues, in order to slow down the cells glucose uptake. This protective mechanism is actually detrimental for cells that primarily use glucose. Insulin resistance technically starves them, causing them to malfunction. So, all of this damage is not the result of high glucose or high insulin, they are the result of insulin malfunction caused by high glucose and high insulin. In other words, pathological insulin resistance of glucose dependent cells.
Lowering your glucose and insulin oftentimes results in glucose dependent cells to suffer further. This is why nasal insulin sprays have been shown to improve cognitive function in patients with certain dementias. The extra insulin is facilitating better glucose entry into glucose dependent cells, which have become diseased. This is why I always say that lowering glucose and insulin will not necessarily resolve the problem. There are certain effects caused by hormones, like insulin, that aren't necessarily reversed by its absence. This is because insulin is a type of hormone that causes long term effects in tissues, even when it's absent.
5. Are low carb diets very easy?
Obesity advice should prepare people for facing the Herculean effort of a complete lifestyle change, instead of trying to create soft cushions for them in excuses and concessions. That's where all the fake food and psycho babble comes in. These are just ways to placate the person into continuing their obesogenic habits, in a new way, but we all know that will not work.
If you ever go to the bookstore, pick up any low carb diet book, and you will see what I mean. Page after page of mock Standard American Diet (SAD) foods, to try and "help you stick to the diet". This isn't going to work. Getting "motivated" with recipes is not enough. Motivation is always fleeting, especially on such a long and difficult road as obtaining normal blood glucose regulation can be. Instead, you need discipline, not motivation. Discipline is when you commit to do something, even if it's difficult, and even when it fails before it works.
On this blog, change is not optional. It's a requirement. I don't make any bones about how difficult obesity is to reverse or how complicated diabetes really is. I want to make sure that everyone is aware of what this journey requires, in order for it to be successful. Excuses don't make you thin, neither do lies. Dedication does. We don't believe in "fat shaming", but we also don't believe in "fat blaming", that's when you blame a million things besides your own actions, on the inability to adhere to your protocol.
You are solely responsible for adhering to your protocol and I am here to explain what causes the ups and downs, along the way, even with strict adherence. What we don't deal with here, is inability to adhere, because that's just a waste of time. We already know what the result of non adherence is - it's not working because your aren't doing it. There really is no new information to provide there.
You will come across the "it's easy" advice many times. Well, it's not easy. If it was, no one would be on this blog. Read through the content in here to get a more realistic view of this lifestyle and what to expect from it.
6. Insulin is a "slimming hormone" because it builds leans muscle mass.
First, insulin is an anabolic hormone. Though anabolic describes growth, you can still consider insulin a "slimming hormone" depending on the context it's being discussed in. For example, the term anabolic used in the context of muscle building, describes a slimming process. Muscle is fat's nemesis. So, if your insulin is growing muscle and not fat, then insulin is very slimming.
The metabolism of the obese is not primed for growing muscle, their insulin only grows fat. So, insulin, in this context, is not a slimming hormone, but it's also not an obesity hormone, as the low carb crowd would like you to think. It's simply a hormone required for both fat growth and muscle growth. Your metabolic state decides which one it's growing more of.
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