1. Low carbers spend most of their time trying to “debunk” veganism, rather than proving their own diet.
This is because vegans and vegetarians are the main competitors in the diet sphere. The last thing these low carb programs need is for obese people to stop buying their books, movies and conference tickets, because they are instead buying vegan books, movies and conference tickets. This is why all of these diet programs are in an elbow war with each other, for access to your wallet.
2. Should you follow a diet that helps you "get fats in"?
You don’t need to get "fats in" your diet. You need to get fat out of your behind.
3. The diabetes epidemic would disappear if people ate low carb/"keto" diets.
That is an extraordinary claim and you know what they say about those,... they require extraordinary evidence. Let's start off by saying that this premise is incorrect, from the get go, because diabetes is not "carbetes". We have known this for a long time.
Many things, besides carbohydrates, contribute to blood glucose abnormalities. We can clearly see this by looking at the hordes of obese people eating “low carb/keto” foods, while barely keeping metabolic markers out of the red, or they’re pants from splitting open.
We simply don’t know what a population with unlimited access to man-made food would have become, if that food was low carb/"keto". My guess is that everyone would still be obese and diabetic, while eating the same processed junk, they do now, “keto style”. You can’t "out carb" a bad diet.
4. Many people have had great success with cardiovascular disease (CVD) treatment by going vegan. For this reason, people with CVD should go vegan.
CVD has a primary genetic cause, with a secondary lifestyle aggravator. This means that if heart disease runs in your family, you are at high risk for lifestyle factors to contribute to the onset of your disease. For example, smoking.
Some people with CVD, or a family history of it, have abnormal lipid profiles. Let me be clear about this, because some people don’t understand what that means. Abnormal lipid profiles are not “high cholesterol”. Rather, abnormal lipids are related to apolipoprotein abnormalities, LDL composition/clearance, amount of remnant cholesterol and oxidized lipoproteins (both LDL and HDL) within the artery. Inflammatory markers and other abnormal conditions (arterial thickening) are also co-morbid factors, in these people, amongst other things. CVD is not as simple as "high cholesterol". If it was, it would have been eradicated decades ago, when the first statins came on the market.
Some people with these lipid abnormalities, see all of their markers improve on plant based/vegan diets. This could be in part, because of a genetic issue in the metabolization of saturated fats, which affects their lipid profile in a negative way. It is unknown if this improvement, in their lipid profiles by going vegan, will achieve long term success in staying CVD free. They could very well just be swapping out one CVD risk (lipid abnormalities) for another (metabolic syndrome). That’s usually the case when you myopically focus on one risk factor, while ignoring the new risk factors posed by the "treatment" itself. This is especially true when the "treatment" must be man-made and artificial, such as is the case with veganism. Veganism is a privilege of the First World and a diet that we did not evolve under, so it's long term effects are up for debate. The "food" vegans eat, wasn't even around during the bulk of our evolutionary history.
So, someone with CVD can try a vegan diet, but keep in mind that they very well could be trading in one risk factor for another and still end up with CVD. Anyone planning on going vegan should do so correctly, by finding a good dietitian that is honest about supplementation and avoiding all sugar. Vegans will not be able to avoid grains, because they cannot get enough calories to survive without them. For this reason, they will have to go on some form of caloric restriction to make sure they aren't eating grain to excess. They must watch their metabolic markers closely, as metabolic abnormalities are a risk factor for developing CVD. They should never try to go "high fat vegan". It’s never a good idea to mix a high carb diet alongside high fat. Fat intake should be kept low, even if it’s from so-called "healthy sources" (olive, avocado oil). Remember every time one thing is treated, 20 others are affected, so other markers should not be ignored, while focusing solely on CVD.
5. "Keto carnivore" is a good diet.
"Keto carnivore" is a marketing term.
6. Diabetes cannot be "metabolic adaptation to starvation" because an excess of calories prevents the body from going into a "starvation mode" and diabetes is caused by an excess of calories.
This is a great statement, always made people who are ignorant on what diabetes truly is, and the response is very counterintuitive. This means that you have to view obesity through an entirely different lens, than the one used by the failed diet industry and conventional medicine.
Diet programs and conventional medicine, outside of obesity research circles, view obesity/diabetes (diabesity) through the caloric centric (calories in/calories out) model (CICO). The caloric model makes sense, is simple and it's practical to use. In other words, it's highly marketable to a large group of people. This is because diet programs and conventional medicine are all aware that there is no cure for obesity and treatments are very complicated and mostly unsustainable for the majority of people. So, the recommendation is to tweak calories in the hopes of stopping further weight gain, even if no significant loss or "cure" is ever achieved.
It's perfectly reasonable to assume that if you eat too much (caloric surplus) you gain weight. And, this is absolutely correct. Eating more or less, absolutely effects weight. But, this effect is only minimal and for the short term. This is because calories, alone, cannot affect metabolism, profoundly enough, for a significant long term effect to occur, as this requires normalization of blood glucose and a change in body composition, which calories does not address. This is why diabesity cannot be cured or reversed through caloric restriction. This is also why someone can lose weight and "pseudo improve" their diabesity, only to find it slowly return after some time. The body does not have a linear relationship with calories. It only has this relationship with blood glucose. Blood glucose is the only signal it cares about and like I mentioned above, calories do have an effect on blood glucose, but not enough. When you consume incorrect macronutrient combinations, the body's blood glucose regulation is effected, irrespective of calories.
Blood glucose regulation is vitally important for maintaining metabolic health, as this is the way the body is aware of its nutrient status and regulates its metabolism. Glucose has a much more profound effect on hormones than calories. In other words, you can cause detrimental disparities of highs and lows in blood glucose, irrespective of caloric intake. We know this from isocaloric studies using various macronutrient combinations and seeing their impact on metabolism.
If you drive blood glucose too high after eating, then too much insulin will be released in response, to help clear it from the bloodstream and into cells. The effect of too much insulin release is too much clearance of blood glucose, causing blood glucose to now drop too low during fasting. It doesn't drop to a hypoglycemic range. It only drops from the very high postprandial range. In other words, dropping blood glucose from 200 mg/dL, after a meal, to 120 mg/dL, three hours later, is detrimental to metabolic function. The large disparity between these two numbers is abnormal. When you then throw in the overnight fast, which might drop blood glucose further down, into the 70 mg/dL range or lower, you've got a problem on your hands.
The body develops an adverse reaction to lower blood glucose, in order to stop this roller coaster, as it likes maintaining a tight range in blood glucose. If this large, up and down, in blood glucose occurs often enough, the body begins to kick in an anti-starvation mechanism in response to the falling blood glucose in order to prevent it. This is called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome helps maintain blood glucose, chronically high, so that it never drops. This mechanism causes the body to break itself down, to create more glucose, in order to maintain it high all of the time. In turn, this causes further insulin stimulation, which disrupts the function and pulsatile release of other hormones. A cascade of abnormalities are now in motion, ranging from the fat cell, to the brain and all the tissues in between. This response sets blood glucose, insulin and body fat set points to high. In other words, pseudo starvation.
Certain tissues of the body develop an adverse reaction to the presence of insulin, in order to prevent insulin from facilitating more glucose entry into their cells. But, metabolic function continues to be set to starvation and it fights the resistance by ramping up counter regulatory hormones to produce even more blood glucose, not less. You are now adapted to starvation and have multiple complex mechanisms, that have kicked in, to prevent it.
This is why it's very difficult to "starve" someone with diabesity and they don't respond well to fasting or caloric restriction. Their bodies actually fight these interventions and instead doubles down on its metabolic malfunction. These folks are already in chronic anti-starvation mode. Starvation mode causes for the fat mass to become highly insulin sensitive, in order to keep growing and protect the body from starving. At the same time other organs and tissues become insulin resistant, in order to stop the intake of glucose, which has gotten to toxic levels within the cell. The body now lives for its fat mass, at the expense of everything else, as that is its main protection from starvation. In fact, if the obese person where to be truly starved, like in a concentration camp, they will die of malnutrition and electrolyte imbalances because a pound is lost.
At the diabesity stage, the different systems in the body are no longer communicating effectively. Blood glucose doesn't seem to be communicating with insulin; leptin is no longer communicating to the brain; incretin hormones are not communicating with satiety and metabolism is running amuck. It has adapted to a state of very high glucose and so it lives only for the sole purpose of acquiring more of it, as it has no alternative fuel it can efficiently use. Fat is mostly locked in the fat cells and unavailable in any significantly useful amount, regardless of how much of it is circulating in the blood. It's just going right back into the fat mass, unused. Glucose is the priority. This causes the person with diabesity to marinate in fat and glucose at the expense of their lean muscle mass, which is constantly being broken down for more glucose, helping to maintain a body composition that further promotes dysfunction.
So, the person who has lost all of his fat mass and lean muscle mass, as is the case for a concentration camp victim, is obviously starving. The person who is obese, with excess fat mass, is also "starving", but it's not so obvious. The same mechanisms are taking place in both people. The difference is that the concentration camp person has zero nutrient availability to prevent starvation and the obese person uses any nutrient availability to prevent starvation.
This is why the best way to resolve this is to stop the tsunami of fat and glucose, which are not being used, and up protein intake, which isn't stored, so this vicious cycle has a chance to stop.
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