I think this is one of the dumbest things I have heard in awhile, but it's out there. I hate to break the news, but only laser surgery corrects eye problems. No one magically develops 20/20 vision after being myopic their entire lives, unless they found a really good faith healer. Just make sure your chosen faith healer isn't wearing eyeglasses themselves and neither is any of their congregation.
High blood glucose and the inflammation caused by hyperinsulinemia can be culprits of near/farsightedness. If the person fixes their diet and lowers these two values it may affect their eyesight and they will magically assume that they have been "cured". But it's BS. I used to know a woman who wore eyeglasses, for many years, until she passed out from a blood glucose of over 400 mg/dL. When they put her on insulin, she ditched the eyeglasses. Do you think the prescribed insulin "cured" her eyesight? No. There was never anything wrong with her eyesight to begin with. She just needed to wipe all that glucose off the surface of her eyes and the prescribed insulin helped her do just that.
So, if your eyesight gets "better on low carb", its because you were having symptoms of diabetes, not a true eye issue.
2. Should diabetics track ketones?
No. It's absolutely a waste of time, unless they are monitoring for keto acidosis. On this blog, we do not track ketones, we track results.
3. You will not be set back if you fall off the wagon. Just pick yourself back up again.
When you "fall off the wagon" you are set as far back as when you first started the diet. This is because you obviously aren't taking the diet seriously and you cannot sustain it, in the long term, except by jumping on and off the wagon.
So unfortunately, we do not deal with that type of behavior on this blog. We only recognize those making true lifestyle changes.
But there are many other blogs out there that entertain this and were created specifically for people who do this. You are welcome to go vent there.
4. Is meat inflammatory, even if I feel great eating it?
There is no "inflammatory" anything, including meat. There are only inflammatory states. Some are positive and some are negative. Hyperinsulinemia is a negative inflammatory state. So is obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and autoimmune conditions, just to name a few. Exercise is a positive inflammatory state. So is the inflammation present in an injured or infected area.
Inflammatory states are affected constantly by different external and internal conditions. So basically, if you have a preexisting inflammatory condition, you are pretty much continuously fighting against the effects of different processes, which can flare up your symptoms. There is no universal inflammatory "thing". It's inflammatory to you, if it aggravates your preexisting condition. The inflammatory response is between you and your disease, not between you and a specific thing.
5. Do Type II diabetics need to take insulin to control their blood glucose?
I hear this often because a lot of sick people go to low carb pages and groups, where they are told that they can control their blood glucose through their diet alone and that is false. It is not only false, it is a very dangerous claim to make.
The vast majority of diabetics will have to use a combination of diet and medications in order to take back control of their blood glucose. With time, medications can be reduced or eliminated, but that is not going to be the case for everyone.
It all depends on:
- How far their condition has progressed.
- How strictly they adhere to their diet.
- What other lifestyle changes they are willing to make and remain consistent with. (e.g.: exercise)
- How much body fat they can lose.
All of those depend on:
- Age
- Gender
- Hormonal status (e.g.: menopause, premenopause, andropause)
- Pre-existing/comorbid conditions (e.g.: thyroid disease, autoimmune disease) Current metabolic status (e.g.: diabetes)
- Mindset (e.g.: commitment and consistency)
You can see now why remission is so difficult to achieve for many people. That's a laundry list of things that can potentially go wrong. Remission is a gift that not everyone gets to open.
For this reason, some diabetics must continue to take insulin and/or other glucose lowering medications, even after the implementation of an appropriate diet, since they simply cannot keep their blood glucose under control. Their metabolism has succumbed to its pathological state and they no longer produce enough insulin to stop the catabolic counter regulation that continues breaking down their lean body mass, and everything they eat, into glucose at an uncontrolled rate. This further deteriorates blood glucose control and insulin function.
This lets us know, that insulin is still effective for lowering their blood glucose, on some level. Even though many of their organs and tissues are rejecting insulin, others are still responding to it, but pharmacological doses are required to achieve this proper response. The control of glucagon is one of those processes that requires large amounts of insulin, in order to work properly, and the more insulin is given, the more of it will be needed with time. This is because diabetes and other metabolic issues are conditions of adaptation. This is why taking control of diet is so important, in order to reverse this adaptation and hopefully lower insulin requirements, until they are no longer needed.
So, if you cannot control your blood glucose through diet alone, you will have to continue taking your medications and use diet as a lever. Eventually, you might be able to get off your medications.
6. If you incorporate boiled potatoes to your low carb meals, it might trigger weight loss.
If you are leptin sensitive, and have been following a low carb diet for a prolonged period of time, introducing carbs in the form of starch can ramp up weight loss, breaking a stall or your maintenance.
Potatoes simply cause a rise in blood glucose. This rise is not pathological for people who are metabolically stable, but it is enough to signal to the body that there is plenty of nutrients available. The temporary decrease in ketones and rise in insulin, in response to this rise in blood glucose, is a strong signal to the body to burn body fat, as there is plenty of food available to do so. Leptin expression is stimulated and body fat is the targeted fuel. The body recognizes that there is no need to store anything, as the presence of glucose is a strong indicator of nutrient availability.
It is this very mechanism that has driven a lot of weight loss protocols to focus on starch and make claims such as "Potatoes for weight loss!" or "Eat starch, become slim!". These claims are true, to a certain extent. The person simply must be aware of the true mechanism behind the weight loss, which is the stimulation of leptin, not that starch is a magic pill. The last thing a person wants to do is believe that the starch itself is causing the weight loss, as this can cause an excess of starch consumption and the person will begin seeing diminished gains, as they stimulate leptin at the expense of insulin. Soon leptin will under express in response to insulin over expression.
Manipulating leptin through diet is very difficult to do and quite a balancing act. For this reason, there are no "leptin diets", as leptin responds directly to nutrient availability and indirectly to macronutrient composition. All of the benefits of leptin are completely dependent on your leptin sensitivity, so not everyone will respond the same way.
Another potential issue with this is that people tend to "carb creep". This means that they no longer just stick to adding potatoes to their meals, they begin adding all sorts of other crap to it as well, like bread, oats, rice or sweets. People like to take the good effects of one thing and run with it, until these effects top off and begin going in the opposite direction.
So, be careful and make sure you are targeting the mechanism you want, which is leptin enhancement, and not targeting your tongue, which just wants french fries.
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