1. I read that they are not fully accepting that obesity is a starvation adaptation because there are so many factors involved that contribute to it.
This is word play and nonsense. The science is pretty clear. The metabolism of the overweight/obese is doing the exact same thing that it would normally do under starvation conditions. For this reason, obesity is not truly a "disease" as nothing is "malfunctioning". It is more of an adaptation than a pathology.
The only factor that tracks linearly as causal for overweight/obesity is blood glucose. Nothing else has and obesity has been studied ad nauseum. For this reason, obesity is a lifestyle condition because multiple lifestyle choices, whether made willingly or not, affect blood glucose regulation. This is why some people can reverse obesity and others cannot. Those that can take control of their blood glucose regulation see reversal and those who don't remain obese. This is also why obesity is so difficult to tackle once diabetes sets in. Diabetics cannot control their blood glucose any longer. If the condition is treated correctly, early enough, they have a better chance at remission through the stabilization of blood glucose.
Be careful of guidelines. They don't follow the science at all. There are many outdated guidelines out there that are still being actively pushed, like lowering of total cholesterol to prevent heart disease, lowering of blood glucose to manage diabetes, lowering of calories to reverse obesity, lowering of all dietary fat for weight loss and vaccinating children against COVID. All of these are just common examples of guidelines that do not follow the current science at all.
So of course you are going to read that obesity is not entirely a starvation adaptation because they still want to hang on to calories even when the science has proven otherwise. They will use fancy tricks to prove their position, like asking "who gets obesity at a concentration camp"? But I have explained all of this in depth in my posts before. It's all BS.
You control obesity by controlling blood glucose regulation and you can do that multiple ways. The most common ways are controlling diet, exercise, chronic conditions, medications, stress (circadian rhythms) and intake of caffeine.
2. Is diabetes truly a "diet disease"? I see so many doctors claiming that they can "cure" diabetes through diet and nothing else is needed. If this is true, what diet would "cure" diabetes?
Diabetes is the end stage of metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a condition triggered by large disparities in blood glucose which affects its proper regulation. The most common culprit for this in modernity is diet. Specifically a high carb diet of which sugar is predominant. That is basically any Western Diet but the Standard American Diet (SAD) is the most cited one. As you can see, though diet can trigger this metabolic abnormality through blood glucose dysregulation, diabetes is not a "diet disease".
Many things affect blood glucose regulation besides diet. Chronic conditions, sex hormones, medications, genetics, aging, stimulants and lack of exercise all affect blood glucose regulation. They not only affect how well you can regulate your blood glucose but most importantly, how long you can sustain its proper regulation. This is why all these things affect what outcomes will be had from treatment.
These online doctors want to focus on diet alone because that's where the money is and they unfortunately, do not even understand what diabetes is. People are much more wiling to listen to someone blame diet than blame blood glucose regulation. Diet is easy and fun and blood glucose regulation sounds complicated and technical. Blood glucose regulation also sounds like something you have little control over and can't be "cured" with a magical pill or by picking out fun "healthy" snacks. Well, your diet is a completely useless pill. At most, it's a placebo. Like I have said many times before, treatments do not work when they are incorrect and/or incomplete. This is why diet interventions alone have been utter failures as treatments for metabolic syndrome/obesity/diabetes.
Having said that, the clue as to what would treat metabolic syndrome/diabetes is right in its definition. God is in the details, not the devil. If metabolic syndrome/diabetes are conditions caused by blood glucose dysregulation, then the best treatment is to eliminate/minimize blood glucose dysregulation. A low carb diet works very well at doing this because it stops the introduction of dietary glucose. Dietary glucose disrupts blood glucose homeostasis. This makes low carb diets a good starting point for reducing the disparities in blood glucose which continue exacerbating the problem.
Then you can also focus on other things that dysregulate blood glucose, like all the ones I listed above, to cause a compounding effect where blood glucose is as controlled as it can possibly be. This can not only prevent metabolic syndrome/diabetes but help put it in remission if you already have it.
3. Is it true that stevia is the only good artificial sweetener (AS)? Some health gurus have been fear mongering now about artificial sweeteners. They don't like any of them. I even heard one of them recommend you can use sugar, in small amounts, instead.
This is precisely why I never follow "diet news" especially from health nuts who have a new book out weekly they are trying to peddle. Diets have been studied ad nauseum and everything we need to know about them, is already known. We also know a lot about food additives, including AS. Artificial sweeteners are well, artificial. You can take from that what you will and that's about all you need to know to make a decision about them.
Artificial sweeteners became popular as more and more people watched their calories and AS are 0 calories (sort of). Then they slowly made another fan base with diabetics as all that calorie watching did nothing to prevent the scourge of diabetes from rearing its ugly head. So both people who watch calories and those who watch their glucose meters use AS liberally. And when I say liberally, I mean on everything. People will sweeten a steak, if they have the opportunity to. Don't believe me? Look at the numerous sweet sauces that can be slathered on everything, including steak.
There are numerous types of AS, some with warnings (saccharin), some with questionable health effects (aspartame/sucralose), some not quite studied enough (stevia) and some cause unpleasant side effects, mostly gastrointestinal (sugar alcohols). Some of these sugar alcohols also convert back into sugar in the body.
I know that a lot of these diet and health nuts find an issue with anything that people enjoy. Their idea of utopia is people flogging themselves constantly over their dinner table. It's almost with a religious fervor that they squash any type of enjoyment you can ever have from what you eat and they take great delight in it. So it was only a matter of time before they went for AS. They saw people had an option now and their job is to take that away immediately. No options. Comply or die. On this blog, I don't care about public shaming parades. I look at every thing through the lens of metabolic health because if you are here reading this, then I suppose that's what you care about as well. You are here to help solve your metabolic issues and I'm here to give you the information that would be most pertinent to accomplishing just that.
Artificial sweeteners do not help your metabolic health. If metabolic syndrome/diabetes are the result of blood glucose dysregulation, then intaking something that interferes with hypothalamic function via the dopamine/serotonin interaction, is not helping. How? Although studies have not proven a definitive correlation between dopamine and blood glucose levels, the answer lies with insulin.
The relationship between insulin and dopamine is fraught with contradictory findings but recent research has indicated that insulin modulates dopamine release in the striatum, which affects brain activity and connectivity. It's been concluded that the striatum plays a pivotal role in regulating glucose metabolism throughout the body. Dopamine has long been known to regulate metabolism, particularly seasonally, and it has been linked to metabolic syndrome/diabetes. But most importantly, we have seen how sugar has caused hypothalamic damage. A damaged hypothalamus can no longer respond to leptin properly so you will be obese forever.
It's believed that the taste of sweet itself is what begins deteriorating metabolic homeostasis through the hypothalamic pathway. After all, taste is metabolic information. It's not just there to make you want to eat, though that's one of its functions but nature is quite efficient. It uses one pathway for many functions rather than having to find many different pathways for each function. The taste of sweet directly affects dopamine as well as other metabolic hormones because sweet taste usually means store fat as winter is coming.
Artificial sweeteners are sweet. In fact, they usually are much more sweeter than sugar. Even with 0 calories, they have done nothing but increase obesity as more people use them quite liberally, on everything, simply because they are "better" than calorie ridden sugar. But the effects on the brain, particularly the part of the brain that's needed for metabolic homeostasis, is basically the same. After all sugar by any other name..... well you know the rest.
As for this idea of recommending the use of sugar "in small amounts", should not be entertained. How well did that work before AS was introduced into the food supply? There has been no established "safe dose" of sugar discovered as of this post. Sugar always affects blood glucose regulation, with individual variability. This means that the amount of sugar which may be benign for one person is not for the other and this changes over time as metabolism changes, age progresses, hormones decline, etc. People need to stay away from sugar, particularly people with metabolic syndrome/diabetes.
Artificial sweeteners are a good alternative. Whether they help or hinder all has to do with the person consuming them. Some can eat like normal people and some simply cannot but staying obese while delaying diabetes (AS) is better than becoming more obese and developing diabetes sooner (sugar).
4. I heard on the news that caffeine is "neuroprotective" and since I have Alzheimer's in my family, I was thinking of drinking expresso, as they suggested. But I have also read your posts which say caffeine is detrimental for diabetes, which I have. What should I do?
Not listen to quacks. The single most important thing you can do for your health is not listen to quackery and daytime TV is full of quackery. This is why people who watch a lot of daytime TV score lower on intelligence tests than those who don't. Now there could be other factors for this. After all, if you have a lot of time to watch daytime TV to begin with, there might be other things going on with you. We can at least say people who watch daytime TV tend to be more misinformed than those who get their news elsewhere.
The reason I bring this is up is because I have seen this "neuroprotective" claim about caffeine make its rounds before. It always pops up every so often. A neurologist is given two minutes to tell you this half true information until they skedaddle him on out so their ads can begin playing. So, let's see where this idea comes from because quackery is usually birthed from truth. In fact, we can say quackery is as its core, bastardized truth.
- Caffeine is a stimulant. It raises blood glucose through adrenal over expression. This rise in blood glucose causes for cells that use glucose to have more access to uptake it. Neurons use glucose. If your neurons are impaired, such as with Alzheimer's, this extra glucose makes it easier for this uptake to occur so it appears as though the neurons are now working better.
- Glucose is an excitotoxin. It excites neurons. Remember the whole insulin nasal spray for Alzheimer's patients which showed an "improvement" in their symptoms? It's the same thing. More insulin, more glucose uptake and so more excited neurons that work harder and better.
There is just one problem. Exciting neurons kills them faster. So this temporary improvement has shown dismal long term results. This is why any neurologist, worth his salt, will tell you to stay away from caffeine if you have migraines. That temporary relief in pain, only causes your symptoms to become worse over time. The best thing a migraine patient can do, is get off caffeine. This will lessen the overall frequency of their migraine attacks.
So when you listen to claims of this sort, please be careful and do further research on your own about what is being claimed. All of this stuff you hear is just click bait to get your attention. This caffeine for Alzheimer's thing slowly became a claim that caffeine can prevent Alzheimer's which is not true. It's like a game of telephone. One person says one thing and as it goes down the line it becomes something else entirely. That's what mainstream news has become. A game of telephone. It puts a seed out there and lets it grow. The problem is that you pay the price.
5. If calories don't matter then why is it that when people "let themselves go" they gain weight? There is no denying that this happens and that's why everyone recommends for you to watch how much you eat, so you don't get fatter.
This is an excellent question and one that is always misunderstood.
The problem with eating ad libitum (letting yourself go) is not due to calories, it's due to blood glucose dysregulation. For instance, if I throw down on a huge serving of food, until I am stuffed, my blood glucose is going to be affected afterwards due to insulin/glucagon ratios. Though food is available for hunter/gatherers, the quantity eaten is always limited due to many factors. We were never designed to starve, but we were also not designed to eat at buffets daily.
Worse yet, if the meal I am stuffing myself with is from the typical Standard American Diet (SAD) menu, then the buffet will be mostly biscuits, pasta and bread rolls. That means I am not only disrupting insulin/glucagon homeostasis, through a huge pile of food, but I am consuming quite a load of dietary glucose to boot. This will further disrupt my blood glucose and affect my insulin for the next 12 - 24 hours. This isn't good because disruption in blood glucose homeostasis causes what? That's right - overweight/obesity/diabetes. So when you begin putting on the pounds, because of this habit, people will automatically assume it was all those calories. Well, it wasn't. It was all that blood glucose dysregulation.
The body can handle its calories but it can't handle disruptions to blood glucose. Not even in the short term. I need for people to understand this. Even in the short term, it's going to become a long term problem.
Eat to satiety. That means you don't leave the table hungry but you don't have to unbutton your pants to do so. This is why buffet style restaurants are never a good idea. Watch your portions through satiety, not because of calories, but because of your blood glucose.
6. I hear that "carnivore" can prevent or "drastically reduce" heart disease from occurring via it's reduction of "inflammatory substances". I totally believe that and am onboard but as someone with current cardiovascular disease (CVD), I am still concerned.
I hear that eating shark fins can make me live to 150. We all hear a lot of things but where is the evidence? I guarantee you found none before you "totally believed" and "got onboard". What if you got onboard the Titanic? People will believe just about anything nowadays and that's sad, considering there's this thing called the internet. All it takes is a little research to debunk the nonsense.
CVD is very complicated and has many causes. I don't know what type of CVD you have. If you believe that CVD is caused by some type of "inflammatory substance" then an anti-inflammatory medication would basically cure you. Unfortunately, NSAIDS have not yet been recognized as the cure for CVD. This means that CVD is much more complex than "inflammation". After all, many things cause inflammation, including arthritis but arthritis is not recognized as a risk factor for CVD. Well, unless it's rheumatoid arthritis, but there are other complexities with that condition.
Now that we have gotten past the nonsense, let's talk about what we do know. Metabolic syndrome is a risk factor for CVD and it's not because of its inflammatory effect though I'm sure that could contribute. It's because of a complex hormonal interplay that interferes with blood pressure regulation and other stress hormones that affect the cardiovascular system as a whole. It's a very complicated process that I will not go into here as I am sure people think I'm pedantically long winded as is.
Metabolic syndrome is caused by improper blood glucose control. Carbohydrates are notorious for interfering in blood glucose homeostasis. Carnivore eliminates all carbs. So carnivore would be beneficial for people with metabolic syndrome. If you can improve your metabolic syndrome, then you would lower your CVD risk. That's it. That's all that carnivore does. No where in that explanation is there a claim for "preventing or drastically reducing" heart disease.
Now the best thing you can do for yourself, is discuss your diet with your doctor. You need to know the results of certain tests, like an advanced lipid panel which measures individual lipoproteins, so that you can figure out what fats would be best for you to use. There are certain genetic profiles that would make the use of saturated fats detrimental for CVD. This means you should be tested regularly when you start your diet to make sure your markers do not take a negative turn. You also have to follow a legitimate carnivore protocol. If you do that, I don't see any issues with you following this type of diet and you shouldn't have any concerns.
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