A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries

An average consumer good contains tons of sugar by default nowadays. Being a fast carbohydrate, it fools the mind of a human into believing he/she is still hungry and thus needs more. This leads to inadequate glucose overshoots on daily basis.

When the time of insulin comes (approx. 2 hours after food intake), the insulin curve is sharp and overshoots over the peak in response to monstrous amounts of glucose in the blood. Despite clearly peaking, no amount of insulin can cover all previously consumed glucose at this stage, and the rest of it gets transformed into the fat.

> Mystery 8: Diets Don’t Work

As an obese person who tried several times to follow medical advise, this does not surprise me, not at all!

Every diet is about calories and sport, which cannot hurt. But every diet completely misses the elephant in the room: hunger!

Any medical procedure is only worth pursuing if it gives you a higher quality of life in the long term. A constant hunger cannot compensate for any weight loss.

I think there are different goals here which aren't necessarily overlapping. I would support making plant-based meat subtitutes that are so frikking delicious that people want to eat them instead of meat. Not because I'm vegetarian(I'm not) but because it simply makes sense from the point of view of ecological impact of animal farming. The modern western diets where people eat meat 3 times a day are crazy(in my opinion) - we just don't need that much meat.

So from that point of view, yeah, it would be great if at least some people switched to plant based substitutes instead.

Now obviously the problem is that we possibly have the science to make these substitutes so delicious, people will overeat them and in the process make themselves worse than had they just had meat. That is also a concern, absoluteley.

Constant hunger is a hallmark sign of insulin resistance. The good thing is you can actually measure it in HOMA-IR test.

This series of blog posts is a fascinating read into conjectured factors behind the obesity epidemic.

I wish the author had continued their rigor in reasoning throughout the two blog posts. Step by step the author is lured into proving a single factor explains the rise in obesity. That maybe a futile attempt from the outset.

To make an example, the author notes, correctly and to the point,

> "Calories are involved in the math but it’s not as simple as “weight gain = calories in – calories out”."

but then moves on to claim that "X provides evidence against CICO" when in fact the article cites numerous examples where an increase/decrease in calories results in a (short-term) increase/decrease in body weight. So what the author really meant was "X provides evidence against CICO as the single factor".

I'm not an expert in nutrition science but it seems very unlikely that a single factor (sugar! trans-fats! exercise! genetics!) will explain a real-world, highly non-linear phenomenon. I personally find the paragraphs where the interactions of factors are discussed the weakest and least convincing.

That is not to say the article is excellent and hammers home two very important points: Firstly the idea of the lipostat and as a result a short and a long-term time scale ('system') for body weight gain/loss. Secondly that factors relevant on one time scale may not be relevant to the other time scale. And of course that there is still a lot we simply don't understand (yet).