An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) • Hacker News Board

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#81

Post by whiddershins » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #47

enraged_camel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>But they idea that any of these are significantly metabolically different is not at all supported by the science. This doesn't seem correct. IF has statistically significant benefits: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur... (Supporting papers linked at the end)

I'm sorry to just repost my paragraph from above, but I believe I already responded to this: > The IF people (along with the Keto people) use a variety of tricks to try and prove their point. There is absolutely not a single paper showing calorically balanced food intake has clinically significant outcomes. Period, full stop etc. There are tons of papers saying things like if you force people to eat in constrained wi…

I agree with everything you are saying and have mostly come to the same conclusions you have except:

It’s obviously not true that for any given set of calories consumed the body has only one option of what to do with them. It can build muscle, store fat, repair heart walls, excrete it, and so forth.

This is determined by a bunch of factors including hormones. So if hormonal balance or other metabolic behavior is modulated by macro (or micro) nutrient intake, then the calorie emphasis might be overly simplistic.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#82

Post by tapland » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #78

wdewind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. T…

> But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage. So why can't I eat a month's worth of calories in one go and then fast for the rest of the month with water and multivitamins?

You can't fill yourself with that much and if you managed to it won't be absorbed before coming out the other end.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#83

Post by INTPenis » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

I need to give this a good read.

My dad is diabetic and his doctor told him that cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels. It's not in this study though.

He was also told to avoid rice and potatoes. He manages quite well and the doctors are astonished at his low blood sugar measurements every day.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#84

Post by wdewind » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

ebg13 wrote: post #78

wdewind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. T…

> But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage. So why can't I eat a month's worth of calories in one go and then fast for the rest of the month with water and multivitamins?

Yeah, this is actually a great question imo.

So the main problem would be nutrient absorption, and there would be a number of problems that would impact it, from literal surface area of your digestive system, to current bacterial populations etc. etc. These problems matter less in a 24 hour window when you are far less likely to hit the same thresholds eating a reasonable amount of food. But basically, you could not effectively break down and absorb all the nutrients quickly enough, and you would have pretty nasty shits/vomiting.

But, let's say somehow you could, and somehow your body ended up storing a bunch of fat. In general, the second half of your statement is totally doable because the human body absolutely kicks ass at energy storage and expenditure. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-true-story-of-a-man-who-sur...

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#85

Post by lawnchair_larry » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #62

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the other fad diet boogeyman, inflammation? Is there any relevance between that and insulin responses? Or anything else?

It's the same idea: talking about spikes vs average. Calories is what matters. Yes, insulin and inflammation can be linked, but also you wont have excess of either on a calorically controlled diet. Interestingly context can totally reverse the implications here too. For instance: as a weightlifter I want a heavy insulin response and I want a heavy inflammatory response because both of those help build muscle. So even…

I’m more curious from the perspective of someone with a normal BMI. CICO isn’t relevant at that point, as that is a solved problem. It seems like every health blogger has an article for why eating X is bad, where X has exhausted virtually all values.

It sounds like your conclusion is roughly that, sufficient nutrients aside, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference which columns the calories are under, not just in terms of weight management, but general health.

Yet, I struggle to entertain the possibility that the guy eating a lot of pizza and ice cream and candy is going to encounter health problems a lot sooner than someone of the same CICO eating avocados and chicken and broccoli.

Is one just as good as the other? What about skinny people who get heart attacks?

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#86

Post by sodosopa » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:13 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #22

Carbs cause diabetes. https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html

That's Type 2 diabetes, which is misnamed since it's a completely different than Type 1 which honestly affects more people.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#87

Post by wdewind » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #85

wdewind wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same idea: talking about spikes vs average. Calories is what matters. Yes, insulin and inflammation can be linked, but also you wont have excess of either on a calorically controlled diet. Interestingly context can totally reverse the implications here too. For instance: as a weightlifter I want a heavy insulin response and I want a heavy inflammatory response because both of those help build muscle. So even…

I’m more curious from the perspective of someone with a normal BMI. CICO isn’t relevant at that point, as that is a solved problem. It seems like every health blogger has an article for why eating X is bad, where X has exhausted virtually all values. It sounds like your conclusion is roughly that, sufficient nutrients aside, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference which columns the calories are under, not just in te…

> It sounds like your conclusion is roughly that, sufficient nutrients aside, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference which columns the calories are under, not just in terms of weight management, but general health.

My conclusion is that but slightly more conservative: more that science is really hard, and we have not been able to show that macro nutrient composition matters nearly as much as we thought. It may still matter quite a bit, though you'd expect it to be easier to measure if it did, but again science is hard.

> Yet, I struggle to entertain the possibility that the guy eating a lot of pizza and ice cream and candy is going to encounter health problems a lot sooner than someone of the same CICO eating avocados and chicken and broccoli.

I can show you small scale examples of people doing this and not having problems (http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...) but I can't show you a strong epidemiological study that confirms this, unfortunately.

> What about skinny people who get heart attacks?

This does happen, though of course far more rarely. Lots of stuff impacts this (genetics etc.), and I don't know nearly enough about heart attacks to comment, but I will say broadly that one of the worst things you can do for your heart, and most of the rest of your body, is to be fat, and the only way to be fat is to eat excess calories.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#88

Post by wdewind » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

soulbadguy wrote: post #73

wdewind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. T…

> But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage. Any resource to validate this claim. This is just a reformulation of the CICO argument. Saying the body "is good at smoothing this out" is tautological at saying that the distribution of the calories across the time domain (the IF crow) or accros the macro domain ( paleo peps) doesn't matter…

> Any resource to validate this claim.

Most IF studies do not show any metabolic difference, and the ones that do do not control for calories. I'm sorry to shift the burden of proof, but I feel like CICO is the default position and additional nuance requires proof, not the opposite. Also I am lazy.

> Again any claim to this ? Most reference i see have this causation relationship reversed....

Yeah totally, so the claim is not that insulin does not cause damage, it is that where we have recorded that damage is directly to cells in labs, but we have not translated this to epidemiological studies. This is sort of like the Schroedinger's Cat of nutrition: we see these effects in the lab at micro scale, but we don't actually see them translate to real world effects when we look for them at the macro scale. One explanation is that with the same way we see insulin causing damage, we see caloric deficit causing repairs. Maybe these cancel each other out when calories are controlled for? I don't have an explanation, but the key is that we don't observe this stuff on the macro level.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#89

Post by wdewind » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

whiddershins wrote: post #81

wdewind wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to just repost my paragraph from above, but I believe I already responded to this: > The IF people (along with the Keto people) use a variety of tricks to try and prove their point. There is absolutely not a single paper showing calorically balanced food intake has clinically significant outcomes. Period, full stop etc. There are tons of papers saying things like if you force people to eat in constrained wi…

I agree with everything you are saying and have mostly come to the same conclusions you have except: It’s obviously not true that for any given set of calories consumed the body has only one option of what to do with them. It can build muscle, store fat, repair heart walls, excrete it, and so forth. This is determined by a bunch of factors including hormones. So if hormonal balance or other metabolic behavior is modu…

> It’s obviously not true that for any given set of calories consumed the body has only one option of what to do with them. It can build muscle, store fat, repair heart walls, excrete it, and so forth.

Yep, I would not suggest anyone take up a diet of pure sugar, only that if you are trying to use science to set your diet we aren't really confident, at the level of macros, about what makes a difference, but we are very confident about excess calories.

Re: An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

#90

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

JanSt wrote: post #66

JanSt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're eating two large meals, you're still releasing a lot of insulin, you're still doing the same amount of fat storage, you're just timing it differently. If that works for you, great. Yes, but your body won't be able to use it's stored fat in the presence of insulin. If you keep that up long enough, you can only burn calories coming in. If you eat a lot of meals AND a caloric deficit your body needs to decre…

> Right but what happens when you no longer inputting calories and thus no longer have high insulin? Then you start burning the fat again. You can only keep your insulin levels pathologically elevated if you are eating enough to support that over the long term, regardless of when you eat. No, diabetics have an elevated insulin levels for hours after a meal. Like, after 4 hours it's still at the level a non-diabetic p…

[deleted]