Search results for "insulin"

Kids Drinking Low-Fat Milk Gain More Weight – Again!

March 20 8:47 in Failed low fat diets, Food for kids, Weight Loss
Low Fat

Big mistake?

Is low-fat milk good for you and your family? Yet another study says no.

The start of the low-fat craze back in the 1980′s perfectly matches up with the start of the obesity epidemic. A coincidence? Probably not.

Low-fat products usually contain more sugar and more starches. If not you’ll probably end up eating more carbs anyway as you’ll be hungrier. This raises the levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin. Study after study prove that low-fat diets are worse for our weight than high-fat low-carb diets. The same is true for kids.

Not surprisingly, a recent Swedish study showed that people using low-fat dairy products end up gaining more weight. Now a new American study shows the same thing. Kids drinking low-fat milk are not only more often obese, they also tend to keep gaining more weight than kids drinking full-fat milk:

LA Times: Low-fat milk doesn’t help toddlers’ weight, study says

When will the disastrous low-fat craze end? How many more kids are going to get obese for no good reason?

What do you think?

23

Lose Weight by Achieving Optimal Ketosis

March 13 15:09 in Insulin, Ketone Measuring, Weight Loss

Do you want to lose weight? Here’s number 14 of my 17 best tips. All of the published tips can be found on the How to Lose Weight page.

Before we get started, here’s a short recap of the tips so far: The first and most crucial piece of advice was to choose a low-carb diet. The next were eating when hungry, eating real food, measuring progress wisely, thinking long-term, avoiding fruit, alcohol and artificial sweeteners, review your medications, stressing less and sleeping more, eating less dairy and nut products, stocking up on vitamins and minerals and finally, exercise.

This is number fourteen:

14. Get into optimal ketosis

Warning: Not recommended for type 1 diabetics, see below.

confused

We’ve now arrived at tip number 14. If you’re still having trouble losing weight, despite following the 13 pieces of advice listed above, it might be a good idea to bring out the heavy artillery: optimal ketosis. Many people stalling at weight plateaus while on a low carb diet have found optimal ketosis helpful. It’s what can melt the fat off once again.

So how does this work? A quick run-through: The first tip was to eat low carb. This is because a low-carb diet lowers your levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin, allowing your fat deposits to shrink and release their stored energy. This tends to cause you to want to consume less calories than you expend – without hunger – and lose weight. Several of the tips mentioned above are about fine-tuning your diet to better this effect.

How do you know you’re getting the maximum hormonal impact from your low-carb diet? You do that by achieving what’s known as “optimal ketosis”.  Continue Reading →

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You’re Seven Feet Tall Because You Eat Too Much

March 9 17:24 in Insulin

Is this man seven feet tall because he eats too much? Did he just forget to count his calories? Hardly. Far more likely he’s got an excess of growth hormone, handing him a possible career as a basketball star.

So why do we assume that people with obesity, people who grow horizontally, just eat too much? They too might have an hormonal issue. Too much fat-storing insulin, perhaps?

Credits

My friend Fred Hahn just posted this picture and argument on his blog. And of course the argument is Gary Taubes 101. Still worth repeating though.

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Yes, a Low-Carb Diet Greatly Lowers Your Insulin

March 3 20:11 in Insulin
Boden-Insulin5

Less carbs, less insulin

Is “eat less and run more” really the only thing you need to know in order to lose weight?

Why is it then that most people lose weight on a LCHF diet, even when eating until satisfied? And this without even any increase in exercise? To think that this should be so controversial!

The best explanation, in a simplified version, looks like this:

Carbohydrates – > insulin – > obesity

Thus more carbohydrates lead to more insulin which leads to more fat accumulation. With more details this can be written as follows:

Too many (bad) carbohydrates – > pathologically high insulin levels – > obesity

What constitutes “too many” varies from person to person depending on sensitivity and activity level (how much carbs you burn). Intensely exercising young men can often tolerate a fair amount of carbs, while heavily overweight older diabetics can only tolerate minimal amounts without problems.

The opposite is the following:

Less carbs – > lower insulin levels – > loss of excess fat

Insulin is a fat storing hormone. And the easiest way to increase your insulin levels is to eat more carbohydrates. The easiest way to lower insulin levels is to eat fewer carbohydrates.

This seems very straight forward. But some are still adamant opponents. Without being able to come up with any better explanation as to why a low-carbohydrate diet works (it does) they still don’t want to accept this explanation. They come up with all kinds of objections. Some don’t even want to recognize the most basic, that carbohydrates increase insulin levels or that a low-carb diet lowers insulin levels.

Their complicated objections don’t matter much in reality. The truth is clear in study after study on humans. Insulin levels are much higher when you eat a lot of carbohydrates and lower on a low-carb diet. The figure above (from Boden et al.) is one example.

Here are some more: Continue Reading →

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Swedish Tabloid Warns of “Low Carb Cancer”

February 23 12:38 in Cancer, The Swedish Revolution
Doctor fears: Fatty foods will give you "LCHF-cancer"

Doctor fears: Fatty foods will give you “LCHF-cancer”

Low-carb and high-fat diets have become extremely popular in Sweden. As many as one Swede in five is said to be on some kind of LCHF diet. Swedes just don’t fear fat like they used to.

But as you can imagine there are still a few old-fashioned fat-fearing “experts” around.

The other day was one of those days. It was once again time for headlines with imaginative warnings about LCHF. I use the word “imaginative” as the alert is, as usual, not based on any study on a LCHF diet. Instead this is about speculation about selected statistics. And of course a physician, who without knowing, ”fears” that LCHF is what is behind an increase in breast cancer rates.

Here’s the translated headline from the Swedish tabloid The Evening Post: Doctor Fears: Fatty Foods Will Give You LCHF-Cancer

Google translated Swedish articles:

A Disproven Theory

Do you get breast cancer from fatty foods? Hardly, this is an outdated belief. Modern, well designed studies have shown that a low-fat diet neither prevents breast cancer nor does it make people with breast cancer any healthier. It’s an old and disproven theory.

There are much better explanations for the statistics. Continue Reading →

10

Does Exercise Promote Weight Loss?

February 22 13:17 in Exercise, Weight Loss

Do you want to lose weight? Here’s part 13 of 17 in a series of blog posts on the subject. You can read them all on the How to Lose Weight page.

confused

13. Exercise

Do you wonder why this weight-loss tip doesn’t show up until number 13 on the list? It’s because few things are so overrated for weight loss as exercise is. Continue Reading →

22

Why Calorie Counting is an Eating Disorder

February 18 19:18 in Calorie Counting, Crazy ways to lose weight, Insulin, Paleo Diets

Calorie counting

Is calorie counting an eating disorder? I think so. When I wrote it quite a few people got upset, including a reader by the name of Brittany. But she gave it some thought – and then she really got the point. In fact, she expresses it more eloquently than I ever could.

Here’s her mail:  Continue Reading →

28

The Cause of Morbid Childhood Obesity

February 17 21:10 in Addiction, Sugar/fructose, The Obesity Epidemic

Why do some kids get really obese? What’s the most common cause? Watch the first three minutes of this documentary and you’ll see an extreme example.

It’s hardly a lack of physical activity. It’s an addiction to processed high-carb junk food. The stuff that skyrockets your fat-storing hormone insulin.

We don’t let our kids get addicted to alcohol. We don’t let them become addicted to smoking. Perhaps we should be equally cautious when it comes to soda and high-carb junk food.

18

Slim is Simple

February 9 10:30 in Weight Loss

Here’s a nice new video called “Slim is Simple” on how to get thin and stay thin. Not surprisingly it’s about the quality of what we eat, and the hormonal effects of it. No specific hormone is mentioned in the video but as always: It’s the insulin, stupid.

The video is produced by Jonathan Bailor and a new non-profit ancestral nutrition education organization that’s also called Slim is Simple. SIS will “provide compelling multimedia resources — free of charge — that the educational and health communities can leverage to share the simple, fun, and proven ancestral nutrition science necessary to stem the obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemics.” Good luck to them!

7

Lose Weight by Cutting Down on Dairy Products and Nuts

February 3 13:21 in Weight Loss

Do you want to lose weight? Here’s part 11 of 17 in a series of blog posts on the subject. You can read the whole series on the How to Lose Weight page. Note that these later parts of the series are primarily meant for people having a hard time losing weight despite doing “everything right”.

snacks

11. Eat less dairy products and nuts

Can one eat as much as one likes, and still lose weight? Yes, it tends to work just fine with a low-carbohydrate diet, as appetite regulation happens effortlessly.

However, despite the fact that a low-carbohydrate diet generally makes it easy to eat just enough, there are foods classified as low carb which become a problem in larger quantities. Continue Reading →

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