An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by wdewind on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @02:35PM (#19371479)

Yes, I want to point out that diabetics react differently and really do have to manage insulin, it's the idea that metabolically healthy people also have to that is a red herring. Obesity is not an insulin disorder just because insulin is involved. Diabetes is absolutely an insulin disorder.

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by lawnchair_larry on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @02:52PM (#19371669)

But what causes an insulin disorder? I thought the argument for eating like a diabetic is so you don’t become one.

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by wdewind on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:06PM (#19371803)

You have to be more specific. T1 diabetes is almost entirely genetic, T2 diabetes is almost entirely behavioral. T2 diabetes is caused by eating too many calories. T2 diabetes is reversed by constraining calories, regardless of macronutrient composition.

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by lawnchair_larry on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:32PM (#19372045)

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

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by wdewind on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:59PM (#19372341)

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 saying that inflammation is bad requires a bit more nuance. It's very complicated, which is why Calories In Calories Out is such a powerful simplification. It doesn't tell you everything, but everything fits into that explanation, and if you can figure out how to control calories a ton of other bad things stop happening too.

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by lawnchair_larry on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:10PM (#19373585)

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?

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Re:An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) by wdewind on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:18PM (#19373655)

> 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.

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