It's not as easy to consume excess calories with fats/protein as it is with simple carbs. These are quickly processed, spike your blood sugar, cause insulin overload, which in turns lowers your blood sugar to the point where you're hungry again.

Fats/protein take longer to process and are more satiating. That's not to say you couldn't consume 5,000 calories of them in one sitting, but you wouldn't be hungry again any time soon.

Protein spikes your insulin just as much as carbs do. A steak will raise your insulin levels more than a plate of spaghetti.

Whole carbs with the fiber intact can be quite satiating. Most of the problems people attribute to carbs really only pertain to refined carbs.

Either I'm built different than other people (and so is the other commentator) or this is wrong. I used a blood glucose monitor to see how my body actually reacted to what I ate. Besides, even if true, it doesn't matter. What most people seem to misunderstand is that the body simply doesn't react the same in ketosis. On keto I could eat a meal and my insulin levels didn't change much, unlike off keto where it is s constant up and down no matter what I eat. In other words in ketosis the spike if I eat an apple is way less than if not in ketosis.

Edit since I can't reply to the reply:

>the idea that carbs = fat

That is the most stupid thing I have ever heard. No-one eating keto have ever said that or they would only eat candy.

And yes you can look it up but insulin level index is only like 1/10 of the story. The fact is still that if a vegan eat an apple the blood spike is higher than if someone in ketosis does. Higher spike = hungry faster, which is the whole point of keto. 1 calorie from non-fat != 1 calorie from fat.

You can look it up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index

Beef is above even white pasta. Your blood glucose and insulin levels are two different things.

The healthiest populations in the world eat a lot of (untefined) carbs so the idea that carbs = fat is simple and appealing but also wrong.

A single number sampled after a two-hour period doesn't paint the whole picture.

If you eat a bowl of rice this likely will happen: Your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released. If after a while your blood sugar is still elevated, another dose of insulin is released which can push your blood sugar below baseline and to the point where "hunger" is triggered.

If you eat the caloric equivalent of that in the form of a steak, your blood sugar stays more or less constant.

How exactly this plays out depends on your insulin sensitivity. It may be different for highly insulin sensitive people, but empirically it is true for me and probably for most people, otherwise "sugar crash" wouldn't be a word.

Of course, you probably won't eat just a bowl of rice except for experiment, adding some fat and protein can greatly mitigate the effect.

> The healthiest populations in the world eat a lot of (untefined) carbs so the idea that carbs = fat is simple and appealing but also wrong.

The "healthiest" populations also are outliers in many other respects. I'm not making an argument that a high-fat diet is healthy or unhealthy. I'm saying that fat, protein and carbohydrates are quite different in how they are experienced from a dietary perspective, regardless of caloric equivalence.

White rice maybe. Eat whole carbs like most humans have for most of human history and you will be fine.

What do you consider "whole carb" then? Whole grain bread or potatoes have a comparable or higher insulin index, and even if the glycemic index may be lower, the glycemic load is the same.

Really what you need to do in order to avoid this effect is to add fat and protein into your meal.

As for what "most humans ate for most of history", it's not really clear-cut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_human_diet

Adding protein is just making things worse. If you want to control glycemic response then what you want is more fiber:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3001740/

Add some veggies to your meal.

This is definitely not my experience as measured with a continuous blood glucose monitor. I repeatedly and reliably got a much lower excursion from a steak than from pasta. There is a lot of idiosyncrasy in these responses but my pattern is the usual. This chart is typical:

https://i0.wp.com/www.gestationaldiabetes.co.uk/wp-content/u...

T1D here who has a CGM, this is not true for me at all. Without _enough_ insulin on board spaghetti would start spiking my blood sugar ~20 minutes after consumption and the sky is the limit. With something like steak I could basically skip injecting insulin beforehand, but would need to inject later to deal with the delayed rise. The rise from protein in general is never anywhere near as drastic as from carbs, even the "healthy" carbs.

This can be measured scientifically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index

Note that insulin level and blood sugar level are two independent things.

Sorry are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?

That Wikipedia article doesn't seem to cite very many studies. At least from my own perspective I can tell you that even after two hours of eating many kinds of meals your blood sugar can rise and you will need insulin to counteract that, either produced by the body itself or injected.

As an aside I would really like to know where the two hour postbrandial measuring for blood glucose levels etc. comes from as it feels completely arbitrary.

> Protein spikes your insulin just as much as carbs do. A steak will raise your insulin levels more than a plate of spaghetti.

Maybe on paper, but it's not the same effect. If I eat a steak, my blood sugar doesn't go up and then way down, it stays constant. I'm not going to be hungry soon afterwards.

> Most of the problems people attribute to carbs really only pertain to refined carbs.

I did explicitly refer to "simple carbs" and "excess consumption".

protein is 4 calories per gram (same as carbs). Fibre content has a big effect on satiety.

Fat is 9 calories per gram. Fat is incredibly easy to over-consume by the very nature of it being more calorically dense and having very little fibre.

Nobody who has ever been on a high-fat diet will corroborate this. You can't just compare calories like that.

As for fibre, I disagree that it is satiating. It may make you feel "full", but that is not the same as being satiated. Your body doesn't tell you to "stop eating" just because your stomach is full of matter that it doesn't actually process. Blood sugar plays a role, as do many other things.

If it were any different, diets based around eating lots of high-volume/low-calorie food should "just work", but they just don't.