4 ms·

Hey, doc, what about insulin and other hormonal stuff? What harm is it going to be short-term / long-term?

• robchez 16y ago
  +1 on this. This type of diet must be destroying his insulin sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity.
  • carbocation 16y ago
    What's your basis for that line of thinking? He's only consuming 1800 calories spaced evenly throughout the day, so I'd imagine that he'd in no way be coming close to taxing his body's ability to process glucose or produce/respond to insulin.
    • chipsy 16y ago
      The "maximum insulin load" is going to depend on factors beyond calorie count. For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat. Also note that in a single can of Coke, you consume 39g of sugar for 140 calories(source: Wikipedia). Therefore 1800 calories in sugar alone is 501g of sugar. I don't know about you, but I usually do not feel very good if I have more than about 20-30g of "naked" sugar at one time. And this guy's experiment does three things that lower his insulin load substantially so that he probably never crosses that 20-30g boundary: He eats pastries rather than drinking soda, thus he enjoys a nice levelling effect from the oils and doesn't actually get all of his calories from carbs. He eats vegetables for extra fiber. He drinks a protein shake, which induces satiety(and depending on the type of protein, may also slow digestion). If you attempted to reproduce the experiment without these things protecting you, you would probably feel too sick to continue within a week.
      • carbocation 16y ago
        > For example, if you consume a can of Coke, your body is going to try to process the sugar in it all at once. But if you consume a donut with equivalent sugar, the fats and oils in it slow down the digestion process. Thus your maximum insulin load(which is the largest immediate factor in creation of fat tissue) will be lower with donuts. Fruit achieves a similar load-lowering quality through fiber instead of fat. You have an understandable and common misconception of glycemic index. You cannot always intuit which foods will have a higher glycemic index. For example, you incorrectly seem to believe that cola has a higher glycemic index than a donut. In fact, donuts have a higher glycemic index than do colas. You should not conflate your subjective feeling of "badness" with the objective measure of circulating insulin or glucose (unless you have rigorously established the correlation, which is not obvious). Subjectively, I feel just as bad when I only eat a donut as when I only drink a coke.
  • niels_olson 16y ago
    see my response.
• niels_olson 16y ago
  1800 calories a day isn't going to be a major challenge to his insulin system, no matter how high the glycemic index, even in the long term. What he might have to deal with is the increased hunger from lack of satiety signal (leptin, et al), which would then require more will power to avoid overeating, a precious commodity. Better to spend under your caloric limit by eating foods with bulk (broccoli, carrots, etc) and some strategic fats (a sprinkle of cheese on your salad, nuts for a snack), thereby maximizing the satiety signal you get for those 1800 calories.