I'm in a similar situation to what you were, 300+ but perfect A1C and fasting insulins.
I didn't eat my way to this on fat and protein though, it was through abusing carbohydrates. Through in a very unhealthy serving seed oils and you have a recipe for disaster. I'm NOW controlling insulin and glucose through limiting carbohydrates.
My best theory on why the weight stubbornly remains is the lack of consistent exercise and also the lack of the correct exercise. I just recently began replacing one meal with a Keto Chow shake, with extra cream because I'm only eating twice a day, and also adding in 4 actual shots of HWC to get more fat in. I like protein a lot you see and I can eat the crap out of it. This has helped me lower the amount of protein I'm eating.
The other part I'm adding are full effort "sprints". I'm starting with 2 full effort motions for 15 seconds a night and plan on working my way up to 6. This is an effort to reduce the visceral fat stores that were built from abusing carbohydrates and over eating seed oils. There's enough evidence to convince me that having large amounts of visceral fats=death.
Current plan is using a Bowflex M3 thingy I bought for the wife as an expensive coat hanger for the max effort cardio and using the X3 resistance bands I bought for myself to look at apparently to place the greatest load I can in the shortest amount of time on the muscles. While still being somewhat safe.
Haha I see you've been listening to Sean O'Mara ;)
Keto Chow didn't work for me, which is really weird because HWC does! Maybe it's all the whey in it? Just made me insanely hungry.. but good luck and keep me updated on how it works!
On Oceania: Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (aka the cluster on the left) are all Melanesian, a group almost completely genetically & culturally distinct from the Polynesians (and related Micronesians) that populate the rest of Oceania.
Within countries that have both populations, like New Zealand or French-controlled New Caledonia, Poly/Micronesians are much more obese than Melanesians or Europeans.
Interesting. What about the diabetes rates? From the clustering it seems like these places are way less obese, but only slightly less diabetic.
So it could be similar to the China vs. US thing where they're just as genetically likely to get diabetes, but way less likely to get obese, even under similar circumstances like food intake and lifestyle.
Yeah, could certainly be, I don't know about the diabetes rate but will look into it. Have been in research phase of writing a post about the Pacific island obesity crisis for a while now
Nope, rather the other side of the world actually. Just have an interest in the obesity crisis (like all of us out here, I guess), saw that these countries were the fattest in the world, and I figured that would be a good place to start looking for clues. Been reading up on the area for a while now, but of course there's always that "what if I missed something" that makes you keep researching instead of just posting the damn article.
Haha yea that's the thing with "data driven"... there's an infinite amount of data. Maybe they're wearing the wrong color socks. You need to already have a hypothesis/mechanism in mind to even collect the appropriate data.
My money is on "least amount of time to adapt to whatever is the factor (probably seed oils)" and now very high % of their food containing the factor. I do think these hyper obese cultures had a crazy swing from basically ancestral hunter/fisher/gatherer/tuber food supply to all-processed-food in 1 generation or less.
Whereas most countries in the West took 2-3 generations to make the same change. So they basically leapfrogged us.
Different people store fat differently and it is visceral fat (compared to subcataneous) that is most tied to insulin resistance. Not surprisingly, race/genetics are related to how people store fat. This is generally what people (at least those who know a thing or two) mean when they talk about BMI being a "racist" measure. Many white people tend to get metabolic and cardiovascular consequences from obesity at a higher BMI than many other races.
AFAIK they even have different BMI numbers for Asian people, probably because of this. I think it's 5 points lower for the same level, so obesity begins at 25, not 30.
That's not the case in the data you use here, right? Along with controlling for ancestry, it's probably really important to control for age, older populations are generally going to be more obese and more diabetic.
The "old age == more obese" thing is actually somewhat recent, not sure it's always the case. It was the opposite (people lost a bit of muscle and their BMI trended slightly down) in the late 1800s in the US at least.
Jun 16, 2023·edited Jun 16, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
"Old age == more fat" is a pretty old thing. I'd love to see what data you are referencing from the 1800s. I would guess that back then, because people weren't very fat, you saw a bigger decrease in weight in old age because sarcopenia.
Also, type 2 diabetes has been, I'm pretty sure, always correlated with age.
Looking at the data you used in this post, it appears to simply say that 30 BMI is obese, and it doesn't take ethnicity into account.
So interesting....Im a new reader and trying to tie this all together. I'm reading a book called The Missing Link in Dementia by Jo Dixon/2020. It's all about thiamine deficiency-the second half is better than the first...and how having a gut bug can stop your body from uptaking thiamine even at high doses. Because Thiamine helps you process sugar so without it ingesting sugar becomes toxic. Other things can block the thiamine receptor including fluoride. Some antibiotics (ie:Bactrim and Cipro-these are the 2 I took that had a negative affect on my health) have fluoride. As a liver doctor-she put it all together when her health failed. She solved it starting with IV thiamine to bypass her gut. This would make sense with your experience being keto- that without sugar, thiamine deficient people can do okay. Any thoughts? There's also an enzyme that eats up thiamine-so there can be dual issues.
Huh interesting. Yea the body is insanely complex. Honestly no clue if I have thiamine uptake issues, but I did start taking a B complex that includes thiamine a while ago.
Jun 10, 2023·edited Jun 10, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I'm still reading over this, it's been a long and exciting day with more to come. For now, some notes.
Diabetes mellitus (sugar diabetes) isn't a disease of excess or opulence. Some people like to assign blame (not that I think you are, of course), but that's not really helpful in treating it. And, treatment is the key word. What surprises you about Libya having such a high incidence of diabetes cases doesn't surprise me -- their healthcare system has been rocked again and again, and helping people manage chronic conditions is secondary to lifesaving treatments.
Insulin resistant diabetes, or Type 2, is a problem with how well the body responds to the hormone insulin. Type 1 diabetes happens when the body stops responding altogether, for one reason or another. Without insulin, we don't process glucose, so it collects in the blood until it runs rampant. Alright, cool, baseline set and basics out of the way.
Type 2 diabetes can "graduate" to Type 1 if the body stops responding to it entirely, or if the pancreas fails. Whatever type it is, careful management is required if someone is going to survive, let alone have a decent quality of life. The worse a state that the local healthcare apparatus is, the harder it is to treat diabetics, who need regular routine care, including eye care (my field). Without it, the excess sugar destroys the body from inside the vascular system, and many of its attempts to negotiate the problem cause more issues. There's only one thing that diabetes has historically helped the body do, so far as I know, which is not a long list.
Edit: I forgot an important point! The diabetes-obesity connection. Mammalian bodies are made of cells, and cells need glucose (or ketones) to keep the lights on. The more of a body there is, the more insulin is needed to keep the power running because those cells need it to process glucose. Like you've pointed out with calories, it's an accounting issue.
This is already long, I'm getting back to the article. In case I forget to come back to this, keep it up! I love what you do.
Edit: I think it's a manifold issue. The correlation between diabetes and obesity is real. Again, it comes down to accounting. Eating sugars and carby foods that break down into sugars forces the body to use it, lose it, or store it. We are made to survive, so we store what we don't use and use the "lose it" option as little as possible. The American Diet of Freedom (tm) is very carby, more as you move lower down the strata of income brackets.
An important part of such an analysis as yours is that you can't really cut out this or that piece of data without just cause for those decisions. Maybe places like Nauru are reliant on the same foods that we Americans eat but their healthcare system is not up to what we would consider par. Other countries don't have the same level of health reporting that we do, and others still probably have better standard for healthcare reporting (I would guess Europe very well might).
I would instead say to try this kind of analysis on a smaller part of globe. Look at the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico, with another data set that includes outlying places like Guam that we control. Fun fact, assuming I'm remembering correctly: Guam is 1/8 United States veterans and active duty service members.
Yeah I started reading this and felt confused given that the two types of diabetes are so distinct on the backend. Some few people with Type 1 diabetes have so little of the type 2 symptoms that they can compete in the Tour de France.
I think the statistics for countries combine both, but I'd wager that almost all cases (99%?) of diabetes in high-diabetes country are T2D. Almost nobody gets T1D from environmental issues, I think, at least not like we see increases in T2D and obesity.
Being an autoimmune disease, there probably are environmental issues causing T1D (infectious triggers, hygiene hypothesis, etc), and there have been increases in the percent of people with T1D.
T1D is much less common than T2D, so you're probably fine with your plots.
I'm in a similar situation to what you were, 300+ but perfect A1C and fasting insulins.
I didn't eat my way to this on fat and protein though, it was through abusing carbohydrates. Through in a very unhealthy serving seed oils and you have a recipe for disaster. I'm NOW controlling insulin and glucose through limiting carbohydrates.
My best theory on why the weight stubbornly remains is the lack of consistent exercise and also the lack of the correct exercise. I just recently began replacing one meal with a Keto Chow shake, with extra cream because I'm only eating twice a day, and also adding in 4 actual shots of HWC to get more fat in. I like protein a lot you see and I can eat the crap out of it. This has helped me lower the amount of protein I'm eating.
The other part I'm adding are full effort "sprints". I'm starting with 2 full effort motions for 15 seconds a night and plan on working my way up to 6. This is an effort to reduce the visceral fat stores that were built from abusing carbohydrates and over eating seed oils. There's enough evidence to convince me that having large amounts of visceral fats=death.
Current plan is using a Bowflex M3 thingy I bought for the wife as an expensive coat hanger for the max effort cardio and using the X3 resistance bands I bought for myself to look at apparently to place the greatest load I can in the shortest amount of time on the muscles. While still being somewhat safe.
Haha I see you've been listening to Sean O'Mara ;)
Keto Chow didn't work for me, which is really weird because HWC does! Maybe it's all the whey in it? Just made me insanely hungry.. but good luck and keep me updated on how it works!
Yep, whey is highly insulinogenic, which will increase appetite.
On Oceania: Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (aka the cluster on the left) are all Melanesian, a group almost completely genetically & culturally distinct from the Polynesians (and related Micronesians) that populate the rest of Oceania.
Within countries that have both populations, like New Zealand or French-controlled New Caledonia, Poly/Micronesians are much more obese than Melanesians or Europeans.
Interesting. What about the diabetes rates? From the clustering it seems like these places are way less obese, but only slightly less diabetic.
So it could be similar to the China vs. US thing where they're just as genetically likely to get diabetes, but way less likely to get obese, even under similar circumstances like food intake and lifestyle.
Yeah, could certainly be, I don't know about the diabetes rate but will look into it. Have been in research phase of writing a post about the Pacific island obesity crisis for a while now
Do you live there?
Nope, rather the other side of the world actually. Just have an interest in the obesity crisis (like all of us out here, I guess), saw that these countries were the fattest in the world, and I figured that would be a good place to start looking for clues. Been reading up on the area for a while now, but of course there's always that "what if I missed something" that makes you keep researching instead of just posting the damn article.
Haha yea that's the thing with "data driven"... there's an infinite amount of data. Maybe they're wearing the wrong color socks. You need to already have a hypothesis/mechanism in mind to even collect the appropriate data.
My money is on "least amount of time to adapt to whatever is the factor (probably seed oils)" and now very high % of their food containing the factor. I do think these hyper obese cultures had a crazy swing from basically ancestral hunter/fisher/gatherer/tuber food supply to all-processed-food in 1 generation or less.
Whereas most countries in the West took 2-3 generations to make the same change. So they basically leapfrogged us.
Different people store fat differently and it is visceral fat (compared to subcataneous) that is most tied to insulin resistance. Not surprisingly, race/genetics are related to how people store fat. This is generally what people (at least those who know a thing or two) mean when they talk about BMI being a "racist" measure. Many white people tend to get metabolic and cardiovascular consequences from obesity at a higher BMI than many other races.
AFAIK they even have different BMI numbers for Asian people, probably because of this. I think it's 5 points lower for the same level, so obesity begins at 25, not 30.
That's not the case in the data you use here, right? Along with controlling for ancestry, it's probably really important to control for age, older populations are generally going to be more obese and more diabetic.
I don't know, depends on the source data I guess.
The "old age == more obese" thing is actually somewhat recent, not sure it's always the case. It was the opposite (people lost a bit of muscle and their BMI trended slightly down) in the late 1800s in the US at least.
"Old age == more fat" is a pretty old thing. I'd love to see what data you are referencing from the 1800s. I would guess that back then, because people weren't very fat, you saw a bigger decrease in weight in old age because sarcopenia.
Also, type 2 diabetes has been, I'm pretty sure, always correlated with age.
Looking at the data you used in this post, it appears to simply say that 30 BMI is obese, and it doesn't take ethnicity into account.
For example, it's mentioned in this SM TM article:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
And yea, that's exactly it: almost nobody was overweight/obese, and people lost some muscle -> BMI trended down after 25 or so.
T2D yes, I think, but of course the rate used to be much lower.
So interesting....Im a new reader and trying to tie this all together. I'm reading a book called The Missing Link in Dementia by Jo Dixon/2020. It's all about thiamine deficiency-the second half is better than the first...and how having a gut bug can stop your body from uptaking thiamine even at high doses. Because Thiamine helps you process sugar so without it ingesting sugar becomes toxic. Other things can block the thiamine receptor including fluoride. Some antibiotics (ie:Bactrim and Cipro-these are the 2 I took that had a negative affect on my health) have fluoride. As a liver doctor-she put it all together when her health failed. She solved it starting with IV thiamine to bypass her gut. This would make sense with your experience being keto- that without sugar, thiamine deficient people can do okay. Any thoughts? There's also an enzyme that eats up thiamine-so there can be dual issues.
Huh interesting. Yea the body is insanely complex. Honestly no clue if I have thiamine uptake issues, but I did start taking a B complex that includes thiamine a while ago.
I'm still reading over this, it's been a long and exciting day with more to come. For now, some notes.
Diabetes mellitus (sugar diabetes) isn't a disease of excess or opulence. Some people like to assign blame (not that I think you are, of course), but that's not really helpful in treating it. And, treatment is the key word. What surprises you about Libya having such a high incidence of diabetes cases doesn't surprise me -- their healthcare system has been rocked again and again, and helping people manage chronic conditions is secondary to lifesaving treatments.
Insulin resistant diabetes, or Type 2, is a problem with how well the body responds to the hormone insulin. Type 1 diabetes happens when the body stops responding altogether, for one reason or another. Without insulin, we don't process glucose, so it collects in the blood until it runs rampant. Alright, cool, baseline set and basics out of the way.
Type 2 diabetes can "graduate" to Type 1 if the body stops responding to it entirely, or if the pancreas fails. Whatever type it is, careful management is required if someone is going to survive, let alone have a decent quality of life. The worse a state that the local healthcare apparatus is, the harder it is to treat diabetics, who need regular routine care, including eye care (my field). Without it, the excess sugar destroys the body from inside the vascular system, and many of its attempts to negotiate the problem cause more issues. There's only one thing that diabetes has historically helped the body do, so far as I know, which is not a long list.
Edit: I forgot an important point! The diabetes-obesity connection. Mammalian bodies are made of cells, and cells need glucose (or ketones) to keep the lights on. The more of a body there is, the more insulin is needed to keep the power running because those cells need it to process glucose. Like you've pointed out with calories, it's an accounting issue.
This is already long, I'm getting back to the article. In case I forget to come back to this, keep it up! I love what you do.
Edit: I think it's a manifold issue. The correlation between diabetes and obesity is real. Again, it comes down to accounting. Eating sugars and carby foods that break down into sugars forces the body to use it, lose it, or store it. We are made to survive, so we store what we don't use and use the "lose it" option as little as possible. The American Diet of Freedom (tm) is very carby, more as you move lower down the strata of income brackets.
An important part of such an analysis as yours is that you can't really cut out this or that piece of data without just cause for those decisions. Maybe places like Nauru are reliant on the same foods that we Americans eat but their healthcare system is not up to what we would consider par. Other countries don't have the same level of health reporting that we do, and others still probably have better standard for healthcare reporting (I would guess Europe very well might).
I would instead say to try this kind of analysis on a smaller part of globe. Look at the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico, with another data set that includes outlying places like Guam that we control. Fun fact, assuming I'm remembering correctly: Guam is 1/8 United States veterans and active duty service members.
Thanks!
Correction/clarification: Type I DM is an autoimmune disorder where the cells that make insulin are destroyed.
T II starts as insulin resistance but can eventually lead to a deficiency of insulin.
Onset of type I is usually adolescence or very early adulthood. Onset of type Ii is more typically middle age or older, although possible at any age
Two very different processes that ultimately have similar long term negative medical consequences
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_1_diabetes
Are the graphs about both types combined or just one? I think it matters...
Yeah I started reading this and felt confused given that the two types of diabetes are so distinct on the backend. Some few people with Type 1 diabetes have so little of the type 2 symptoms that they can compete in the Tour de France.
Yea, I think these statistics are 99% or so Type 2. AFAIK the rate of T1 hasn't increased nearly as much.
This is all very true. Thank you.
I think the statistics for countries combine both, but I'd wager that almost all cases (99%?) of diabetes in high-diabetes country are T2D. Almost nobody gets T1D from environmental issues, I think, at least not like we see increases in T2D and obesity.
Being an autoimmune disease, there probably are environmental issues causing T1D (infectious triggers, hygiene hypothesis, etc), and there have been increases in the percent of people with T1D.
T1D is much less common than T2D, so you're probably fine with your plots.
Yea, T2D makes up 90% of all diabetes world wide (and it's probably closer to 95/99% in the U.S.) so I basically consider it "above my pay grade." :)