I shared a few weeks back a discussion I had with a skeptical physician friend after he’d approached me for input on how he might best approach turning his health around; read my recount of our interaction (part 1 and part 2) here.
We’ve chatted back and forth over the past couple of months, working through his traditional medical training induced skepticism for a lower carb / moderate protein / higher fat food plan and I thought it might be worth sharing what finally convinced him to jump into a trial with both feet.
What finally convinced him was encouraging him to let simple human physiology inform his food choices, particularly when it came to carbohydrate intake.
For illustration purposes, I constructed a hypothetical man, weighing 190 pounds, and used one of the many tools available to estimate his blood volume, which turned out to be 6464 ml.
I then asked him what he’d like to consider as a “normal” blood glucose level (granted, there are a host of influences on what might be a normal level); he suggested we use 100 mg/dl (to make the math easy, and that’s 5.5 mmol/l for those thinking along those lines).
In our hypothetical man, a blood glucose level of 100 mg/dl, given his estimated blood volume per above, means that only 6460 mg of glucose is in circulation at any given moment. That’s all of 0.228 ounces, which, when visualized in terms of table sugar (yes, that’s sucrose, but we’re painting a visual picture here), ends up just a hair over 1 and 1/2 teaspoons.
In our hypothetical man, a blood glucose level of 130 mg/dl – deemed to be the acceptable upper limit of normal, given his estimated blood volume per above, means that only 8398 mg of glucose is in circulation at any given moment. That’s all of 0.296 ounces, which, when visualized in terms of table sugar (yes, that’s sucrose, but we’re painting a visual picture here), ends up being just about 2 teaspoons.
I reminded him of how aggressively the body responds to carbohydrate consumption, which produces a flood of glucose into the bloodstream inducing the cascade of insulin responses (here’s a quick reminder, it’s oversimplified, but a review).
Visualizing what relatively small amounts of blood glucose are actually in circulation at any given time, thinking through the very elegantly designed hormonal controls in place to keep blood sugar very tightly regulated, and well understanding the ravages of blood glucose elevated out of normal ranges (i.e. T1DM), finally ‘flipped the switch’ in my friend’s thought process, at least in the context of the standard American diet and the (relatively speaking) huge load of carbohydrates it provides.
Sometimes simple examples win the day.
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