Dr. David Ludwig recently published a nifty article over on Medium – The Case for a Low-Carb Diet is Stronger Than Ever – in which he discussed a recent study his team conducted looking at the Carbohydrate Insulin Model of obesity.
From the article, in way of introduction –
…The conventional approach to obesity considers weight control as a matter of accounting — too many calories into the body, not enough calories out. The solution: count calories, eat less and move more. As long as you have a negative “energy balance,” you’ll eventually solve the problem.
Sounds simple. The problem is, calorie restriction is devilishly difficult for most people to sustain over the long term, because the body fights back when it’s deprived of calories. Decades of research shows that, as people lose weight, their hunger inevitably increases and their metabolism slows down.
The more weight you lose, the harder it is to burn off those extra calories, even as hunger and cravings for extra calories keep rising. This isn’t a matter of will power. In the battle between mind and metabolism, metabolism wins. According to nationally-representative data, fewer than 1 in 5 people with overweight or obesity have ever lost just 10% of their weight, for just 1 year.
We each have a sort of set-point, a weight that our body seems to want to remain — it’s lighter for some people, heavier for others, and determined in part by our genes. Some people can eat whatever they want and stay thin. Others seem to gain a few pounds by simply walking past a bakery. For both groups, attempts to either lose or gain significant amounts of weight run into biological resistance…
And the alternative, the Carbohydrate Insulin Model (again, from the article, and there’s a great image summarizing the following at the link)-
…There’s another theory of obesity called the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model (CIM), which argues that we’ve had it backwards all along: Overeating doesn’t cause weight gain, at least not over the long term; the process of gaining weight is what causes us to overeat.
Think of a teenage boy. Eating a lot doesn’t make him grow; his rapid growth makes him hungry and and so he eats a lot. (Of course, adults won’t grow taller no matter how much they eat.)
According to the CIM (see Figure 1), processed, high-“glycemic load”carbohydrates — mainly refined grains, potato products and added sugar — that flooded the food supply during the low-fat diet craze of the last 40 years have raised insulin levels, forcing people’s fat cells into calorie storage overdrive. Our rapidly growing fat cells take up too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. That’s why we get hungry. And that’s why our metabolism slows down if we force ourselves to eat less…
Well worth a read; it’s written as a laymen’s-oriented overview of his study, and the diagrams included are quite illustrative. Despite conventional wisdom’s collective panning of the CIM theory, there’s more research coming down the pike about thoughtful and intentional carbohydrate consumption that’s NOT typical of the standard American diet.
Leave a Reply