Mark Sisson: It's All About the Insulin

If you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in biology, just remember this and own it: carbohydrate controls insulin; insulin controls fat storage. 

It's All About Insulin (Well, at Least 80 Percent of It): Eighty percent of your ability to achieve body composition goals is determined by your diet—essentially, your ability to moderate insulin production so you can access and burn stored body fat for energy, while preserving or building muscle. Insulin is an important hormone that transports nutrients into cells for storage. When the delicate insulin balance is abused by habitually consuming too many carbs, cells become insulin resistant; more fat is stored and it becomes increasingly difficult to burn. This sets the stage for the development of serious conditions like Metabolic Syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Synthesis of testosterone and human growth hormone are hindered by excessive insulin production, creating an artificially accelerated aging process. There are also serious immediate drawbacks to consuming high-carb snacks or meals. The sugar high-insulin release-stress response cycle causes problems with fatigue, mental focus, mood swings, and jitters, resulting in the familiar condition of burnout. The regulation of insulin production is perhaps the most important takeaway message of the Primal Blueprint for preventing obesity and many modern health problems.

[For Weight Loss] Bottom line: It’s all about insulin to enjoy effortless lifelong weight control.

It’s as simple as this: if you have excess body fat, it’s directly reflective of the amount of insulin you produce from your diet combined with your familial genetic predisposition to store fat.

No, Really—It’s All About Insulin: The insulin story is perhaps the most health-critical concept in the book, so I want you to fully understand it on both a practical and a biochemical level. Like so many things in life, a moderate amount of insulin is good and a lot can be bad —very bad.

From The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson

2009,  PDF pp. 190, 219, 30, 150, 154 respectively

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Some Comments

• My introduction to "paleo" was through discussions of MDA on Jimmy Moore's forum.   For me, it was clear from day one that Mark was a low carber.  He did seem to sanction fruit and with his "big ass salads" basically encouraged not worrying over the carbs in non-starchy veggies.  I didn't have the book at the time so relied on information on his website.  The book, as you can see from the excerpts above -- and I had to seriously chop that down -- is very heavy on the insulin theory.   We don't hear quite as much about insulin from Mark in his writings and interviews as one might expect after reading this book.
• Mark was distinctly anti-starch for TWICHOO (Taubes Wrong Insulin Carb Hypothesis Of Obesity) reasons.  Indeed, as I've linked to before, in many of the "is it primal?" type posts, starch content was a deciding factor.  See for example his post about buckwheat.
• Especially in LC circles, Mark is famous for his Carbohydrate Curve, which I have fun with here at The Asylum from time to time.
• Here's an example of Mark softening his stance on insulin a bit:  Dairy and Insulin.  This was written about one-to-two months after Jimmy Moore's first data dump post, asking a butt ton of "experts" about insulin in response to James Krieger's awesome series.  Here's the link to my Insulin Wars series (responding to several of the contributors):  Insulin Wars II: Mark Sisson.  A Cliff notes of Mark's comments would be that we need an easily understood slogan (it's the insulin to replace CICO/ELMM), and it's not really important that it is correct because we want to maximize buy in. Mark's response to Jimmy's query was probably the single most honest thing I've read from a paleo/primal/LC guru.  But ...
• With statements such as the quotes excerpted here, in Primal Blueprint Mark Sisson backed himself into a corner.  It would be difficult, if not impossible, to go back on all of this for the reason that it is all stated so definitively.  Even Taubes peppers his writing with enough qualifiers like "probably" or "it could be" that there may well come a day when he lays down his TWICHOO sword and says, oh nevermind.  Those, like Mark, who were influenced by Taubes will not have it so easy, and I can only see more difficulties as paleo goes through continuing growing pains.
• After reading PB, along with Wolf's, it does serve as a reminder of what many expressed in comments here in recent discussions.  The "new" attempted co-opting of paleo by LC (let's be honest, the market share grab by Jimmy Moore) is nothing new.  Paleo & LC have deep roots.  From my vantage point, the paleo community is trying to find ways to counter the revolution of sorts that occurred circa late 2010 through 2011 and continued into 2012 -- with prominent blogger after prominent blogger after frequent participant of forums/blogs jumping ship from the USS TWICHOO or "coming out" as folks who had smuggled potatoes and such aboard all along.   Thus ...
• The primary source of conflict will remain the enshrinement of TWICHOO in books like Primal Blueprint.
• Mark has clearly changed his schtick to focus on ketosis, fat burning and glucose and aging.   Props to him for being able to alter the message just enough, but it is incongruous with what is written in PB which is incontrovertibly TWICHOO.
• As to the first quote, I cringe every time I read similar.  Whether it's Mary Vernon (MD) or Mark Sisson (BA, Biology), this notion that you learn carbs drive insulin drives fat accumulation in biology classes is way overstated.  I have a BS in Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and in my junior year I flirted with a Chem/Bio double major, switched officially to Chem, and then back to where my heart led me:  Biology.  But as such I took two biochemistry classes (one from the Bio dept, the other a grad level class from the Chem dept), A&P and an advanced A&P lab).  Before leaving the pharmaceutical industry to study full time, I was pursuing an MS in Biomedical Engineering  at night, and took yet another A&P class.  This is not to mention several relevant electives on Cell and Molecular bio.  Y'all know my memory by now.  I just unearthed one of the Biochem texts, and yes it mentions insulin in like one paragraph of a 2.5" thick text.  Really peeps, I have no recollection of this kind of focus on insulin, and most of the people discussing this are 10 or more years older than I am.  It may well be more of a focus in current biology curricula, but it just wasn't a major focus.   Even in my A&P lab where we anesthetized giant white bunnies, cannulated various veins and ducts and injected them with various hormones to see changes in blood pressure, fluid fluxes and the like (Guyton Textbook of Medical Physio was our text for this 3 credit lab for which we were required to cite peer review sources in our write-ups), I don't recall insulin being one of them.   So this whole notion that this principle is widely taught with any degree of emphasis, let alone that folks who learned biology have somehow forgotten it, is rather bogus.  Again, perhaps with the rise in obesity and diabetes necessitating greater knowledge of metabolism, this may have changed some for younger folks ... I can only hope they haven't dumbed down insulin to this level :-(
• I have a dream.  I know it will never happen.  But healing in the greater community would come quite easily if those who most forcefully promoted TWICHOO from an evolutionary basis could come out with definitive corrections of the record.  Problem is, doing so, would be quite difficult for those making the corrections.