The Carb-Sane Asylum

On Facebook today, Mark Hyman MD (functional medicine doc) posted : There are no essential carbohydrates. There are essentials fats and essentials proteins, but if you never had any carbohydrates again, you would survive. The Teaspoon Party This was brought to my attention but also reminded me that Richard Feinman is at it again with a recent blog post on this no essential dietary carb canard, couched in a history lesson of sorts:   Revolutions. Political and Scientific .  He discusses Claude Bernard finding sugar in a dog that hadn't been fed any carbohydrate.  The question is why ... again ... why ... now?   This idea has earned him an honored place in the group at right.

It's been a while since Part I of this series ... too many irons in too many fires and all that jazz.  But one research track I went down recently reminded me of this lingering series and I thought I'd finish up this second installment. We hear all the time truisms such as that the acute effects of a hormone differ from the chronic effects, and whenever a hormone is present in excess of normal levels, the term " fill in hormone here resistance" is sure to be close behind.  Now there is no doubt that hormone resistance is a very real phenomenon, but what does it mean, specifically? The concept of insulin resistance, IR, is highly complicated by the fact that insulin has varying actions in various tissues and organs.  I do intend to discuss tissue-specific IR in more depth as this series unfolds.  But for today, I am going to limit the discussion to insulin and the muscle cell.  After all, when general IR is discussed, it is usually systemic or skeletal muscle i...

METABOLIC ADAPTATIONS TO A "STUFF AND STARVE" FEEDING PROGRAM. I. STUDIES OF ADIPOSE TISSUE AND LIVER GLYCOGEN IN RATS LIMITED TO A SHORT DAILY FEEDING PERIOD This is quite an old study, published in 1962, and it's in rats who are known to have greater DNL in adipose tissue.  This was a fairly short study, wherein rats were put on a 2 hr/day ad libitum eating schedule for one week.  Intake was 60% lower on day 1, but back up to 95% of normal ad libitum intake by the second day.  Thus the rats lost weight early on, but were back within 10% of their start weight by week's end.   Essentially it appears that in short order with a switch to such a regime, adipose tissue storage and DNL in adipose tissue is upregulated considerably (10 fold).  Normally a 24 hr fasted rat will have depleted glycogen stores as some is burned along with fatty acids.  Rats adapted to this regime had full liver glycogen after the 24 hr fast indicating that they likely use fats prefe...

Nutrient effects: post-absorptive interactions BY ERIC JEQUIER    (1995) After a meal, the metabolic fuel selection at the whole-body level depends on the plasma concentrations of nutrients such as glucose, non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA) , amino acids, and on hormonal responses. Over the last 10 years, there has been great interest in studying the metabolic effects following the ingestion or the intravenous (i.v.) infusion of the three macronutrients, carbohydrate (CHO), fat, and protein (or amino acids for i.v. infusion). The aim of the present brief review  {I'm thinking it's not so brief!}  is to summarize the main mechanisms which determine the post-absorptive interactions between the nutrients. This is an older paper, but still recent enough to provide some good info on the basics.  I'm going to do something a bit different with this one and I otherwise would be quoting huge chunks.  So I'll do bullet point summar...