« Water Bottles, Sports Drinks, and Ancient Tastes | Main | "Rocket Science" comes to baseball and the movies »

Follow Up to "Food in America"

April 15, 2005 08:47 PM

This is a followup to my earlier post about my wife's stay in the hospital and our ensuing battle with the ADA (American Diabetes Association) diet guidelines. She is out now and during her 9 day stay she gained 7 pounds. This is a prodigious gain for her; she has had a stable weight for many years. If you saw the earlier comment you will know that the ADA diet raised her blood sugar and we had to increase her insulin to manage the starcy and high glycemic index foods she was given. (The ADA recommends this diet because many Type 2 diabetics have trouble metabolizing fat, but that is because they are too fat to begin with and, thus, have a large pool of triglycerides floating in their blood stream.) The quantities she was given were very large as well. She chose to eat far less than the hospital gave her and to choose as carefully as she could from the foods offered.

This was not enough. What happened, and happens to many people with diabetes, is that she had to increase her insulin to cover the carbohydrate in her meals. As a result, she had to eat more later to avoid an insulin reaction from the insulin load. She was chasing her food with insulin to keep her blood glucose within a healthy range. Insulin directs nutrients to muscle and then to fat if the muscle is already full of glycogen. So she put on fat at a high rate. She put on more than 7 pounds of fat because even though her body weight only increased 7 pounds, her confinement caused her to lose muscle mass.

There is a large lesson here for people struggling with their weight. Your body goes through the same sequence even if you are not diabetic. Since my wife is a Type 1 diabetic she does not produce insulin and we had to "cover" the unhealthful food she was given with more and larger insulin injections. In a non-diabetic, high glycemic and starchy food produces higher insulin levels automatically as the body tries to cope with the carbohydrate load. This does two important things: 1. it causes your blood sugar to fall and makes you hungry and a bit foggy or irritable, 2. it preferentially directs the energy you eat into fat rather than muscle and organs because they become resistant to the insulin signal.

It is a prescription for weight gain and one many people live on because of the food they eat and their lack of insulin sensitivity from too much starchy food and too little activity.

· Evolutionary Fitness

Comments

Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 12, 2006 4:27 AM

I'm loving the blog. You're just so intelligent, it blows my mind. What's the ETA on Evolutionary Fitness? Can't wait to read it...

Posted by: Matt O'Donnell at April 16, 2005 5:56 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?