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Carbohydrate Sensitivity

Patch

Patch

Well-Known Member
Can anyone point me in the direction of some good information wrt Carbohydrate Sensitivity? Can it simply be that the the more overweight a Type 2 diabetic is, the more sensitive he/she is to carbs? Or does it have more to do with your metabolism? For instance, is a 17st man that exercises less sensitive to carbs than a 17st man that doesn't exercise?

There are a lot of people on this site that have gone lo-carb to keep their blood sugar down. But if they lost more of the weight, would they be able to eat more carbs? Or would they need to maintain a high level of activity in order to consume carbs?

This whole diabetes thing is just filled with chicken and egg/cause and effect type situations...
 
There are all lot of low carbers who have lost a large amount of weight low carbing and then found that they can indeed increase the amount of carbs that they eat.When you lose a lot of weight,especially around the stomach area it creates less insulin resistance,that coupled with the reduction of carb intake rests the pancreas and it does not produce so much insulin.Once the weight is off then increasing the amount of carbs can be done as long as you still maintain good control of your blood sugar levels.
 
Hi Patch,

Carbohydrate sensitivity is an interesting and fairly new idea. I'm not sure whether it has been scientifically proved or whether it is just hypothesis. The basis is that with increasing consumption of packaged, refined and sweetened foods over the past decades, there has been a corresponding decrease in consumption of whole, unprocessed foods. Eating a diet that consists of heavily refined foods, which includes a high-carbohydrate content, causes weight gain and eventually carbohydrate sensitivity. Once you become carbohydrate sensitive, your body can no longer burn fat effectively, and even moderate to low GI foods as well as complex carbohydrates get stored as fat.

So, to answer your question, being overweight does seem to lead to carbohydrate sensitivity, but this can be overcome by a reduction in carbs. Once the weight has come off then it is possible to eat more carbs, but if these are refined carbs then all that will happen is that the carbohydrate sensitivity returns, together with weight gain yet again.
 
I realise that, dennis - but I suppose the question I'm asking is: What actually changes in the body when one loses weight to make them less sensitive to carbohydrate? When a 20st diabetic eats exactly the same food (same volume, same ratios of fat/carbs/protein) as a 12st diabetic, his/her numbers will shoot up, while the thin persons numbers stay relatively low?

We know that being overweight is bad - but what actually happens in a thin persons body that doesn't happen in a fat persons body that makes them able to eat carbs? And WHY doesn't this happen in the fat person?

Maybe I've got this backwards, and something actually happens in the fat persons body that doesn't happen in the thin persons body. I don't know. But surely someone somewhere should be looking into this, and asking these questions???
 
Patch
no-one will look into these responses, becaue there's probably no money in it and it's fashionable to blame fat people for their diabetes. It wouldn't do to prove them blameless.
 
Hi Patch,

Fat/muscle ratio is an important factor in carb sensitivity.

Muscles will burn energy, even when they're not being used. Body fat, on the other hand, only
acts as a storage medium, raising insulin requirement and insulin resistance as it builds.

Hope this helps,
timo.
 
I suspect the simple answer is insulin resistance. The complicated answer involves things like leptin and leptin resistance.

Coincidentally

http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2009 ... sults.html

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/ ... drome.html

both things I have read recently, I suggest you do the same.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

two blogs I follow, not principally concerned with diabetes but have a great deal of information and links to useful papers on the subject of 21st century metabolic research
 
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