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LCHF/Low carb and insulin response

A

Adam01

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It was my understanding (please do correct me if i have this all wrong) that high insulin levels are bad and contribute to insulin resistance and therefore cause diabetes. I also understand that low carb diets are really beneficial in lowering blood sugar. However I have read that low carb foods like meat, eggs and dairy actually cause significant rises in insulin (some sites say more than porridge or pasta does). Is this a flaw in the low carb diet? I hope not as I am all for it. But it all seems in vain if it continues to cause high circulating insulin. Any insights would be much appreciated.
 
Adam01 said:
However I have read that low carb foods like meat, eggs and dairy actually cause significant rises in insulin (some sites say more than porridge or pasta does)
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Let me hazard a guess that these may be websites supportive of a whole food plant based way of eating? i.e. veggie/vegan promoting?
 
Adam01 said:
It was my understanding (please do correct me if i have this all wrong) that high insulin levels are bad and contribute to insulin resistance and therefore cause diabetes. I also understand that low carb diets are really beneficial in lowering blood sugar. However I have read that low carb foods like meat, eggs and dairy actually cause significant rises in insulin (some sites say more than porridge or pasta does). Is this a flaw in the low carb diet? I hope not as I am all for it. But it all seems in vain if it continues to cause high circulating insulin. Any insights would be much appreciated.
Click to expand...

Your "some sites" are wrong - perhaps you could offer us some links to them?

Most foods trigger an insulin response, but hey! Look at the insulin response index - look which ones trigger the most ..... fruit and several vegetables. Butter is by far the best as it doesn't trigger a response at all.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/christoffer.green#!/vizhome/InsulinogenicFoodData/Dashboard1
 
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A low carb diet can result in physiological insulin resistance that goes away if you go back to eating carbs for a few days. If you are not consuming very much carbs, then the insulin resistance is not an issue.
 
Fortunately it is absolutely wrong about there being an insulin response to meat eggs and dairy, fish and shellfish too - quite the reverse.
Porridge and pasta - and other carb dense foods are the prime insulin requiring foods.
I eat twice a day, early and late and stick to low carb foods - my results could not be better, so I think that my metabolism is a lot happier than when I ate the wrong foods.
 
Resurgam said:
Fortunately it is absolutely wrong about there being an insulin response to meat eggs and dairy, fish and shellfish too - quite the reverse.
Porridge and pasta - and other carb dense foods are the prime insulin requiring foods.
I eat twice a day, early and late and stick to low carb foods - my results could not be better, so I think that my metabolism is a lot happier than when I ate the wrong foods.
Click to expand...

Do you have any links to research about your comment that those foods do not trigger an insulin response? I am genuinely interested.

If you are simply going by your own personal glucose response and also manage somehow to test the corresponding insulin response, you have no idea what your insulin response to those foods is.
 
You can eat too much protein on a LC diet which will cause an insulin response you need to eat lots of fat a moderate amount of protein and low carbs.

Watch this video
 
Basic human biology?
There is the option of using protein for glucogenesis when that is a need, but it is an inefficient and usually insignificant process compared to the huge amounts of glucose produced by a 'normal' high carb diet.
 
Adam01 said:
Yes they did suggest plant based was better. Are they wrong about the insulin response then?
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I believe so yes.. there have been a number of people claiming the WFPB ways of eating are better for us but there aren't many (any?) studies that really support this. The Veggie/vegan sites all say that keto/LCHF is a high protein diet but it isn't really it's more low carb moderate protein and higher fat. Very few studies actually do it properly. Check out the success stories on the low carb diet thread on this site if you want to see some evidence from real people who are controlling their condition with LCHF.
 
From a Heads Up Health blog about insulin load

Beyond “Counting Carbs”
I came across a study titled “An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000-kJ portions of common foods” by Holt, Miller and Petocz from the Department of Biochemistry, University of Sydney, Australia (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Nov 1997). The study looked beyond the Glycemic Index (GI) which ranks foods according to the extent to which they raise blood glucose concentrations. The following text really caught my attention: “some of the protein-rich foods…fish, beef, cheese, and eggs still had larger insulin responses per gram than did many of the foods consisting predominately of carbohydrate.”

A search for the “Food Insulin Index” lead me to a game changing presentation titled “Managing Insulin to Optimize Nutrition” by Australian Engineer and Type 2 diabetic Marty Kendall (his wife is a Type 1 Diabetic) from the Low Carb Down Under Conference (Nov 2015) and to his website Optimizing Nutrition.

The “Insulin Load” of any given food is calculated as follows:

Insulin Load = Carbohydrates(g) – Fibre(g) + [.56 x Protein(g)]

So, yes, protein will result in an insulin release, but from what I’ve read, it doesn’t spike blood glucose.
Here’s the link for the blog if you want the entire article
https://www.headsuphealth.com/blog/stories-of-transformation/insulin-load-beyond-counting-carbs/
 
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