Low fat vs low carb again (2)

For your enjoyment I have simplified this graph from

Hyperinsulinemia Drives Diet-Induced Obesity Independently of Brain Insulin Production

out of Jim Johnson's lab:

down to this graph (at great effort) to show only the mice on standard chow:

These are the insulin responses to an IP glucose tolerance test at a year of age in mice which have been fed on good quality chow all of their lives. The mice in the top curve are phenotypically normal in their insulin response to glucose, the mice in the lower curve have had three out of four of their insulin genes knocked out. They weigh the same.

We all know from the Surwit posts that the normal insulin exposure mice have an 11% decrease in median lifespan compared to low insulin exposed mice, Jim Johnson's lab again.

None of us is in a position to have our insulin genes partially silenced from before birth, but we do have a choice as to how much insulin we expose ourselves to, based on our dietary choices.

What we need to know is what the insulin response to a given meal might be if we were to try to imitate the partial insulin gene knockout mice. Very few studies have provided this sort of information but the current pre print from Hall et al does just this. Here is the graph

The red curve is from a group of people fed a single meal of a mildly ketogenic diet. With insulin peaking between 20 and 30micoU/ml this is quite similar to the value in mice with reduced insulin gene load, those pan out at around the 22microU/ml mark (don't you wish everyone just used picomoles all the time? Well, I do). Or you can eat low fat, plant based and choose to expose yourself to over 100microU/ml of insulin. Doing this you might still lose a little weight (another post, eventually), you might lose a little fat but you also might lose a few years of lifespan as the insulin drives ageing with its associated chronic diseases.

How many years? If the median lifespan for humans is around 70-80 years and we are talking about an 11% reduction that gives us a ballpark of just under a decade lost. As a thought experiment.

PBLF, plant based low fat. ABLC, animal based low carbohydrate.

There is no choice.

Peter

Total aside: I really hope that Hall keeps the title of this paper unchanged in the version which eventually gets published. It's a single sentence of prose which encapsulates what is wrong with nutrition research. It is absolutely, totally factually accurate, while being completely selective in its choice of factual content to give an absolutely misleading impression. As a declaration of bias it is unbeatable. I love it.