Dietary Fats Cause Insulin Resistance, Not Carbs. I Can Prove It
I really don’t care what you choose to eat, but do stop spreading misinformation, will you?
Let me be absolutely clear about what I’m saying, because I know that half of you rage-clicked this article, already determined to straw man me.
This is the fact:
High fat diets cause insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes your blood sugar to go high when you eat carbohydrates.
Don’t mischaracterize what I’m saying and respond:
“No! It’s definitely carbs that make my blood sugar go high! I know that for a fact because I tested my blood sugar after eating carbs and it was high! And I feel like crap when I eat them!”
I’m not doubting that. What I’m saying is, the REASON your blood sugar goes high after you eat carbs is because you have insulin resistance. And the reason you have insulin resistance is because you eat a high-fat diet.
I’ll Just Let the People Who Argue with Me About This Cite Evidence that Proves It
You know what’s so funny? Whenever I tell people this completely true information and they argue with me about it, they do it by copy/pasting what they refer to as “studies” (they’re usually not studies, but meta-analyses) from whichever diet guru they’ve gotten taken in by.
And about 2/3 of the time, when I click on their link and read it, it doesn’t support their claim that carbs cause insulin resistance. It supports what I’ve said — that dietary fat causes insulin resistance.
For instance, recently, someone decided to “prove” to me that carbs are the culprit with this link. My guess is that their preferred diet guru listed it as supporting their nonsense, figuring people would derive conclusions from the title alone, and not bother to actually read it.
Except, I did read it. Here are some choice excerpts:
In the San Luis Valley study, no relationship was found between dietary carbohydrate and either hyperinsulinemia or the onset of frank diabetes (10). In fact, there was a trend for an inverse relationship. However, a significant relationship occurred between dietary fat and newly diagnosed cases of diabetes. The strength of this study comes from its prospective design, careful diet histories and accurate case identification.
Oh wait, what was that? Sounds like it’s saying that carbohydrates don’t cause insulin resistance, fat does. Is that really what it’s saying? I’ll let my opponent’s link speak for itself:
Taken together, these data support the idea that high carbohydrate diets, at the very least, do not adversely affect insulin sensitivity and may be beneficial for insulin sensitivity. On the contrary, high intakes of dietary fat, particularly saturated fat, do appear in some of these studies to be associated with a decline in insulin sensitivity.
The conclusion?
Intake of dietary fat, particularly saturated fat, appears to be associated with insulin resistance in animals (23) and humans (21) and may predispose to the development of diabetes (10). It seems prudent at this time to advocate increased fiber consumption... Although simple sugars appear to cause insulin resistance in rats, adverse effects in humans have not been demonstrated conclusively.
Well, thanks for that helpful link, person who insists on the opposite conclusion.
The Reason I’m Positive Dietary Fat Causes Insulin Resistance Doesn’t Come from Studies, Though
Don’t get me wrong, science backs up what I’m saying as best as it can. There are huge problems with getting good data on diets, for a number of reasons, such as:
- Dietary self-reporting is unreliable.
- To get really good data, you’d need to do a long-term study where you fed people all their food and monitored their health, which is expensive and not always feasible.
- Studies often compare something that increases insulin resistance, such as full-fat dairy, to something that also increases insulin resistance but not as much, such as lower-fat dairy. And then people, not actually understanding studies, will just go around claiming dairy is protective against type 2 diabetes, which I’m sorry, it isn’t, it’s just not as bad as full-fat dairy.
There are too few truly helpful studies on diet, and the diet industry thrives on the confusion.
But I know for certain that high-fat, low-carb diets increase insulin resistance because I am a walking control group.
See, I have type 1 diabetes, which means that my body makes no insulin whatsoever. Therefore, I get all my insulin from a pump. And that means that, unlike normal people, I can tell you exactly how much insulin my body needs to keep my sugars normal on different diets.
I Used to Eat a Very Low-Carb Diet
I used to eat low-carb and high fat. That’s a common thing for type 1 diabetics to do. And there’s some logic to them eating that way. When you eat low-carb and high-fat, you’re less prone to blood sugar spikes because you’re not eating carbs, and don’t have to think about carb counting and giving yourself insulin for it. You can just rely on your background insulin to take care of your blood sugar.
When I ate that way, at first my blood sugars were good, and my insulin intake was lower than it had been. But that quickly changed.
As I ate so much fat, my insulin resistance went way up. I found myself constantly needing to increase my basal rate of insulin — that’s the amount of insulin my body uses in the background all the time, even when I’m not eating.
On top of that, heaven forbid I ate a banana. Carbs — even good, healthy carbs like fruit — shot my blood sugar through the roof when I ate low carb. It took 4 units of insulin to keep my sugar in range when I ate a banana on my low-carb diet.
For that reason, when I ate low-carb, I pretty much had to avoid all carbs, all the time.
That’s the problem with low-carb diets. They only prevent blood sugar spikes as long as you NEVER EAT CARBS. Because when you have insulin resistance, your body can’t deal with carbs.
Who wants to live that way?
I Switched to a Low-Fat Diet, and My Insulin Resistance Went Away
Someone convinced me to try one of these low-fat, unprocessed, plant-based diets.
I didn’t jump right into eating carbs, and if you’ve been eating high fat and have insulin resistance, you shouldn’t either. You’ll feel like total crap if you do.
For about a week, you’ll need to switch to a diet that is not sustainable long-term, but you can do it for seven days. Basically, you should eat BOTH low-carb AND low-fat.
So, like, what the hell do you eat that week, then? Well, beans mostly. As well as low-carb, non-starchy vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, zucchini, squash, lettuces/kale, that kind of stuff. As much of that stuff as you want, no limit.
If you follow some low-fat diet gurus on the internet, which I do not recommend doing, they’ll likely promote their “perfect” version of this diet. They’ll be super-extreme about it, telling you to also not eat salt anymore and to use no oil at all.
I’m not that strong of a person, myself. Yes, I cut way back on oil to reduce fat. I used a teaspoon instead of a tablespoon of olive oil to fry veggies and scramble them with beans or tofu. But salt? I’d never eat vegetables if I couldn’t have salt.
We’re not talking about blood pressure here, we’re talking about insulin resistance. So forget about trying to be perfect and use way less oil (but not none if you don’t want to) and use salt to make it palatable for you. After a week, you can add fruit, starchy veggies, and minimally processed whole grains into your diet. It won’t shoot your blood sugar up anymore because your insulin resistance will have gone way down. And it’ll go down even more after that, as long as you keep eating low fat, minimally processed food.
I kid you not, even once I was eating all those yummy carbs, I used 1/3 as much insulin as I did when I ate high fat. My background basal insulin became absurdly low — a tiny fraction of a unit would sustain a normal blood sugar for an hour. And a banana only took about 1.4 units of insulin to cover instead of 4 units.
You can’t argue with results like that.
I Truly Don’t Care What You or Anyone Chooses to Eat
So, look, I’m a vegan, but I only became one after I went plant-based for health, and I decided to look into it more. Yeah, I care about animals and the environment and all that, but I also believe very strongly that the world is doomed no matter what you eat. If you want to only eat fat and never eat any carbs, go ahead, it’s none of my business.
I just think you deserve to know that, if you choose to eat low-carb and high-fat, you can never eat carbs without feeling horrible. The reverse is not the case for eating low-fat.
One of the little perks of eating very low-fat is, if you decide to go all-in occasionally, say for Thanksgiving — turkey, stuffing, gravy, pie, the whole thing — it’s not like your blood sugar will shoot up from it. Insulin resistance isn’t formed in a day. Your body will be able to handle all that stuff. So that you can, you know, enjoy life.
If you feel like, “Okay, I can cut out oil and processed food and go very low-fat, but I can’t hack to never eat meat,” then eat some freaking meat sometimes. It doesn’t need to be all or nothing. Exercise reduces insulin resistance too. Maybe you can go for an extra walk or something after you indulge.
The Way to Eat, In General, Is Not Complicated
Assuming you don’t have all kinds of allergies or other issues, the way to eat well is fairly simple. Eat veggies, fruit, legumes (beans), whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Avoid highly processed foods. Avoid meat, dairy, and eggs as much as you can.
But don’t beat yourself up if you’re not “perfect.” We don’t live in a perfect world. And perfection is for show-offs and jerks anyway.
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