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thomascgalvin

This "pseudo-diabetes" appears to be fairly straightforward:

1. Someone stops consuming carbohydrates

2. This causes them to produce significantly less insulin

3. In order to preserve ~~insulin~~ glucose for the brain, other insulin receptors are downregulated

4. Because of this downregulation, the subject is less tolerant of carbohydrates

This is "pseudo-diabetes" and not "diabetes" because a person on a ketogenic diet isn't producing insulin, whereas a diabetic can't produce (enough) insulin, or is so desensitized to it that glucose stays in the blood steam.

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Nailed it. This is also the same mechanism of action for almost any addiction.

1) Consume external drug

2) Receptors downregulate (thanks to homeostasis)

3) Need more of said drug or withdrawals kick in (analogous to needing to take external insulin so body can get rid of excess glucose)

4) Rinse & repeat

From a United States perspective: What we have is a duopoly of Big Pharma and Big Ag that gets people hooked on sugar and then uses medicine-as-a-service to hook them on insulin forever. There is no money in preventative medicine.

There are other countries in the world that have already taken steps to get junk foods and sugary drinks out of the hands of children [0]. What excuses does the United States have?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/aug/06/mexico-oaxaca-s...

To be fair, the government is complicit in this food pyramid scheme.

People are told time and again that it's healthcare system. Yeah, it's not health / customer focused. But all the more reason to do a decent job at avoiding that system. Instead, the status quo diet + lifestyle persists. (Political) leaders can't risk the push back trying to change the narrative.

I've experienced this: after a month of zero carb, I had a couple bananas and an apple and went into a crazy sugar rush that lasted hours. Then I crashed and felt like shit for two days. But my metabolic system is out of whack from years of abuse, so in general I find the lower the amount of carb I consume, the better I feel.

The brain runs fine off ketones. Better than on glucose, in many cases. This is why so many of the therapeutic targets of ketogenesis are neurological.

Only red blood cells and a couple other actually need glucose.

I'm not so certain a ketogenic diet is healthy. The Inuit who have been eating an almost entirely ketogenic diet for centuries can't effectively produce ketones. The ability to produce ketones was selected our of their population.

I think nature might know something we don't know.

I do not know what you’re referring to, perhaps some supporting data would help.

The current method of testing for ketones is ketones freely available in blood stream. The ketones are released by the liver when it’s too full of them and thus they spill over to the blood stream. The consequence therefore is that once you’re fully keto adapted, your ketones won’t spike too high as your body can efficiently generate the required amount.

Most people who do a long fast, they’ll have 1+mmol (higher at 3+) ketones, whereas someone who’s adapted maintains sub 1mmol.

Also, if all you’re eating is protein and large fats, youre producing ketones otherwise you’d die as there’s no carbs/glucose. So yeah, Inuit and carnivore diet people couldn’t exist.

live experiments and observations are a thing, and they are happening everywhere if you do a quick search

They have a defective CPT1A enzyme so they're body can't produce ketones very well. It lead to a high infant mortality, but despite that has been selected for in Inuit populations.

This paper contests the notion that this has to do with possible negative side effects of prolonged ketosis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32088118/

The keto diet is one of the most studied diets in the world. It is super healthy (when done right of course like anything else). The “low carb down under” YouTube group has a lot of talk on the latest research.

What do they produce instead?

I think in 3. you mean preserve 'glucose' for the brain?

Yes, that's correct, sorry.

I would expect any organism that uses glucose derived from gluconeogenesis for glycogen instead of the select tissues that absolutely require glucose, would be selected out quite quickly.

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