Apparently the theme this week is “awesome videos I’ve come across on Youtube” here at GTonline. Today’s video is an excellent, and somewhat comical, video created by Tom Naughton about the role of insulin in the regulation of body fat. Tom is a comedian, documentary maker and blogger who runs a website, Fat Head, that is decidedly low-carb in nature.
Regardless of whether you are a low-carber or not, taking a few minutes to watch this video will serve you well:
I love this video because it provides a nice, easy to understand summary of how insulin controls blood sugar and by extension, body fat. Admittedly, the hormonal interplay that governs body fat regulation is infinitely more complicated than what the video suggests, however, insulin is definitely one of the key players in the creation of excess body fat.
The video also helps us see why proper insulin management is central to any diet. Although some lucky individuals have such a great innate tolerance for carbohydrates that they can, and must, eat a large percentage of total calories as carbohydrates; the majority of us must regulate our insulin through the diet and exercise.
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In preparing my “Why calorie counting is making you fat” talk, I came across tons of great data that I simply couldn’t include due to time constraints. One particularly enlightening study I left out dealt with identifying risk factors in the development of adult obesity. It was a six-year prospective study done in Quebec1, as part of the Quebec Family Study (QFS).
Now you might be thinking, “Oh great, another obesity study that confirms what we already know; obese people eat too much and exercise too little.” However this study was different. Unlike the typical obesity study, which involve subjecting overweight individuals to a battery of tests and questionnaires in an attempt to identify common obesity traits, this particular study sought to identify what behaviours precipitate the development of obesity.
In order to do so, the researchers tracked hundreds of participants between the ages of 18-64, having a wide range of BMIs for a six-year time period. As you can imagine, this approach to research is pretty damn time consuming and expensive, which is why you rarely see studies like this. However, unlike the typical “study some people for 3 months, then make a grandiose claim about the mechanics of weight control” crowd, at the end of the day, these researchers can actually make educated statements about how long-term weight control might work in the real world.
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