View Single Post
  #12   ^
Old Sat, Jun-02-18, 07:38
M Levac M Levac is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 6,498
 
Plan: VLC, mostly meat
Stats: 202/200/165 Male 5' 7"
BF:
Progress: 5%
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Default

Two subsets of insulin-makes-us-fat:

1. During or immediately after a meal (post-prandial) - insulin is at its highest on a curve, more fat goes into fat tissue than otherwise.

2. In-between meals (fasting insulin) - insulin is higher than otherwise, less fat comes out of fat tissue over time.

Often the first subset is understood as the main idea behind insulin in discussions. And often I and others point out how the second subset is more likely. The reason is simple logistical efficiency. It's more efficient to store meal energy quickly into fat tissue (and other storage organs and tissues like the liver and muscles for glucose/glycogen), and it's more efficient to drain fat tissue in-between meals slowly. Perhaps as a result of natural selection, where eating a meal quickly lends more to survival than eating a meal slowly, and having a constant internal supply over a long period also lends itself more to survival.

The greater effect isn't with higher rate, but with longer period. This is due to the relative rate increase/decrease needed to obtain the same effect from either a meal or in-between. It's not that easy to stuff double the energy in a meal in the same short period (because the rate of storage is aleady so high), but quite easy to double or halve the rate of release in-between meals (because the rate of release is already so low).

The second subset can be rephrased as thrifty gene, but instead of "storing as much energy as possible", it's "releasing energy as slowly as possible". This then gives us yet another hypothesis:

Efficiency of energy usage - the more efficient we are at using energy, the slower the energy release from storage we can tolerate, the fatter we can grow. The converse is energy waste, where the more energy we waste, the less likely we are to grow fatter. For example, brown fat cells instead of white fat cells. A subset of this is the slower the rate of release from storage, the more efficient we become at using energy, and round we go.
Reply With Quote