On the greatly-exaggerated demise of the insulin-hypothesis
Last week, I tweeted a New England Journal of Medicine image challenge, part of the journal’s continuing education program for physicians. I suggested that it might be a source of comfort to those who were worried about the insulin hypothesis as a viable hypothesis to explain obesity and excess fat accumulation. Although I linked to … [Read more]
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Updates for 2012
Checking in after a long absence (working too hard, and blogging too little), I have news and updates for 2012. The first order of business is a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Tara Parker-Pope’s “The Fat Trap” article that ran on the cover of the January 1st NYT Magazine. I … [Read more]
Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(e, as in “end” and “enough already”)
In our last post, we discussed, among other things, an experiment from the 1960s that Dr. Stephan Guyenet of wholehealthsource.org has evoked to support the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity. This was an experiment by Sami Hashim and Ted Van Itallie published in 1965. Four subjects, two lean and two obese, consumed a formula … [Read more]
Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(d)
When last I left off, the subject of discussion was the critical question about the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity: Can palatability and reward value of foods be disassociated from the metabolic and hormonal effects of the individual nutrients being consumed and, in particular, the sugar and refined grains that “hyper-rewarding” foods seem to … [Read more]
Catching up on lost time – the Ancestral Health Symposium, food reward, palatability, insulin signaling and carbohydrates… Part II(c)
We’ve been discussing the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity and whether this idea adds anything meaningful to our understanding of obesity. Is the evidence for it sufficiently compelling that we should cease to pay attention to the fact that insulin, as Yalow and Berson noted in 1965, is “the principal regulator of fat metabolism?” … [Read more]