Tuesday, August 31, 2010

How to become diabetic in 6 hours!? Thanks Dr. Delgado for bringing science to the masses!

(Note: My apologies for the sarcastic tone of this post. I am not really congratulating anybody here!)

Dr. Nick Delgado shows us in this YouTube video how to "become diabetic" in 6 hours!

I must admit that I liked the real-time microscope imaging, and wish he had shown us more of that.

But really!

After consulting with my mentor, the MIMIW, I was reminded that there is at least one post on this blog that shows how one can "become diabetic" in just over 60 minutes – that is, about 6 times faster than using the technique described by Dr. Delgado.

The technique used in the post mentioned above is called "intense exercise", which is even believed to be health-promoting! (Unlike drinking olive oil as if it was water, or eating white bread.)

The advantage of this technique is that one can "become diabetic" by doing something healthy!

Thanks Dr. Delgado, your video ranks high up there, together with this Ali G. video, as a fine example of how to bring real science to the masses.

22 comments:

  1. Wow, that's fantastic! That is real science. Big screen plasma TV an all. I wish I could do science like that...

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  2. No offence, but please rememmber that many of your readers struggle to understand these topics and that - for them - humour does not always clarify what point you are trying to make.

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  3. Yeah, I've got to agree w/ anonymous. I really like your posts and have read every one of them. I get something from your perspective that I don't get elsewhere. However, the more traffic you get, the more people will arrive who do not "get it." You can decide whether or not to clarify your intent further in your posts (after all it is your blog) but just be aware.

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  4. I AM way confused now...???

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  6. Sorry folks. I added a note at the beginning of the post about its sarcastic tone.

    The inimitable master of this type of sarcastic discourse online is Peter, at Hyperlipid:

    http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/

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  7. Btw, thanks are due to Alex for pointing out Dr. Delgado's ridiculous video.

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  8. Thank you, I now know that drinking half a cup of olive oil followed 3 hours later by a giant pizza and cheese roll is bad for my health.

    It could however be used as a good example of how lipid metabolism is regulated, as far as I understand it. Some insulin is normally released due to the carbohydrate or protein that usually accompanies dietary fat. The insulin upregulates lipoprotein lipase expression and suppreses hormone sensitive lipase. The result is than when fat peaks in the blood 3-5 hours after eating the uptake of fat from the blood is increased and release of fatty acids from the fat cells is suppressed. This helps clear fat from the blood reducing the rise in tryglycerides and limiting fatty acid induced insulin resistance.

    Drinking pure fat bypasses normal regulation. With no insulin clearance of ingested fat from the plasma is impaired and fatty acids are still released from fat cells increasing insulin resistance. If at this point you ingest a massive dose of glucose (pizza) into your blood the temporary insulin resistance raises blood glucose. Neither the fat or glucose can be efficiently stored or metabolised raising both to unhealthy concentrations.

    It is almost as if the doctor used the ways that metabolic regulation works to make the olive oil look bad.

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  9. Hi Matthew.

    This doctor would make John L. O'Foub, whose middle name is "Lip", look like a fat lover.

    That talk about the fat making the blood a mess, made it sound as if fat was a toxin.

    He also managed to redefine diabetes, equating it to temporary physiological insulin resistance.

    All of that while showing some cool gadgets, which make him look quite believable ...

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  10. I agree although I would like to have his gadgets :)

    From looking at his website he also seems keen on injecting people with stem cells.

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  11. Question: Does saturated fat cause insulin resistance (temporary/chronic)?

    http://robbwolf.com/2010/02/04/insulin-anorexic/#comment-72129

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  12. Hi rick.

    Temporary physiological insulin resistance can be caused by a number of things. Among them are an increase in serum free fatty acids or ketones. These will go up with ingestion of a fatty meal, exercise, and fasting.

    This type of insulin resistance is reverted almost immediately after consumption of carbs. If you are temporarily insulin resistant, and you consume carbs, your blood glucose levels may go up slightly higher than if you are not. For example, they may peak at 160 mg/dl one hour after a carb-rich meal (which is normal), instead of peaking at 140 mg/dl otherwise. They are not going to go up to 200 mg/dl though; not for temporary physiological insulin resistance.

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  13. "Temporary physiological insulin resistance can be caused by a number of things. Among them are an increase in serum free fatty acids or ketones. These will go up with ingestion of a fatty meal, exercise, and fasting.

    This type of insulin resistance is reverted almost immediately after consumption of carbs. If you are temporarily insulin resistant, and you consume carbs, your blood glucose levels may go up slightly higher than if you are not. "

    so that is bad right? im a bit confused as i am petty sure i suffer from this induced by gorging on fat to gain weight. how do i fix it?

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  15. Hi Mal.

    I wouldn't worry about that. But eating a mix of foods containing protein, fat, and carbs should mitigate the effect. Force-feeding fat and then refined carbs, like Dr. Delgado did in the video, is rather unnatural anyway.

    Hunger regulation should have been very important for our ancestors, so I think that our natural hunger patterns should be trusted. That is, unless they are "messed up" due to an unnatural diet rich in highly processed foods. In that case, hunger patterns may take a few months to go back to natural levels.

    You have a bit of an advantage in that your body fat levels are very low. So you probably have high levels of serum adiponectin, which promote insulin sensitivity. Combining strength training with eating natural foods to satisfaction (but not force feeding) should be very good for you in the short to long term.

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  16. "Temporary physiological insulin resistance can be caused by a number of things. Among them are an increase in serum free fatty acids or ketones. These will go up with ingestion of a fatty meal, exercise, and fasting."

    Does this mean that a person who is losing weight (releasing free fatty acids, I presume) and engaging in exercise training will experience more glucose fluctuations than someone who is not?

    I ask, because in response to being diagnosed with mild diabetes (A1c 6.4 in May), I increased my exercise intensity and adopted a low-carb diet, along with going on Metformin. For reasons too numerous to list here, I believe I'm not a Type II, however, and am soon to have a genetic test for a glucokinase mutation (MODY 2).

    All of my efforts have only brought me down to a 6.1 as of early August. I think the issue is that I'm just not that insulin resistant, i.e. that's not the cause of my hyperglycemia. My glucose tolerance hasn't improved one iota, though I think monitoring my carbs has evened out some peaks. My fasting glucose tends to be between 125 and 140. I was only 10 pounds overweight and have lost 12 pounds.

    I started doing sprints once a week recently and noticed my glucose tolerance has *worsened.* (A few days ago I went up to 204 at one hour post-prandial, a new number for me, with the same carb load I'd had at the same meal a day before, when I went up to 135. It did go down under 120 at two hours post-prandial.)

    I found this study showing that exercise-trained rats have lower levels of glucokinase and lower insulin production, which seemed a possible explanation.

    http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/40/3/401.short

    You've now listed another reason this may be occurring. I do want to keep stepping up my exercise intensity and including weight training, but this trend has been alarming me. I'm not sure what to do about it.

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  17. Hi Helen.

    I believe it is the acute hormonal responses induced by intense exercise that may be affecting your glucose levels. They are the ones associated with elevated FFA and ketone levels.

    And sprinting, as well as HIIT in general, is a very intense form of exercise. Massive cortisol, adrenaline, and growth hormone responses tend to follow a sprinting session. See this post:

    http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/2010/05/growth-hormone-may-rise-300-percent.html

    Plus, when we exercise, our body's priority is preventing hypoglycemia, not hyperglycemia:

    http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-bodys-priority-is-preventing.html

    One alternative in your case is to do less intense exercise. For instance, localized resistance exercise with low weights and/or light exercise (e.g., walking).

    Finally, from exercise physiology, we know that the hormonal responses to intense exercise become much less pronounced as one goes from beginner to trained. So you may be going through a period of compensatory adaptation, and soon (e.g., in a few months) your glucose responses may stabilize even with intense exercise.

    But I simply don't know enough about this condition to say that this will happen with certainty.

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  19. Comment below from Corky:

    (Note: I think Blogger is not capturing comments with embedded links or scripts.)

    ***

    I saw this first here and thought, "Hmm, let me investigate further."

    To my delight, Googling "How to become diabetic in 6 hours" had one link. Yours.

    So, it seems Dr.DelGad-oaf hasn't reached the millions of converts he's hoped to.

    Wonder who he's working for . . . ?

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  20. Hi Corky.

    I am afraid Tom and I might have brought more attention to the video than it would have gotten otherwise.

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  21. Hey I really want to be diabetic because all of my friends are and they said u should c how it is and I want to so if I did this it would work for me to become diabetic?

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    1. Are you serious? There is a little more to diabetes than just "fitting with the crowd." I have a question for you, if your friends wanted to jump off the Empire State building, would you jump because they are? Just because they have a autoimmune dissorder does NOT mean you should join them. Enjoy your life and don't cause yourself pain!

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