I know this is a somewhat biased source, and I have to say that I was a STRONG advocate of eating about 30% carbs for years before my son’s T1D dx, but I have now been seeing that the 30% carbs with higher fat IS causing the effect described in the article. What Causes Insulin Resistance? | Forks Over Knives
Apparently it is NOT seen in athletes who do endurance training. My son has gone from needing about 1 unit per 40 grams of carbs to needing 1 unit per 8 grams of carbs since I tried to increase dietary fat to get him more calories. It worked great for a year when he still had his own insulin (which must have been at a pretty high level).
I am afraid that this also may be slowing his growth and I have a hard time seeing a path out because he needs at least 1400 calories a day.
I found this. It seems that my son may be becoming “physiologically” insulin resistant because I tried to get the fat in his diet higher, and keep the carbs under 30%. It resulted in great control but has created troublesome patterns (late rising blood sugar, lows soon after eating because insulin is faster than the food, and also very high doses, carb ratios of about 8 to 1! Before I increased the fat he was at about 25 to 1. I am trying to find a way out. I went this route because he felt bad eating a lot of carbs after his DX because carbs had made him feel horrible.
Maybe a dumb question, but it’s something I’ve been playing
with for myself. Have you tried separating fat and carb intake?
It seems to me that eating how we evolved to eat is
generally a good rule of thumb for health. The idea of a food combining meal is
a very recent occurrence in our evolution. We largely would have sat down to
eat a particular food previously. There are also very few carb and fat
combining individual foods (even with modern developed plants), so we may not
be evolved very well to combine the 2.
As complicated as our hormonal control systems are around
eating, it seems fairly reasonable that the combination could confuse the
system. We may be set up to where when we taste sweet, our stomachs assume the
volume being ingested is just a carb source (or something similar), and then
overcompensating for the carb intake and taking time to recover.
If it’s the combination of fat and carbs that’s causing
issues, you could try your lower carb (30%) approach but separate your fat and
carb based meals and see if the insulin works better for meals without the fat
while still getting in the fat calories necessary to keep the carbs low at
separate times.
I initially was thinking along this lines. Which consequently made me think that Kiefer’s Carb backloading might be on to something. However, after researching more, I think its more of an overall energy intake of fats vs. carbs rather than an issue of combination at meals.
The more total energy intake from fats, the more intramuscular storage of fats, the more induced insulin resistance in muscular cells.
I do wonder if there is some validation to avoiding fats in the intra workout periods. Not because of a slowing of digestion which has been espoused for awhile now, but because of the enhanced uptake of nutrients as a result of exercise, it may be prudent to avoid exogenous FFA’s to reduce the amount of FFA uptake into the muscle which could result in an increased storage of intramuscular fat, reducing overall insulin sensitivity.
It seems that going high carbs 1-2 days a week might be the key to retaining insulin sensitivity (for athletes). That was why I mentioned the anabolic diet earlier.
Oddly, I have found in the last week that if I give my son more carbs, just enough to get a little over 30% he actually becomes more sensitive to his insulin.
I wanted to post this: Insulin resistance in type 1 diabetes - PubMed and also mention that I have been raising my son’s carbs over the last 2 weeks and he is actually needing LESS insulin. Just for some quick numbers, his insulin is down to 75% of what it was on a high fat, 25% carb diet, and his carbs are up to about 150% of where they were (maybe 170 grams instead of 115). It is clear to me now that intermuscular and intramuscular fat results in insulin resistance, and probably prevents cellular hydration (because fat is “dry” and glycogen is bound to water), prevents growth. It goes against everything I had come to believe over the last 5-6 years.
In talking to a few T1D biochemists (the have T1D themselves) I have also come to realize that when the body is deprived of carbs for activity, it stops making glycolytic enzymes, and it downregulates everything about burning carbs for movement so that carbs can be preserved for the brain.
T1D may actually be caused by a failure to use glucose properly by cells, and therefore a type of insulin resistance. Injected insulin will still make blood sugar drop because it will block glucose from being sent out of the liver, but it does NOT upregulate the glucose burning mechanisms in cells. This requires CARBS! and MOVEMENT! Absolutely rocking the core of my moderate starch paleo philosophy.
Also by the way, I have learned something about how the body uses fructose that makes me fear it much less than I had previously. I had come to believe that the body could safely process about 25 grams of fructose a day in the liver-turning it into glycogen, plus that you could add fructose if you were active to replenish liver glycogen. NOW however I have been taught that most fructose gets absorbed directly by the organs of the gut, and transformed into glucose and released into the bloodstream in the form of glucose, not fructose-so while fructose in the blood is bad, and the liver can process a limited amount, most consumed fructose is turned into glucose by the cells of the gut organs.
Anyway, I basically added “gasp” fruit, like bananas and oranges and strawberries to my son’s meals and suddenly he needs LESS insulin, less basal insulin (he went low at night though I have a monitor and had to cut his basal almost in half in a week) and his meal time patterns are normalizing AND his blood sugar is averaging 103 for the last 5 days without lows (well I caught them ahead of time) and with only about 10% of the day over 150 mg/dl. This is after he had been running 134 with a lot more insulin and fewer carbs for the last week or so.
25% carbs worked for 6-8 months, but clearly my son’s metabolism changed to where he was using glucose disfunctionally.