I have a friend who has recently been ‘diagnosed’ with pre-diabetes. So far all I know is that her fasting blood sugar is higher, at 5.6. From personal experience I know that doesn’t mean shit.

 Anyway we have suggested, several times, that her friend read the Tim Noakes essay which gives a very good insight into this subject. I wanted a summary of it and couldn’t find one. So I’ve started to put it together myself.

What did we evolve to eat? Look before the agricultural revolution 12000 years ago. Look before bread, cakes, sweets!

Gut biome is crucial as this provides additional nutrients missing from diet. Modern diet kills gut biome.

We have evolved to run very efficiently and for long distances. We are supposed to have thin waists according to our structure. This so why running is a poor exercise for weight loss. We are designed to run long distances efficiently.

We evolved as strong and clever hunters by eating energy dense food with fat and protein. Meat. We outhunted lions because of our ability to keep running efficiently in midday heat.

Our metabolic profile that evolved enables us to process fat and protein efficiently but doesn’t process carbohydrate so well.

Eating a diet rich in fat and protein but poor in carbs produces a specific metabolic profile – insulin resistance (IR)

Carbohydrate is the only Macronutrient completely non essential for life. Avoiding it has no short or long term effects on our health other than the effect of weight loss.

However glucose is essential. It fuels the brain! But it can be produced from the liver from fat and protein and is not required to be ingested as carbs in our diet.

Every other part of our body can be fueled by fat.

So, evolutionary speaking we are all insulin resistant to a greater or lesser extent. Insulin resistance is our incapacity to metabolise ingested carbs.

A high blood glucose concentration is very toxic for human tissues because glucose damages the structure of all proteins.

To minimise this effect, humans secrete the hormone insulin whenever carbs are ingested to counter the effects of the rise in blood glucose. Insulin causes the body to either use the glucose for energy immediately or store that energy as fuel in the liver and muscles. Any that can’t be used or stored this way is then immediately converted to fat. It is first converted to fat in the liver and then transported to fat tissues on the body.

In order to maximise the carbs ingested it also turns off the fat burning ability of the body.

The more insulin resistant a person is the more prone to diabetes they are. As a person becomes IR the body has to produce more and more insulin to have the same effect. Eventually the body becomes so resistant that they are unable to manage the glucose in the blood and damage is done.

There are two modern dietary blunders that are catastrophic:

• The agricultural revolution 12000 years ago turned us from being hunter gathers of primarily meat and fibrous roots into producers of primarily carb based products from cereals, grain and wheat;
• The USDA dietary guidelines from 1977. This was a politically and commercially motivated act that distorted science on an unprecedented scale (read Nina teicholz big fat surprise for more) that spread a false gospel that fatty foods caused heart disease and we should all eat carb based. Cholesterol was hyped as the baddie which was causing this disease. This is wrong and came about because of false presentation of data by ancel keys.

It was actually mainly cigarettes which were causing the problem.

Yudkin also showed a causation with sugar consumption at the same time that keys was active. But yudkin was ridiculed.

Worst case scenario is that the removal of fat from the diet is very likely the single direct cause of obesity and diabetes epidemics that begin after the 1980s