You’re quite right about the showy American style
@Docb It’s a whole different style which, yes, can be a bit jarring to start with. Yes, you can pay for a Meal Planner from Forks Over Knives but there are lots of free recipes there too. Likewise the Dan Buettner website and others. Many websites have pop ups encouraging you to subscribe, etc, both in the U.K. and US.
If you want to go down a rabbit hole, take a look at all the related stuff. The Forks Over Knives film and the What The Health film, the Engine 2 Diet (Rip Esselstyn - yes, his first name is really Rip), How Not To Die book, the Blue Zones and Dan Buettner books and websites and more.
Yes, it’s weight loss but as I understand it, what they’re saying is that the saturated fat increases insulin resistance. Michael Greger has some videos on it and there’s a transcripted podcast from Cyrus Khambatta with a fair bit of detail. I can’t comment on the science because I’m not a scientist but the diet does work to decrease insulin resistance. They compare it with the keto diet which, they say, doesn’t solve the actual problem of insulin resistance.
Here are some videos from Michael Greger (his website is Nutrition Facts and has loads of videos on it):
Prediabetes and type 2 diabetes are caused by a drop in insulin sensitivity blamed on “intramyocellular lipid,” the buildup of fat inside our muscle cells.
nutritionfacts.org
We’ve known since the 1930s that type 2 diabetes can be prevented, arrested, and even reversed with a plant-based diet. Within five years of following the
nutritionfacts.org
And an edited (because they chat) section from the transcript of a podcast with Cyrus Khambatta. Again, lots of chatty Americanness because it’s a podcast but I extracted some explanation:
“
Let's go back to 2007, when I first began my graduate degree. My professor at the time said, "Cyrus, I'm going to give you a project for the next five years. And the project is to understand every single aspect of insulin resistance. I want you to learn what causes it, how to induce it in laboratory mice and in laboratory rats, and then how you can rescue insulin sensitivity using either intermittent fasting, calorie restriction or movement." So this is a really fascinating topic, and there's a thousand different rabbit holes that you can get caught in. My first homework assignment was to try and figure out how do I create insulin resistance in laboratory mice and laboratory rats? What am I going to do? And what my head was saying is just feed them a diet that's got a lot of sugar in it, Cyrus.
Feed them either artificial sweeteners or fructose or high fructose corn syrup. And when I looked into the research to try and figure out how insulin resistance was induced in laboratory animals, the answer was totally different. The answer was very different. The answer was feed them a diet that is high in saturated fat, for a minimum of eight weeks. If you do that, animals will become insulin resistant. And it's very, very repeatable, extremely easy to measure, extremely easy to perform.
So here's how this works. Fat in food is locked up in a molecule known as triglyceride. Triglyceride is just the storage form of fatty acids inside of mammals, and inside of fruits and vegetables and plant material. So triglyceride is how fat exists primarily in the natural world. If you consume triglyceride inside of a food that contains a significant amount of fat, like let's say you're consuming red meat, or you consume cheese, or maybe even an avocado, or maybe you have some olive oil. All of those foods tend to be fat rich, and they contain triglycerides. So you consume the triglyceride, it travels into your mouth, it goes down your esophagus, it gets inside of your stomach. Inside of your stomach is an acid chamber, where the walls of your stomach are secreting hydrochloric acid into the lumen, and they're basically using that as a mechanism to try and get access to the food and start to unfold it.
So primarily protein is denatured and unfolded from its three dimensional structure and linearized inside of your stomach. At that point the partially digested food material, called chyme, ends up transitioning into your small intestine. Your small intestine is a magical, magical organ, because inside of your small intestine that's where the bulk of nutrient digestion and absorption happens. In your small intestine there are digestive enzymes that are secreted by your liver and your pancreas and your gallbladder, and your small intestine itself. And that cocktail of enzymes has a very specific function. And that is these enzymes go and they effectively attack the food that you are eating, or that you just ate. And their purpose is to try and take this food and take it from its large macro molecules and cut them into individual pieces, and then take those individual pieces and absorb them through the walls of your small intestine and put them into your blood.
So when it comes to triglyceride, the triglyceride is basically cut. The reason it's called triglyceride is because there are three fatty acid molecules attached to a glycerol. So you have a glycerol backbone plus three fatty acids. And the digestive enzymes hydrolyze or cut the glycerol from the three fatty acids, and then those three fatty acids are then transported into your lymph system. And then in your lymph system there then eventually dumped into your blood. And then once they're inside of your blood they are then packaged into these things called chylomicron particles. There's some funky words that we use in the biology world, but the idea here is these chylomicron particles are these little spaceships. And they're spaceships that contain a bunch of cargo. And there are billions of them in circulation inside of your blood at any moment in time.
So right after a fat-rich meal, these chylomicrons are loaded with the cargo of fatty acids. And these fatty acids circulate in chylomicrons. And their goal is to get to a tissue so that the fatty acids can be unloaded into a tissue. Now, if I could design the human body, or if I could design mammals from the ground up, what I would do is I would make it so that those chylomicron particles only really have access to one tissue. And that one tissue is called fat tissue, or adipose tissue. Because if those chylomicron particles went only to the fat tissue and delivered their cargo into the fat tissue, that would actually be physiologically safe. Because your fat tissue is actually a very safe place to keep fatty acids. It's designed both mechanically and enzymatically to be able to take up large amounts of fat, when present, and then store that fat and lock it up in a triglyceride one more time, and keep it until it doesn't need it anymore, then it can cut it and deliver to other tissues.
But here's the problem. When those chylomicrons are loaded with their fatty acid cargo and they circulate, they not only deliver fat to the fat tissue, which is again the safe place to put it, but they also deliver the excess to your liver, and they also deliver the excess to your muscle. So now you have fatty acids that are basically getting partitioned into one of three tissues. Your adipose tissue, number one, and then your muscle and your liver is number two and number three.”
Cyrus Khambatta, PhD went from “soccer stud” to “chronic disease patient” in the blink of an eye when he was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, alopecia, and Type 1 diabetes in 2002. Today, he is the author and co-founder of “Mastering Diabetes.”
www.plantstrongpodcast.com
I still eat some animal products but I also eat lots of plant-based meals. I’m convinced that some variation of that is healthiest (ie plant-based fully or some high percentage of plant-based) and the recommended diet has been demonstrated to reduce insulin resistance.
Note - I’ve responded with detail not because I’m trying to persuade anyone but because I think there’s prejudice against the idea and people don’t look with an open mind. There’s not some vegan conspiracy going on here. Most of these people have changed their diet because the evidence suggested it was best. There is, of course, evidence about the benefits of vegan and vegetarian diets for things like cancer too. Everyone should choose what works for them and what they can sustain, but I believe they should choose without prejudice and look at as much different information as they can. We all make our own choices, as we should.
