These “Thinking about “ pieces are my highly speculative way
of working out diabetes using the KPT2
perspective, right now I’m wondering about obesity and whether it really is
what we’ve been told it is.
First of all I believe there is something in our food that
can be toxic at a fundamental level, especially with constant exposure, which
causes our bodies to compensate in ways that cause problems down the line.
Essentially, I’m saying that body processes go awry and
instead of helping, begin to hurt. The result of this is what I’m calling
inflammation, basically slightly misaligned processes that are rubbing each
other the wrong way. These processes go awry do to cumulative trauma. Cumulative
trauma is actually a term for injury caused by repetitive actions. I use it
here because it captures the idea of repeated exposures causing small amounts
of damage that can lead to chronic and disabling consequences.
Here’s a useful analogy. A highly skilled boxer blocks or
slips most punches but still some get through and take an effect. This tells in
the later rounds when the coordination is missing and the punches are neither
hard nor crisp, systems are now misfiring due to the accumulated damage caused
by punches.
Robert
Scheinman on
A Sweet Life used this description for IR,
which I’m now stealing for my own purposes. You have a satellite disk on the
roof and through the actions of wind and rain, it slowly, over time, shifts. It
becomes misaligned and the reception begins to suffer. You can boost the signal
many times to get reception but for the most part you’re going to get a lot
more static as well. Think of this static as an interference that disrupts or
skews signaling in the body.
Okay, I almost said it. Now I’ll state it concisely. Fat is
largely protective in our modern toxic environment. Think of it as the body’s
storage facility, a place where the effects of toxicity can be sequestered.
Notice that I said “the effects of toxicity”. I don’t doubt that some toxins do
get stored in the body, but here I’m talking about the compensations that the
body makes when it comes into contact with a toxin
Toxicity is a very specific thing for any given individual;
some of us are sensitive to some things and not to others and some vary in how
much exposure will cause a response. There is a general area under the curve
where our behavior clusters given any input but we are talking KPD here. It is widely known that people of color have
a disproportionate rate of diabetes and KPD is found at a higher rate in
peoples of color. So for the sake of keeping this short, I’m going with the
idea that KPD’s basically have around the same sensitivities.
Now I can give you the idea of “fat carrying capacity”. One
of the papers mentioned on this blog referred to the fact that the heaviest
KPD’s kept their blood sugars in check far better than the thinner diabetics
even as they continued to gain weight.
This situation continued until eventually the people
relapsed. Their blood sugars rose sharply .
My position on this is that they reached the end of their carrying capacity.
This is where the body can no longer put on body fat as a response to a
continual toxic challenge because body fat, in itself, becomes toxic. Without
this ability, the toxicity (which in this case may be the high blood sugars)
can not be stored and the blood sugars rose until they, once again, went out of
control.
I’m using blood sugars here but what is body putting on fat in
response to? It could be almost anything,
that it has a strong correlation to stabilized blood sugars in this case
doesn’t mean that they are linked. There could be a myriad of things triggering
it. What this is about is that this is a response to something internal not to
caloric intake or goodness of food.
This carrying capacity runs largely between the two poles of
skeletal muscle and fat tissues both
which can be used to draw down toxicity effects and depending on the person
this storage will be on a line between these two poles.
For example, I put on muscle easily but fat is nearly
impossible for me to maintain. In this case, I would be down near the muscle
part of the spectrum. I actually think this is rare. There is a very strong
evolutionary advantage to putting on weight since it gives you something to
fall back on in lean times. I would suspect that most people would shade more
towards fat storage.
The common view of fat storage is that it is a way to store
energy for future uses. Here the idea takes a bit of a twist. Putting on fat is
a way of offsetting problems caused by blood sugars by quickly converting these
sugars to fat and storing them in fat tissue. Obviously, this would have to do
with the relative sensitivity of the two types of tissue to insulin. This is
not a constant but I would say that those who tend to put on fat have more
overall sensitivity there.
Let’s put this on a scale of 0 to 100. At “0”, a person has
no ability to store fats while at “100” they have an endless ability to do so.
Where a person sits on this scale determines the person’s carrying capacity.
I would assume that the need for such capacity would only
come into play if the person needs it. If the environment doesn’t contain a lot
of toxicity for an individual then there would be little or no reaction and
little need to use this capacity.
Why do people feel better when the drop weight? Using this
idea, it would be when they have exceeded their carrying capacity. The lose of
weight would take them below the point where their weight becomes toxic. This
would also seem to suggest that it should be very hard to lose and keep off
weight since the fat isn’t about energy but a need to off set some imbalance.
In this case, it serves a purpose in maintaining stability. The body would seek
to put this weight back on and if it is truly protective, it would probably put
back more to guard against any future losses.
This may seem absurd but I don’t find it any more absurd as
believing that in the last forty years a third of the population has become
lazy over eaters. There is also the fact that most of the people I know, who are
obese, work pretty hard and do watch what they eat.
Slowly, I am being prodded up a path that says the strong
correlation between diabetes and obesity is akin to that of smoke and heat to
fire.
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