Thinking about Diabesity 3

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.

http://ketosisprone.blogspot.com/2010/06/increased-weight-and-insulin-resistance.html

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.