Importance of a Low-Carb Diet for Treating Metabolic Conditions

How exactly does a low-carb diet help with metabolic conditions? If you’re wondering, this article is for you!

What Normal Looks Like

When the body is functioning well and not hindered by metabolic disease, energy needs and appetite are in balance.

Energy storage

Normally, when you eat food, your body breaks it down into nutrients that you absorb. All carbohydrates, from candy and sugary foods to starchy vegetables, break down into glucose. Your body must store that glucose for later use as energy. It does that by having your pancreas secrete insulin, which signals your body’s cells to store the glucose. Extra glucose is converted into fat and transported as triglycerides in your blood. It’s then stored in your fat cells as body fat.

Appetite and energy balance

Your body has an effective, hormone-driven method of appetite control, permitting a balance between energy use and energy consumption through dietary intake. When this works properly, your appetite signals you to eat enough food to replace what you’ve burned.

Satiety, or feeling satisfied after eating, is triggered by fats, proteins with complete amino acid profiles, and micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. Satiety is not triggered as effectively by carbohydrates or foods without balanced proteins, saturated fats, or adequate micronutrients.

Your liver, fat cells, pancreas, muscles, thyroid, and more all contribute to the flow of hormonal control that regulates appetite, metabolism, and energy storage for future use.

How It Goes Wrong

Carbohydrates comprise much of processed and packaged foods in the modern Western diet. Carbs are satisfying in the short term but protein has a longer effect on satiety. Without proper satiety signaling the need to eat more and more frequently is likely. Let’s explore the cascade of events that occur under these circumstances.

Modern foods hijack satiety

Modern industrially produced, processed foods fail to meet the nutritional requirements of fats, proteins with complete amino acid profiles, and micronutrients like vitamins and minerals; consequently, you must eat more of these processed foods to get your required nutrients (if it’s even possible).

Some people may overeat or binge eat. However, most people consume extra calories each day, accumulating over time. The liver converts excess blood sugar (from extra calories) into body fat, which is then transported as triglycerides and stored as body fat.

Several events occur, each making the next one worse:

Prediabetes

• A diet with elevated levels of carbohydrates creates high glucose absorption, which we call a high glycemic load.
• Overeating, even if it's only 100 extra calories per day, results in weight gain, though this effect is less evident with protein.
• Weight gain, and engorged fat cells, promote a systemic inflammatory response.
• As the body becomes inflamed, the cells don’t respond to insulin as effectively and become slow to store glucose. We call this insulin resistance, and it’s also known as prediabetes. It’s partly because inflammation affects the insulin receptors on the cell membranes, which are what insulin “plugs into” to make the cell store glucose. The inflammation also affects your fat cells directly.

Type 2 diabetes

• Your liver then has to create extra insulin to store the extra glucose.
• The elevated insulin levels and combined inflammation further damage insulin receptors, so the cells respond even less to insulin.
• Over time, glucose and insulin levels rise more. We call this type 2 diabetes.
• The extra sugar sticks to your red blood cells, a process called glycation. It allows us to look at a lab value, HbA1c, or glycated hemoglobin, and estimate how often and how high your blood sugar has been rising.
• As your fat cells can’t store more fat, it’s left in the bloodstream as triglycerides. Elevated triglycerides promote heart disease.

Obesity

Our bodies store energy in only a few ways. Energy is stored at the tissue level as ATP, ready for immediate bursts of energy. We also store energy as glycogen in the liver and the muscles. Essentially this is stored glucose used for slightly longer and more intense efforts. Most energy comes from body fat, the storehouse with the biggest reserves. Normally, the equation is balanced, so your body doesn’t consume more energy than it needs.

How does obesity happen in such a well-regulated system?

Fat cells are more than just a storage locker for triglycerides. Fat cells also produce hormones and messenger molecules known as adipokines. These influence the liver and other tissues, acting as part of the communication network that maintains energy balance. Some of these adipokines enhance insulin sensitivity, while others help regulate appetite.

When this network becomes imbalanced, as part of the prediabetes and diabetes mechanisms discussed above, this control mechanism becomes dysregulated.

What happens next is:

• Fat cells become inflamed.
• Their messaging signals trigger more appetite.
• Inflamed fat cells further insulin resistance.
• Fats increase in the bloodstream.
• Fats accumulate in muscle and liver, decreasing their insulin response.
• Appetite becomes uncoupled from actual energy needs.
• The body becomes an energy storage machine, as extra fat is repeatedly accumulated with more eating and extra calories.
• The fat accumulation in other tissues becomes toxic to mitochondria, further reducing the body’s ability to burn fuel.

Hypertension

High blood pressure, known as hypertension, is the final component of this failure of energy homeostasis. Your body's control of blood pressure is complex and effective, involving multiple organs, including the kidneys and the autonomic nervous system.

When this system is working normally, it regulates blood pressure to your brain, each of your muscles, every organ, and the surface of your skin. You rarely sense that the system is functioning, as its work is seamless, though you might observe changes in heat or cold conditions as blood flow compensates to preserve core temperature.

During metabolic disease a cycle develops.

Obesity causes several problems, including:

• Obstructive sleep apnea triggers your sympathetic fight-or-flight response and raises blood pressure.
• Increased leptin signaling, which also drives your sympathetic activation
• Activation of the kidney’s renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, which causes vasoconstriction and increased blood pressure, alters kidney function, promotes kidney disease, and causes your kidneys to retain sodium (which raises blood pressure)
• Drives insulin levels higher, causing your kidneys to preserve sodium, and raising blood pressure
• Increased body fat physically compresses the kidneys, causing increased renin-angiotensin-aldosterone activation. It also causes sodium retention, both of which raise blood pressure.

Elevated insulin levels, in turn, cause:

• Increased deposition of triglycerides in fat cells drives more fat cell dysfunction.
• Blood sugar levels become unstable.
• Low blood sugar levels drive additional cravings.
• Appetite increases, and more calories are consumed.

The cycle repeats, eventually increasing in magnitude as blood pressure, insulin, and obesity increase.

How Can You Address These Issues?

The practical and effective solution is to eat a diet that supports satiety, nutrition, and metabolic health, helping to treat the entire dysfunctional cycle of metabolic disease. The single most successful intervention for these conditions, by a wide margin, is a low-carbohydrate diet.

Low-carbohydrate diets show better glycemic (blood sugar) control and weight loss than low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. They also exhibit better blood pressure control than the low-sodium DASH diet, which has been the accepted standard for blood pressure dietary intervention until now. Research studies published in the last three years demonstrate that low-carb diets:

• Reduce blood glucose levels
• Reduce A1c (a measurement of blood glucose elevations over time)
• Reduce body fat
• Reduce blood pressure
• Cut medication needs

Published studies are now showing that treating metabolic disease with a low-carb diet has helped many patients reduce or eliminate their medication needs through nutritional therapy.

How It Works

This disease progression can be interrupted by a few simple steps supported by current science and published research. On Revero's low-carb diet you:

• Stop eating processed foods so that satiety can happen normally.
• Stop eating foods that contain sugar, to reduce your glycemic load.
• Stop eating starchy foods, as starch converts to sugar inside the body.
• Reduce carbohydrates to below 30 grams/day, mostly from non-starchy vegetables.
• Increase bioavailable, complete protein and nutrient intake by eating meat.
• Increase fat percentage in the diet by choosing fatty cuts of meat.

These simple steps can help your body return to a normal metabolic state by:

• Restoring insulin sensitivity at the cell level, so that your cells can store the extra glucose again
• Normalizing blood sugar and insulin levels and lowering your A1c
• Lowering inflammation, which happens from reducing glucose and insulin and losing weight
• Shifting from a sugar-burning metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism allows you to burn off extra body fat as fuel.
• Promoting weight loss and enabling your body to store fat and glucose normally again

When you eat this way, you are helping your body be less inflamed. With less inflammation, your body’s cells begin responding to insulin again. This is the beginning of taking control of your metabolic disease process.

Burning Fat Instead of Carbs for Fuel

The human body and brain evolved to use protein and fats as fuel, with small amounts of carbohydrates along the way. Fueling your body with a low-carb diet means cutting your dependence on carbohydrates and sugars for fuel and allowing your body to burn fats instead. The result is more stable brain function and a balanced metabolic state, where energy needs are easily met by diet without overeating.

There is no metabolic need for carbohydrates, as your body can function optimally without them. Your liver can easily produce the small supply of glucose your brain needs, as your brain can use ketone bodies derived from fat for most of its fuel.

This highly evolved mechanism helps your body stabilize blood sugar instead of being on a rollercoaster! It also helps your body function as it was designed to, yielding better physical and mental health.