Sugar causes inflammation/fat gain?

Nutrition Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello, I have a friend who made these claims based on a post I made about sugar not inherently being ~bad~ for you or causing weight gain.
Her claims are “sugar caused insulin spike, insulin spike causes inflammation, inflammation causes you to not burn fat the way that your body should. Therefore, storing fat, making you fat.” She also claims that glucose doesn’t cause inflammation when there are “minimal to no spikes” and that you can eat a steak followed by a milkshake and get less of a spike than if you had a milkshake on an empty stomach…

She cited me the following pudmed articles and I’m not going to pretend to be smart enough to understand everything the articles are saying and how they do or don’t relate to what she is claiming. But I do know and trust that it’s calories in vs calories out and I’d like to be able to provide her with an actual rebuttal to her claims, which is why I am here presenting this to ya’ll.

Articles:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art…20of%20obesity
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2

Andy,

Only one of these links is an actual study investigating the role of insulin, inflammation, and obesity. The other three are editorials, which can be useful for generating discussion or further experiments, though they don’t really add to any body of evidence.

Of the 1 RCT linked here, the authors conclude:

[/quote]
3 intervention groups were not observed to have different effects on hunger, satiety, lipid profiles, or other inflammatory and metabolic risk markers.[/quote]

Looks like inflammation is not really at play here. Diet-induced inflammation can be measured in a number of ways and is more reflective of the dietary pattern, rather than granular enough to tell you a particular food does X to insulin or Y to inflammation.

As to your friend’s claim regarding “spikes”, all foods cause an insulin spike. Thinking about food causes an insulin spike. Insulin is also an important satiety hormone, though it plays many roles. You can gain loads of fat under low insulin situations, e.g. Type 1 Diabetics who aren’t treated. So, the carb-insulin model is not off to a good start.

To the claim about about the milkshake and the steak, the higher Calorie load is going to raise insulin, though this doesn’t really more. It’s higher Calorie and more fat is stored. Hopefully she just misspoke and doesn’t actually believe this.

Then, when investigated over and over again in controlled feeding studies- low carbohydrate diets do no better (and in many cases worse) than low fat diets. This is also true in free-living studies when people aren’t kept under lock and key.

To be clear, a low carb diet is a fine way to eat if it meets other health-promoting dietary pattern criteria, but it’s not inherently better as your friend seems to suggest. Kind of seems like she’s doing a poor job parroting the low carb community.

In any case, I don’t think it’s your position to provide a rebuttal to her claims. She’s very clearly not an expert in this field and has not supported her claim with significant data. If she’s actually interested in discussing this, she can come here and I’d be happy to talk about it. I’m not interested in playing the telephone game though.

-Jordan