Art DeVany is one of the forefathers of the paleo, ancestral health or evolutionary fitness (his preferred term) movement.
Most of his stuff is behind a paywall, so I’m not as familiar with him as I am with others like Robb Wolf or Mark Sisson.
I do have Art’s book, The New Evolution Diet, on Kindle, but haven’t read it yet, largely because Chris Masterjohn’s review wasn’t particularly flattering.
But given Art’s history (and the fact he’ll be at the Ancestral Health symposium I’m heading to in the late summer), I recently listened to Jimmy Moore’s interview with Art. I found some of Art’s comments about the role of insulin on obesity really interesting, as it ties into my current fascination with insulin resistance and the liver.
So for your reading pleasure (and my archival), here’s a transcript of some of these comments, beginning around the 23:50 mark (very lightly edited by moi, any errors likely mine).
[Muscle] insulin resistance is a naturally evolved adaptation which tends to be brain sparing. The problem is the chronic. Acute episodes of insulin are fine, … but chronic exposure to insulin desensitizes the body.
If your liver becomes insulin resistant, it just doesn’t know what orders to follow any more. It just keeps pumping out the lipids at a high rate. This is how the whole metabolic cascade begins. So you have to be careful about the pattern of insulin release.
Jimmy: Now what role does exercise play when it comes to insulin sensitivity?
Art: A big one, because the muscle is the primary source for disposal of glucose. And it’s the glucose ‘sink’ in some sense as well because the glucose can enter the muscle and be stored there as glycogen. And then later the body can call upon, by degrading the amino acids in the muscle, the alanine can be used to make glucose for the brain.
So basically, I let my liver and my muscle feed my brain. I don’t give it carbohydrate at all. It works wonderfully. It’s a selfish brain theory which you’ll see developed at some length in the book.
The brain is selfish, it wants to protect its glucose supply. If you start starving the brain of its glucose because you’ve made it and other tissues resistant to the action of insulin through bad behavior, the brain will have to induce insulin resistance in order to spare the glucose that it wants for itself.
The problem is that fat becomes a competitor to the brain for energy. … This is a very complex coordination problem inside the body. Ultimately, fat cells can become so powerful because of the inflammatory substances that they release that induce insulin resistance in other tissues and thus they end up getting more for themselves.
So there’s a little bit of an open forward feedback loop here that can lead to obesity propelling still further accumulation of fat through the insulin resistance induced by the inflammation.
Later (around the 34:55 mark) Art talks about why “eat less, move more” is a simplistic way of looking at weight loss:
So take somebody who’s become insulin resistant and has substantial fat mass. They’re hungry all the time, because the fat mass is denying nutrients to other tissues and has induced insulin resistance to the muscle, the brain and the liver. …
They’re not burning fat because they’re somewhat incapable of burning fat because their insulin levels are chronically high. So they can’t access the fat that is sitting right there in their bodies very well.
Consequently, the brain gets hungry and what does it do, it says ‘stop moving’ and then secondly says ‘eat something right now.’ So you put those two forces together and you can see that it’s really the brain that has to stay in some kind of energy balance. …
So somebody who becomes overweight and whose brain is hungry which is almost always the case, that’s why they seem pathologically incapable of limiting their eating, because the brain still lives in 40,000 BC. It doesn’t know it’s not going to starve, it thinks its in an energy crisis.
More later, but for now, this reinforces my latest thoughts that weight loss exercise in a “calories in vs out” sense (a la ‘chronic cardio’) is not so helpful, but exercise to address insulin resistance (e.g. HIIT) is actually critical. Glad I have that appointment for a Body by Science trainer next week!
