this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Starving to death will also solve obesity (and cure cancer!), but that's probably not the solution that most people are looking for. Dr. Walter Kempner reversed severe obesity and various other ailments by putting his patients on a diet in which 90-95% of calories came from easily-digested carbohydrates. Carbohydrate consumption does not result in chronically-elevated fasting insulin in the absence of excess fat consumption. This is crucial to understanding the aetiology of type-2 diabetes in particular, but it also relates to obesity and "metabolic" illness in general.
This is a very strong statement. Can you please share your literature on this claim? I'd love to read more about it.
Dr. Barnard's presentation (the video link) has information regarding the insulin response to carbohydrate consumption in the presence vs absence of excess fat. It has been years since I have read the literature on which he based that presentation, but his book, Program for Reversing Diabetes (available online but which I will not link directly here for DMCA reasons), cites many different sources which you can consult.
The rice diet / potato diet / sugar diet - All based on Kempner's work - All are very interesting, they reduce inflammation by not triggering the Randel Cycle (not a cycle) cross inhibition of inflammation. They also increase basial metabolic rates by FGF-21 protein sparing (something like 20% increase).
For some people this reduction of inflammation is enough to resolve their obesity and type 2 diabetes! The Rice diet, as I'm sure you read about, had very poor adherence rates - Kempner had something of a scandal when the corporal punishments he used to keep people on the diet were revealed.
This does not diminish the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, both of these datapoints can exist together on the same plane of existence.
When I say elevated insulin is a necessary part of obesity, i mean that very strictly, it is necessary but not sufficient cause of obesity. There are a class of people who by reducing inflammation and increasing their base metabolic rate by 20% will sufficiently reduce their obesity... however, this doesn't remove from the insulin model of obesity - it is a subset of it. To metabolize the fat of a obese person following kempner's rice diet, they still get a insulin spike eating their carbohydrates, and while insulin is elevated they pause fat burning - that really doesn't change.. An Obese person following the rice diet is pausing their fat burning for 2-4 hours after every eating event, if they eat 3 times a day, that is 12 hours of no fat burning per day... can they burn enough fat in the remaining 12 hours to make a difference? Sure, why not, but its making things unnecessarily difficult.