How your body reacts to Atkins, Paleo and the 5:2 ‘is determined by your metabolism’

For years, failing to lose weight while on a diet has been put down to a simple lack of willpower.

Whether the diet is the Atkins, Dukan, 5:2, or Paleo diets have often been more successful for some would-be slimmers than others

Slimmers who fail to lose weight because it is believed their eating is ‘out of control’ may simply be getting the wrong advice on what to eat, the scientists claim.

Now researchers have discovered that our bodies are unique in their response to a wide range of everyday foods, including pizza, bread, and ice cream.

Even foods considered healthy in most people – such as tomatoes – can cause blood sugar levels to surge in individuals, the study found.

The slimmers had highly variable responses to basic starchy foods such as bread and rice – with some people being much more ‘carbohydrate sensitive’ than others.

In other instances some people saw their blood sugar levels fall on eating fat – while others this had a limited effect.

Ice cream and pizza were two foods that led to rises in blood sugar in some individuals – but not in others eating identical items.

And it’s not just a case of adding extra weight: high blood sugar levels, as well as a potential cause of diabetes can increase the risk of becoming overweight and obese, heart disease, liver disease and high blood pressure.

The authors suggest that personalised diet plans may help people struggling with getting good results from their diets.

Scientists made the discovery while monitoring the diets of 800 people representative of the general Israeli population over the course of 46,898 meals.

The subjects recorded everything that they ate on a smartphone app, and monitored their blood sugar levels continuously on a portable glucose monitor.

The scientists also recorded how much sleep and exercise the participants took. The huge amount of personal data was then analysed by computer to see what effect individual foods had on the individual’s body.

Eran Segal, a computer scientist of the Weizmann Institute, Israel said: ‘Most dietary recommendations that one can think of are based on one of these grading systems; however, what people didn’t highlight, or maybe they didn’t fully appreciate, is that there are profound differences between individuals–in some cases, individuals have opposite response to one another, and this is really a big hole in the literature.’

Her colleague, Eran Elinav added: ‘Measuring such a large cohort without any prejudice really enlightened us on how inaccurate we all were about one of the most basic concepts of our existence, which is what we eat and how we integrate nutrition into our daily life.

‘In contrast to our current practices, tailoring diets to the individual may allow us to utilise nutrition as means of controlling elevated blood sugar levels and its associated medical conditions.’

In one case a middle-aged obese woman with pre-diabetes -who had failed to succeed on a range of diets over the years, learned that her blood sugar ‘spiked’ after eating tomatoes, the researchers said.

Dr Elinav said: ‘For this person, an individualized tailored diet would not have included tomatoes but may have included other ingredients that many of us would not consider healthy, but are in fact healthy for her.

‘Before this study was conducted, there is no way that anyone could have provided her with such personalized recommendations, which may substantially impact the progression of her pre-diabetes.’

Editor’s NOTE: Do some careful research on your own. There are mixed reactions and reports regarding the Paleo Diet. Our suggestion would be to first purchase a copy of Dr. Kelley’s Self Test for the Different Metabolic Types to determine first – exactly what types of foods that your metabolism would balance best with. ~ J.B.

In general, eating dietary fibre was overall found to help reduce blood sugar levels overall, while a lack of sleep, highly salty diets, and having existing high cholesterol levels all had a negative effect on blood sugar, the authors wrote in the journal Cell.

The authors suggest that giving each food a ‘glycaemic index’ – in other words how much sugar it produces in your blood when it is eaten – is not useful, as it varies greatly between individuals.

The authors said the major reason we have such diverse reactions to ordinary foods is to do with the make-up of bacteria in our guts, which vary greatly from individual to individual.

Dr Segal said that the findings will force us to look at how diets work in a new light. He said: ‘The intuition of people is that we know how to treat these conditions, and it’s just that people are not listening and are eating out of control–but maybe people are actually compliant but in many cases we were giving them wrong advice.

‘It’s common knowledge among dieticians and doctors that their patients respond very differently to assigned diets’.

‘We can see in the data that the same general recommendations are not always helping people, and my biggest hope is that we can move this boat and steer it in a different direction.’

Written by Colin Fernandez, Science Correspondent for The Daily Mail, November 19, 2015.

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