You're not too fat, you're under-muscled

"Our health is in shambles because of our obsessive focus on body fat.”

What if people nowadays aren’t suffering from a problem of too much fat but too little muscle?

“All of my sickest patients had one thing in common. They all had unhealthy muscle,” Dr. Gabrielle Lyon told her TEDx audience. “73% of adults are either overweight or obese. Our health is in shambles because of our obsessive focus on body fat.” Dr. Lyon says that the reason so many of us are struggling is because we’re missing that “obesity at its core is a disease of the muscle.”

Last time, we talked about the protein leverage hypothesis which says that because the body is prioritizing protein, you will be hungrier eating a low-protein diet. Eating a high-protein diet will hit your protein needs on less calories. Several studies support this notion.

A study from just this year found that on average, each 1% increase in protein lowers total calorie intake  by about 1%. A 2011 study found that people ate more calories if they ate a 10% protein diet instead of a 15% protein diet. Another study found people with pre-diabetes lost more weight on a 30% protein diet than a 15% protein diet.

This time around we’re going to answer two questions:
(1) Why is muscle important to health and obesity?
(2) What is the benefit of eating more protein?

You need protein for a countless number of things: to keep your skin, bones and muscles healthy; protein is used to make neurotransmitters and hormones. Things like dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and thyroid hormones all require protein. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at how muscle (which is built up by protein) helps you make sure you’re achieving baseline health.

As we go through the next sections, keep this in mind:

reduced muscle mass and strength is commonly associated with many chronic diseases, including obesity and insulin resistance.(S)

Also, I think muscle explains why bodybuilders make fun of low-carb dieters so often.

The lowest bar for being healthy

The most important thing about healthy muscle is that it shields you from developing metabolic syndrome also “insulin resistance syndrome.”

Insulin is what allows you to take sugar out of the blood and put it in the cells so it can be used. If your tissues are insulin resistant it means your insulin doesn’t ‘work’ as well, so you need more insulin to properly manage incoming sugar. (Note: I’m using “sugar” interchangeably with “glucose.”) If you’re insulin resistant, you’re on a very unhealthy path to diabetes. Diabetes is kind of an epicenter for all kinds of health issues. It is a well known risk factor for cancer and you’re twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke if you have diabetes. Even though it’s several steps before actual diabetes, we really don’t want to be insulin resistant. Dr. Peter Attia says:

“If you have even the mildest interest in being healthy, you can’t be insulin resistant. …If you are insulin resistant, you are not going to be healthy.”

So what does muscle have to do with all this?

To make this really simple: 
・When you eat carbohydrate, it is broken down into glucose.
・Insulin takes the glucose out of the blood stream and puts it into various cells so you don’t have super high blood sugar just from eating a croissant. (Note: Blood Sugar is also referred to as Blood Glucose)
・However, Muscle is the key glucose sink that absorbs most of the glucose.
・The muscle can either ‘burn’ the glucose for energy or store it. The muscle can store a lot of glucose, and the liver can store a little bit.
・When the liver is full of stored glucose and there’s more glucose than the muscle can handle, the glucose gets turned into fat in the liver. (Note: This process is called De Novo Lipogenesis i.e. ‘New Fat Making’)
・This fat made in the liver gets stored in your fat tissue.
・If this process happens excessively, that fat made in the liver eventually gets stuck in the liver and lodged muscle. This indicates that you’re becoming insulin resistant. A key feature of insulin resistance is that you become worse at processing glucose.
・Muscle mass decline worsens insulin resistance because there’s less muscle to get rid of the excess glucose.(S)
・On the other hand, more muscle mass means less insulin resistance and more muscle to clear glucose from the blood (also called “glucose disposal”).(S)