The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

by Gary Taubes

Elevating insulin even slightly above some hypothetical threshold will cause fat cells to enter storage mode. The longer the insulin remains elevated, even if by barely measurable amounts, the longer fat cells will be storing fat, not mobilizing it. For this reason, some of the most prominent diabetes researchers in the world—i.e., the specialists whose purview included paying attention to insulin—had speculated in the 1960s and ’70s that having too much insulin circulating in the blood or having fat tissue excessively sensitive to insulin might be the cause of obesity. It might be the reason, as Bruch said, the metabolism shifts too much into storage mode, the reason some of us may trap five or ten or twenty or even one hundred excess calories a day as fat into our fat tissue and others don’t. These researchers were just speculating on what seemed like an obvious cause-and-effect possibility, a prime suspect in the mechanism of why we get fat.