Insulin spike: Is this guy on the dot?

[preyst]

this passage is from another forum i came across regarding insulin spike. I'm convinced. What are your guy's interpretation of this? Note that i am 100% all for insulin spike and take 2:1 carb/protein ratio

yea... another insulin spike thread.

"The diet thing is always debatable. Everyone has a theory on when/what to eat. Your dedication and commitment is what gets you your gains, not breaking your diet in micro sections and anabolic windows. Ofcourse, I'll never convince you otherwise. That will come with time. You're smart, hopefully it won't take you as long as it did me.
I promote The Zone as a base. It works for everyone, no matter a persons fitness goals. Since you read about it, you know it's more about controlling insulin levels than performance. So it does have to be tweaked for an athlete. I eat more protein the they suggest. Most CF'er/tri guys/athletes in general should.
The bottom line is this, I've tried the carb loading, carb cycles, post load simple sugars for increasing insulin to exploit the "anabolic window" at the end of a workout. I've done the priming diets where you starve your body of carolies for a week to reset it's primal adaptations of survival, then over eat to create an anabolic environment.
The fact is, I've never made more gains than when I quit eating sugars and carbs that spike insulin. Spike is the important word here. All carbs per weight cause the body to release the same amount of insulin. Some just faster than others. And some even faster than that.
Bobybuilding, and therefore popfitness rhetoric is that this spike is anabolic. The problem is, insulin is not an anabolic hormone.
Anabolic is defined: the building up in the body of more complex substances from simpler ones. Insulin facilitates glycogen storage, right? That, in and of itself is not anabolic. Does this mechanism support some anabolic actions in the body by helping create a state in which the body is more prepared to rebuild and recover from intense trainig... yes.
The problem is, the body cannot absorb and assimilate but so many carbs by weight in so much time. So, you spike your insulin and take in "x" amounts of carbs in hopes your body crams it's muscle cells full of gycogen.
It doesn't work... it's not how the body works.

First off, it is simply an overload for the body. Before the body is done digesting those simple carbs, converting them to glycogen, uptaking it from the blood, and assimilating the glcogen into the submyocellular components, the insulin you've spiked and hope to use to exploit this imaginary "anabolic" window, is gone from the blood stream.
Basically, the body reuptakes the insulin faster than your body can convert the carbs to glycogen and store it in your cells. If everything has an equal and opposite reaction... then the spike of insulin is taken away just as fast as your body created it. It's your body's way of protecting itself from insulin resistance.
So now that insulin is gone and you've got all these carbs being release into the blood... where do they go? The liver? No way... it's full. It's the last to be depleted of glycogen. The liver is the glycogen bank... you could not eat for 3 days and you wouldn't start tearing into those glycogen stores.
So where do they, those carbs go? They are processed as waste in the renal and lymph systems and secreted promptly.
What does work is eating slower digesting carbs that do not spike insulin and therefore do not cause a drastic reuptake of insulin. So now, as your carbs are digested there is enough insulin available to transfer and put them where the body really needs them.

Secondly, and way more importantly, most of us never deplete our muscles of glycogen to any measurable levels. In anaerobic and glycolytic training the muscles do not use glycogen as a fuel source. It's ATP the muscle uses for contractual mobility functions.
Glycogen is used mostly for myocellular functions, not contractions. So you're not using up glycogen in your workouts.
And since insulin plays no part in the production of ATP, what's the point in trying to spike it. Again, I know, you're trying to cram glycogen into the muscle... but it does not need it. The bodybuilding/carb/insulin manipulating diets are not based on how your body actually works.
Most of the time I've found the bodybuilding community is right... about half of the **** they say. Like in this case, they talk about how sugars cause and insulin response. And yes, at first it sounds really good... especially to young inexperienced athletes looking for an edge, but they do not carry it to the end of the body's actions. They didn't follow the body's mechanisms to the end. Therefore, it's only half right. The other half is why it doesn't work.

From release to reuptake, the insulin response is more damaging than it can ever be "anabolic".

There's only a few hormones that are truely anabolic and most of them have nothing to do with muscles or increasing human performance... the word you should look at is androgenic."

[FlyingV]

this passage is from another forum i came across regarding insulin spike. I'm convinced.

Convinced of what, might I ask? I read through it but I'm not sure what the point is that he's trying to make. He makes a lot of generalizations, oversimplifications and there are a few questionable statements. He also seems to have overlooked that insulin also stimulates amino acids uptake and I think it's fair to call it an anabolic hormone for that reason alone.

This might get moved BTW.

[DRP7]

Convinced of what, might I ask? I read through it but I'm not sure what the point is that he's trying to make. He makes a lot of generalizations, oversimplifications and there are a few questionable statements. He also seems to have overlooked that insulin also stimulates amino acids uptake and I think it's fair to call it an anabolic hormone for that reason alone.

This might get moved BTW.

yes, but some recent research shows that in humans (in contrast to rodents and other animals) physiological elevations of insulin (as induced by oral carb intake) are not sufficient to increase protein synthesis. by that, physiological insulin levels are not anabolic. however, insulin is certainly anti-catabolic, but such anti-catabolic levels of insulin can be induced with amino acids (e.g. leucine, arginine).

[FlyingV]

yes, but some recent research shows that in humans (in contrast to rodents and other animals) physiological elevations of insulin (as induced by oral carb intake) are not sufficient to increase protein synthesis. by that, physiological insulin levels are not anabolic. however, insulin is certainly anti-catabolic, but such anti-catabolic levels of insulin can be induced with amino acids (e.g. leucine, arginine).

Well, I wouldn't have expected a simple rise in insulin - in and of itself - to increase protein synthesis in the first place. Why would it? All it is contributing to that process (protein synthesis) is facilitating amino acid uptake. That doesn't necessarily mean muscle cells will increase protein synthesis, it only means that one of the conditions for that to occur has been met.


Is his main point an attempt to pigeonhole insulin as anabolic or not? That seems like a non-starter. It has a complex role, it can contribute to an anabolic state or not, depends on a hundred other things.

Thanks for your reply.