Last Updated on March 2, 2019 by Patricia Carter

Summary:  It is NOT calories in, calories out.  This Intervention Diet Weight Loss Study is looking to show just that.  It is being conducted by five prestigious universities:  Framingham State University, Boston Children’s Hospital, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Baylor University!  The study evaluates the effect of dietary carbohydrate and sugar consumption independent of energy content on body fatness and metabolism in a rigorous feeding study.  The study looks at WHY diets high in total carbohydrate, with or without added sugar, acts through increased insulin secretion, all during substrate partitioning towards storage and body fat, leading to increased hunger, slower metabolism, and accumulation of body fat. This is a randomized controlled feeding study involving 128 adults with BMI between 27 to 40.  The test diets include very low carbohydrate (about 70% fat), High carbohydrate low sugar (25% fat, 0% added sugar), and high carbohydrate high sugar (about 25% fat, 20% added sugars).  

In sum, you need to be:

• 18 to 50 years old,
• Have a BMI between 27 and 40,
• Be interested in healthy weight loss, and
• Be able to live and work remotely (if possible) full time because you’ll be living in a beautiful retreat in Ashland Massachusetts for 13 weeks!
• Willingness to follow a VLC weight-loss diet,
• Willingness to reside in a research unit for 3 months and eat/drink only provided study foods and beverages,
• No major food allergies or aversions,
• NO Chronic use of any medication or dietary supplement that could affect study outcomes (e.g., insulin, metformin, thyroxine),
• NO physician diagnosis of a major medical illness or eating disorder,
• NO history of kidney stones,
• NO laboratory tests with:  ALT>2x upper limit; HgA1c ≥6.5%; abnormal TSH; abnormal creatinine; abnormal uric acid (using the male upper limit for both sexes),
• NO failed CORI or SORI check
• NO current diagnosis or history of kidney stones, gout, or gall stones; or removal of gall bladder,
• NO exercise restrictions or at high risk for complications during exercise.

Female-specific exclusion criteria are:

• NOT menopausal,
• NO change in birth control medication during the 3 months prior to enrollment,
• NO pregnancy or lactation during the 12 months prior to enrollment, or intent to become pregnant during study participation.

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How this works –> You get:

• FREE home meal deliveries for 3 months,
• Then a 13 week expense free stay in a private room at the Warren Center –> a 100 acre wooded lakefront with miles of trails,
• Nutritional counseling,
• A personalized Health Report,
• Advance ground breaking scientific research, AND
• You can earn money while eating healthy –> up to $10,000!

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Relevant Publications are:

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For details, go to the FB4 website:

FB⁴ Relax. Eat Well. Advance Science.

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The clinical trial is at:

Macronutrients and Body Fat Accumulation: A Mechanistic Feeding Study.

This is where you’ll see loads of outcomes being measured from body mass, microbiome, energy expenditure, insulin, cholesterol, CRP, blood pressure, cortisol, leptin, ghrelin…

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Detailed Description of study:

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Contacts:

Investigators are:

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My first insight into diabetes came from Dr. Peter Attia

Dr Attia changed his attitude, lifestyle, and career based on going down the diabetes rabbit hole once he, a young athlete following the food pyramid to the letter and exercising 3 or 4 hours a day, had gained weight and was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome.  He had become insulin resistant which is the precursor to diabetes because the pancreas can’t keep up with the rising insulin due to the insulin resistance. Blood sugar rises and gets out of control leading the heart disease, cancer, and even Alzheimer’s Disease. He found that our conventional medical assumptions may be leading us to wage the wrong medical war.  Dr. Attia changed his diet (in manners that may shock you) and lifestyle, and no longer has metabolic syndrome. Dr Peter Attia, MD said,

“I dream of the day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance because as medical professionals we’ve shed our excess medical baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday’s ideas when they don’t appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn’t final but constantly evolving.”

Listen to his TED talk, Peter Attia: What if we’re wrong about diabetes?  The new thought is:  Obesity is a PROTECTIVE MODE the body does in response to insulin resistance caused by excess glucose from grains, starches, sugars…, not the reverse (eat too much then become obese) as currently believed.  Current ideas of cause and effect are wrong.  Lean exercisers can be insulin resistant, as he personally experienced.

You can read more on:

• Dr. Attia here,
• The role of IBS and diabetes here,
• The role heartburn drugs may have for diabetes and microbiome associations here.
• The paper, Before the onset of type 1 diabetes, gut community diversity plummets and markers of inflammation increase, is insightful as it showed that before the onset of Type 1 Diabetes, gut community diversity plummets and markers of inflammation increase:

• Regarding the metabolic syndrome and obese microbiome:  Resultant physiological factors are positively impacted by increasing probiotics (whole foods live fermented Kimchi).  The accumulating evidence suggests relationship of compositional changes of gut microbiota with onset of metabolic disorders and obesity:

Conclusions of 2011 study: Ingestion of fermented kimchi had positive effects on various factors associated with metabolic syndrome, including systolic and diastolic blood pressures, percent body fat, fasting glucose, and total cholesterol, compared with the fresh kimchi. These results suggest that the maturity of kimchi (fresh vs fermented) may affect obesity, lipid metabolism, and inflammatory processes... significant decreases in body weight, body mass index, and body fat in both groups, and the fermented kimchi group showed a significant decrease in the waist-hip ratio and fasting blood glucose. Net differences in the systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, percent body fat, fasting glucose, and total cholesterol in the fermented kimchi group were significantly greater than those in the fresh kimchi group. There was also a tendency for a decrease in fasting insulin after consumption of fermented kimchi. -Fermented kimchi reduces body weight and improves metabolic parameters in overweight and obese patients.

Conclusions of 2015 study: Twenty four obese women were randomly assigned to either fresh or fermented kimchi group foreight weeks of kimchi intervention. Pyrosequencing of fecal microbiota and microarray analyses of blood samples revealed that fresh and fermented kimchi interventions exerted differential effects on the obesity-related clinical parameters. Correlations of these effects with changes in blood gene expression and gut microbial population were more evident in the fermented kimchi group than the fresh kimchi group. –Contrasting effects of fresh and fermented kimchi consumption on gut microbiota composition and gene expression related to metabolic syndrome in obese Korean women.

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In conclusion,

This post increases awareness of the FB4 clinical diet-based intervention for weight loss that looks to test current ideas of cause and effect.

Best in health thru awareness,

#microbiome #weight #clinic#insulinresistance #food #diabetes#diabetestype2 #metabolism #weightloss#weightlossmotivation #cholesterol#insulin #crp #foodislife #foodismedicine#foodasmedicine #functionalmedicine#doctor #cme #whitecoat #bloodpressure#hypertension #biomeonboardawareness

♥Last updated: March 2, 2019 at 9:57 am to fix broken link for the FB4 website. Prior updates: Jan 14, 2019 was for block conversion for excerpt. June 28, 2018 corrected a typo.