Gluconeogenesis

I’ve had something about polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) in the hopper that is my brain for some time, but when I was finally catching up on my blog reading, I found that Dr. Kurt Harris has written something about it recently. It’s a good one.

It’s coming from a little different place than I am, and winds up somewhere a bit different, but it’s close. Ultimately, vegetable fats are not your friends. I’ll get to mine eventually, but go read his, especially if you’re a Paleo who uses canola oil, flax oil or eats a lot of nuts.

Anyway, another concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot came up on Robb Wolf’s podcast this week. Here’s “Bill’s” question:

Quick question about maximizing effectiveness of carb intake on cortisol levels. In a nutshell, if carb intake is restricted sufficiently to require more or less continuous gluconeogenesis to maintain blood sugar, and cortisol is the pathway by which gluconeogenesis is activated, wouldn’t eating close to zero carbs result in continuously elevated cortisol levels?

I’m pretty sure that this is what triggered my cortisol and adrenal issues. If I didn’t have *other* issues, it might not have happened, but I can’t help but notice that a lot of people (especially women) in the paleosphere also have hypothyroid symptoms. Non-raging hypothyroid symptoms (like gluten intolerance) are something you can experience for quite a long time and not realize that you just aren’t performing up to snuff. Once they start to abate, you realize just how many problems you had that were caused by your hormones that *aren’t* insulin. People in the low-carb world, paleo or not, tend to blame everything on insulin.

Here’s Robb Wolf’s answer (this is my transcription from the podcast. It may not be perfect, but I’m sure it’s pretty close):

Cortisol is not the only way to turn on gluconeogenesis, it’s one way to do it, but it’s not the only way to do it. The thought here is good, and this is part of the reason why the Intermittent Fasting stuff is really interesting, but also potentially very, very problematic because if you are in a fasted state, and then begin training, especially at a high intensity level, the likelihood of you releasing cortisol to prop up blood sugar levels is very, very high.

When I was talking with Lon Kilgore [not sure about that name, maybe this guy?] the other day about how cortisol levels can be elevated from overtraining and one of the obvious places this can happen, like if we’re doing intense, mixed modal activity where we’re using a lot of muscle mass intensely, like basically taking things down to failure, we’re causing a huge stimulus to uptake glucose into the muscles. If we clear all the blood glucose out of the bloodstream into the muscles, we’re going to really perturb the system, and if we do not have an easy way of replenishing that glucose then we are going to stimulate the release of cortisol and adrenaline to release glucose out of the liver. And so this is one of those things that when I’m looking back at my own problems with elevated cortisol levels, the AM training in a fasted state, when I’m looking back at it and I was already stressed, already having problems, already overly caffeinated and then throwing in fasted training on top of that? Oh, I was an idiot, no wonder I ended up producing the problems that I had.

He goes on to talk about moderation, and says that (paraphrased) some of the HIT training, some of the fasting is OK and maybe you can fly under the cortisol radar if you’ve got everything else in order, if you aren’t stressed and you’re sleeping enough and all that.

Robb and Andy Deas have discussed caffeine in the past, so they don’t go into that piece again here. Basically, they feel a moderate intake is OK and that something to slow down the jolt (heavy cream or coconut/almond milk if you don’t do dairy) is beneficial. They take a lot of questions about caffeine and alcohol in the podcast.

Also, Robb seems to feel pretty strongly that benefits of Intermittent Fasting max out at 16 hours. He has mentioned that more than once in these podcasts. The other half of the question:

Likewise, to maximize development of muscle (occurring in reduced cortisol environment) wouldn’t the ideal, though perhaps unattainable, diet be the one that provided JUST enough carbs to nearly eliminate gluconeogenesis, thus generating the lowest levels of cortisol due to diet (all other factors being equal)? Or is my understanding of this simply immature?

Robb’s answer:

I think that’s pretty spot on from the reality for maximum muscle development, although I am no means an exemplary expert in this area, the things that seem to go into it are insulin sensitivity but then also getting away with as much carbohydrate as you can definitely has some growth promotion to it, but different people have some different levels of buy-in on how much carbohydrate they can tolerate in this whole scene. The cortisol management piece is definitely really important from an androgen perspective. If your cortisol is going up, testosterone is going to go down and it’s going to have some other collateral damage effects including insulin sensitivity because of elevated cortisol, so there’s a lot of reasons for keeping cortisol in tight check.

As your pro-sleep hormones fall off (your best quality sleep for hormone balancing occurs before midnight), your system starts to produce cortisol in the morning to get you going. This is normal, but it’s *not* normal if you’re getting that shot of cortisol at 3am or 4am and waking up then. I found that if that happens (I can usually go back to sleep for a couple of hours, but it’s not high-quality sleep), I have a higher fasting blood glucose in the morning (in the 90s or about 105 instead of my normal low 80s) as well. This also makes sense, because the cortisol is driving the liver to produce some glucose as part of the waking process. So, this is a deranged reaction as the BG is too high and I was waking up too early.

Since I added the carbs back (a serving of fruit at the end of two meals and one meal with root veggies – I eat about 100g of carbohydrate a day including fiber), my morning blood sugars are coming down from 95-100. Yesterday it was 72 (which is really too low), and today it was 87, which is just right. I’m not waking up at 3 or 4am either, obviously. It’s a slow process, but everything keeps getting a *little bit better* every day.