111: The Sugar Diet: What the Science Really Says and Why It May Work for Some with Dr. Ben Bikman

You've heard of keto and carnivore, but what if I told you the latest trend is sugar? Ever wondered if piling on simple carbs from fruits, juices and honey could burn more fat, boost energy and improve metabolic health, all without cutting calories? Welcome to the 2025 sugar diet trend. A high carb, low fat, low protein plan. But is the hype real or just tales from fit enthusiasts? The evidence may surprise you. There could be legitimate molecular mechanisms that explain some of the reported benefits. And here's a shocker. It could all be a result of eating less protein. This is lecture 111 of the Metabolic Classroom. Looking to improve your own metabolic health? Visit insuliniq.com for courses, coaching, consultations and a 10 day free community membership trial to dive deep into the science behind behind Metabolic Health. Become an insider@Benbickman.com where you'll enjoy my exclusive content ad, free podcasts, live stream, Q A access and more. Welcome to the Metabolic Classroom. I'm Benjamin Bickman, biomedical scientist and professor of cell biology. Today we're exploring the sugar diet, a trend that has gained an enormous amount of tension here in the year 2025. So, over the course of this mini lecture, we're going to define the sugar diet. It's not qu it sounds like. Compare it to its historical twin of a diet. Review the available evidence for some of its health health effects, but also consider some of the profile of its latest advocates and why that might be a bit misleading and then even however, at the end, discuss some of the possible mechanisms. Now, the discussion that we'll go through is based on published literature as well as, unfortunately, some anecdotes. Now, scientists don't love anecdotes, but that's what a lot of this is based on. So we have to consider that a little bit. But overall, I, of course, I certainly hope to provide a bit of a balanced perspective, lest it seem like I'm just going to come out of the gate swinging. There are some interesting points here that I think you'll find interesting. All right, so let's get on with the lecture. Okay, so first of all, what is the sugar diet? Well, it's not, contrary to popular opinion, a person just eating spoonfuls of sugar. Based on recent discussions, online and reports, and indeed these anecdotes, it is, to say it another way, a very high carbohydrate, low fat and low protein diet. And it emphasizes simple sugars as the main energy source. Now, that means, not that it emphasizes spoonfuls of table sugar but rather it includes fruits, juice, fruit juices, honey, and sometimes things like sugar or even some candies or sugary beverages. But that's not the main part of it. Mostly it really is generally these simple sugars from things like fruits and juice and honey. As I noted, fat intake is very often quite low, below 10% of calories. So that's just a few grams a day. And protein, interestingly, is also very minimized. This is often also less than about 10% of the total calories per day. So that's important. So it's a very high carb, very low fat, very low protein diet. And it's that latter part, the low protein, that is a little peculiar, given the profile as we'll get to in a bit of many of the advocates for the so called sugar diet. And these advocates, these proponents, suggest that you consume these foods very freely without strict calorie limits. And they cite their own evidence and their own findings that it will support fat loss, that it does maintain muscle and it boosts energy by favoring this blood sugar metabolism or glucose metabolism. Now, the whole reason I am even taking time to discuss this is because it has become such a popular phenomenon. In fact, I'm even a little late to the game where this approach has spread through social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, et cetera, where individuals document these short term experiments showing remarkable weight loss and really great athletic physical performance. However, it lacks any sort of formal endorsement and it appears to really be more of a self experimentation trend rather than any sort of formal scientific approach. Now, from a metabolic viewpoint, the heavy reliance on sugar certainly for me raises concerns about sustained insulin elevation, which as you know, having connected with me before, the more a person is spiking their insulin and keeping it elevated, the more that will promote insulin resistance. Now we're going to get into mechanisms more in a moment, but I wanted to provide a historical context because this isn't quite as novel an approach as you might think it is. So 4. That context, the sugar diet, so called, shares remarkable similarities with the rice diet developed by Dr. Walter Kempner at Duke University in the 1930s. The rice diet was intended very deliberately for patients with severe hypertension and kidney disease and heart failure. And that's because heart disease was the main concern at the time and coincidentally is still the main leading cause of non infectious death within the United States and much of the world. So but at the time these were conditions that were really difficult to manage, and let's face it, they still are with bad information. But the rice diet Consisted primarily of white rice, but also fruits, fruit juices, and even some added sugars for getting more calories and just making it taste good. And this Diet was about 90% carbohydrate. Less than 5% of it was coming from fat. And as you can just do the math, about 5% of it would be coming from protein. So this was perhaps a more extreme version of the, what we call the sugar diet. It was so high in carbohydrate. Now there was a little bit difference there also where they deliberately restricted sodium and it was often calorie limited. They would want you to control the calories, you know, just to around that 2,000 calories per day. Now, Kempner's studies had he he reported data on thousands of patients noting significant improvements in things like blood pressure, you know, hypertension in hypertensive patients, average blood pressure drops really were pretty remarkable. And they noted even reductions in things like obesity. But of course, the diet was challenging to follow. You would only adhere to it when you were living within this facility. But it was difficult to adhere to because of the monotony. And let's face it, in a point I will make later, some of the nutrient deficiencies that would start to potentially creep up. And again, I'll come to that point later. We'll revisit that in a moment or a few moments. Now, modern analyses of the Rice diet suggest that the success was partly due to the calorie restriction, Rather than saying that the person was eating a lot of carbs. Now let me just play on that point for just a moment. I have stated before that with slow insulin resistance, and please go watch that previous metabolic classroom lecture where I discuss slow and fast insulin resistance. Slow insulin resistance is an insulin resistance that that is a result of an expand fat cell or a hypertrophic fat cell. And there are two variables that drive the expansion. And thus these same two variables can be leveraged to reduce the size. And that is insulin and energy. And the more energy is brought down, the more insulin also will come down. And so that's a very important thing to note, that if a person is cutting back on their calories, even if they're still eating a lot of carbs, they're still eating less than what they were before. And so insulin will come down. All right, now, so that was the rice diet in its this historical view, and I can't help but see a lot of similarity, that the sugar diet is simply the new version of the rice diet. So when we compare the two, they're both very High in carbohydrates from very refined or simple sources, very low in fat and very low in protein. And they're both really targeting this improvement in metabolic health. That's what they're claiming, that's what they're trying to do. Now the rice diet was medically supervised and it had a lot of rest. It was a very sort of low physical activity diet as well, or the diet came along with strong encouragement to just rest and be somewhat sedentary. But there was a lot of monitoring. But the sugar diet has none of those kinds of things. There's no calorie restriction. And in fact, as we'll get to it, is really used by people who are very physically active, which I actually think is a bit of a confounding variable. Okay, so let's come back to the sugar diet. Direct studies on the sugar diet are not only limited, they're actually non existent. This is a very recent trend. And there's no randomized controlled trials that I'm aware of. There are a lot of anecdotal reports, or not a lot. There are some strong anecdotal reports from a handful of people that do suggest short term fat loss, energy improvements and physical performance enhancements. So these people are doing really well with their exercise. Drawing from related research, high sugar diets from fruits can appear to offer some metabolic advantages in very active populations. But the overall literature on deliberately adding simple sugars to the diet is not good. Now, even as I'm going to, I think about this 2023, what's called an umbrella review, so a very, very big study covering dozens of other studies, it showed a lot of harms like increased risk of heart disease, increased risk of type 2 diabetes. But even as I look at that big review, I can't make a direct comparison to the sugar diet because that is, those are review articles that are just looking at how much extra sugar people are eating in the midst of a lot of fat and a lot of protein. And so it's not a surprise that that's not a very fair comparison. And an advocate of the sugar diet would be very justified in pointing out that restriction. So across multiple studies, if you try to find evidence that looks at high sugar, you can't, you almost can't use that term in a way that the sugar diet advocates are using it where it's a very, very high carb. In fact, that may be the better term for it. It should just be a high simple carbohydrate diet. Because calling it the sugar diet does invoke this improper idea that it is just a person drinking more sugary soda or adding more sugar to their cake or something like that. All right, now let's get into some studies that look that start to touch on although we'll get to the mechanism more in a mechanisms more in just a moment that could explain some of these benefits because people are reporting benefits and there is evidence in the published literature to, to hint at what could be happening here. All right, now one interesting study is from 2016 where they looked at a low protein, high carb, it was also low fat diet, but they deliberately restricted protein too. And then they looked at a bunch of metabolic markers. Now this 2016 study is interesting because it's primarily an animal study, but there was a little bit of a human arm to it. Now with the animal aspect, they took almost 1000 animals and spread them up randomly across 25 diets that were varying in the ratios of macronutrients, so proteins to carbs to fat ratios. And then as I noted, they had what's called a human validation arm. The methodology of the study tested metabolic health, things like glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity with some blood tests. And the finding revealed that low protein, 5 to 10% high carb diets reduced fasting blood glucose and insulin more than control than animals on just a standard diet. And this was even despite the higher carb load. Now of course those are animals in the human aspect of it, a very small group showed similar trends. So this wasn't a human study per se, but they included a human component. But they found some data that supported that view. You that lower protein led to improved glucose handling. And of course it was very small group, it was just a few weeks and so you can't really translate this too well. And there were no long term health outcomes. There was no monitoring of physical activity and sleep and cognition and other things. But the study does support the potential, at least short term metabolic benefits to the a diet that is very, very high carb and low protein and low fat. Now there was Another study, a 2022 study which I have noted previously for those of you who are part of the benbickman.com or the insulin IQ communities, you would have benefited from listening to one of my research reviews where I talked about this article, a 2022 randomized trial and it was interesting to me and why I highlighted it at the time a couple months ago was because they, they put these individuals into two different groups. One was just a group of protein restriction and one was calorie restriction and it was on 21 human patients with metabolic syndrome. So insulin resistance, pre diabetes over about the period of, of one month. And it was under some supervised inpatient conditions. So it's pretty well controlled. So a participants that they were split up into the two groups, the calorie restriction group consumed a diet with 25% fewer calories than their baseline energy needs. So they would have measured their metabolic rate and then said, all right, here's your metabolic rate. We're going to give you 25% fewer calories than your metabolic rate would demand in order to keep you where you are. But the protein restriction group was ISO caloric, matching their energy expenditure. So it was just eating their normal amount of calories, but it was low protein. So protein was no more than 10% of the calories. Both interventions, the calorie restriction and just the protein restriction, but remember, they had normal calories, so they were eating more calories. So both interventions led to significant weight loss, primarily from fat mass. It was about 6.6.6% in the protein restriction and 8% in the calorie restriction. So very similar. They noted also reduced blood glucose, reduced HbA1C levels, and what they would consider improved lipid profile. So LDL went down, which I find neither good nor bad. But also triglycerides went down, which I consider to be a decidedly good thing. But blood pressure improved and even markers of inflammation improved. Insulin sensitivity improved surprisingly well. It improved by 93% in the protein restriction group and 62% in the calorie restriction group. And they measured this with the hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamps. And they reported no muscle loss, no changes in gut microbiome or anything like that. So these findings, I think, are some of the most compelling, although I'm gonna get to another interesting one when we get to the mechanisms in just a moment. But they certainly do suggest that even in the absence of any kind of calorie restriction, protein restriction can mimic some of the benefits of calorie restriction for managing things like metabolic syndrome without requiring an overall reduction in energy. So this could be why individuals who are using or advocating for the sugar diet don't tell people that they need to restrict their calories, because this study would suggest that you can eat as much calories as you were before. And as long as you just restrict your protein, you're going to see some improvements. And indeed they did. It's a good study. Again, 2022 study, for those of you that are insiders, you can get the reference by accessing through the site. Okay, now what are some other concerns that I have? Even though I just shared with you a study to me, in fact, a couple studies with more to come. A notable issue with the sugar diet is that many, if not all of the advocates of the sugar diet that I've seen, in fact all of them that I can think of, and that as I was thinking of when I was creating some talking points here, they are very lean, highly active men. That is the, that is the two fold description of these individuals. Very lean, actually three very lean, very physically active, and they're all dudes. That to me introduces some confounding variables. There's very high muscle mass, very high physical activities, physical activity rates because of both of those. There's very high insulin sensitivity and very high glucose tolerance. Those are not the same thing. But it certainly means these are guys who are able to process high loads of refined sugars without much denting of their metabolic function. But, but there's a worry there to me that if you start to apply this diet broadly, is everyone going to respond the same way? One important point to that is that I think the sugar diet's efficacy could depend on individual traits beyond being a guy who's very lean, who's very physically active, but including things like self control and susceptibility to addictive eating behaviors. High carb diets that are rich in refined sugars or simple sugars like fruits, fruit juices and even sweets, because a lot of them are just even eating like gummy candies. It could absolutely exacerbate some food addiction behavior really driving these reward pathways like what we see with substance abuse. Remember in all of the human studies that look at the neurobiology of addiction to foods, it is always, it always comes back to carbohydrates. Not that there isn't evidence to suggest that high carb and high fat is also a rewarding addictive thing. But it's never just fat. It's never just protein. It is always the common variable being carbohydrates. And in fact, with that topic in mind, there are studies showing in humans that low carb approaches like ketogenic diets actually improve binge eating and reduce food cravings and addictive food behavior. So for people with high self control and no signs of addictive eating, like guys that are extremely lean and used to frankly a high degree of. I, I say self abuse, but I don't mean that in an ugly way. I mean these are people who are used to really punishing their bodies through Workouts, etc, high, high self control, high self discipline, that this very high simple sugar diet might be more feasible because they can manage the potential hunger spikes or the potential cravings just through just gritting their teeth and having discipline. But in these cases, in these cases, I think the reporting of the short term benefits, like the energy boosts, etc, I think it can work in them and it doesn't lead to over consumption or addictive eating behaviors, but for those with lower self control or addictive patterns. And let's face it, that kind of describes most people who are overweight, with or without type 2 diabetes, which is a disease of poorly metabolizing glucose. But these rapid glucose spikes and then the drops could absolutely trigger cycles of binging which could undermine any of these improvements. But I just note all of this to just underscore the importance of personalizing diets based on who you are and how you are and how you behave. Now one other point on this is some gender considerations because while it is easy to find lean, highly physically active, very muscled men that advocate the sugar diet, it's actually harder. Just as a fun bit of homework, it's harder to find women who report the same things. So when it comes to the sex considerations, women might not be responding as well to this and may be more sensitive to these glyce, to the glycemic and insulinemic variability of the high sugar diet. Now all of this is of course based on anecdotes. There aren't studies to show this and the really well, thorough studies that look at the sugar diet as it is currently used. But I mentioned protein restriction generally in a study. We're going to come back to some mechanisms in a moment. So there's a little more evidence than perhaps I'm suggesting. But if you try to find comparable anecdotal evidence that you see in men and find it in women, it is harder. I'm not saying there aren't some out there maybe, but I, I couldn't find any. Just as an interesting survey of social media and that is where much of the sugar, if not, well, all of the sugar diet exists. It doesn't exist in the published literature as it is currently practiced. And with all of that in mind, one important aspect to consider is satiety, this feeling of fullness that will drive our hunger and eating. Research on high carb diets, particularly those emphasizing simple sugars like in the sugar diet, show mixed but usually concerning effects on satiety. Some studies indicate that high carb meals can lead to a quicker return of hunger compared to meals higher in protein or fat. For example, one of the studies that I have in my citation list is a 2014 study that had participants consuming a high carb, low fat breakfast and they reported a significantly faster and stronger return to hunger. So these are people who, they'd eat the meal same amount of calories and be much hungrier sooner than a meal that was lower in carbs and higher in fat, but it was equal in protein. So that's, that's a bit something where maybe a sugar diet adherent would say, well, they should have done a low protein version to see how they feel that. And that's, that's a valid point because it does seem like some of the benefit in that, including that study in people with metabolic syndrome that I noted. I think it was a 2016 study, their fat levels were pretty modest. It was about like a 30% fat diet. Then it was 60% carb or 70% or so. And then it was extremely little protein. So there is some theme here that protein restriction appears to be good in the high sugar diet. And yet what we know from so much human evidence is that protein has a very strong satiating effect. More satiating than carbohydrates, more satiating than fat. And so you'd think that high protein diets are going to suppress appetite more effectively and support weight loss. And indeed they do. And that the more you are cutting protein, the more you are especially focusing on carbs, the more you are going to have hunger and blood sugar fluctuations that could lead to overeating. Now, of course, fiber is an underlying confounding variable here in that the sugar diet is surprisingly devoid of fiber. So this is another reason where the sugar diet would be offensive to many plant based people because they of course, are such advocates of protein consumption. So one way of looking at the sugar diet is it basically is just the big middle finger to every other diet. All right, now having said all of this, I have made it clear, and I will make it even clearer now by saying that I think a lot of what we're seeing is surprisingly a restriction in protein. This is surprising and it's even a little awkward for me because I'm an advocate of eating protein and yet I think that is actually the most likely mechanism because of not only that 20, I think it was a 2022 study actually that I had mentioned a moment ago, where they had them eat low protein and just cutting back protein even in the absence of any calorie cutting. They, they performed as well as the calorie cutting group. So let's just keep that in mind as we go through mechanisms because I actually attribute much of the molecular mechanism to the restriction in protein and what that elicits. Okay. With that in mind, I think a very relevant molecular mechanism that underlies a lot of this apparent metabolic benefit to the sugar diet could be a protein called fibroblast growth factor 21, FGF 21. It's a hormone that is produced in the liver and it increases with protein restriction. Now, one of the studies I'm going to cite in a moment, I need to acknowledge Nick Norwitz, a friend and really sharp science mind. I wouldn't, I don't know that I would have found this very recently published study if it hadn't been for him highlighting it. So I'm happy to acknowledge him being the source of me being able to share this with you. Okay, now before I get to that 2025 study, studies in mice and humans have shown that FGF 21 increases during low protein feeding. Now, that is metabolically favorable when FGF21 goes up because FGF21 improves insulin sensitivity, it promotes fatty acid oxidation, it enhances mitochondrial biogenesis, all of these things that are going to be favorable. A 2022 study in mice showed that FGF21 is also essential for lifespan extension. So promoting longevity and some metabolic improvements that you do see with protein restriction in humans. Low protein diets also elevate FGF 21, potentially mimicking some of these benefits from fasting without calorie restriction. Now, here's the study that I alluded to a moment ago, a very relevant paper published in 2025, so very recently, coincidentally coinciding with the rise of the sugar diet. And it was published in a very journal, Nature Metabolism. I'd love to publish in that journal. It's great, but it provides some pretty compelling evidence for these effects that I'm talking about. This is a randomized trial and it involved, here's a wrinkle, it was only healthy, lean men. Now, ladies, lest you be upset, most weight loss trials actually do include women. Women are, if anything, overrepresented. So don't, please don't think that it's some cabal against the fairer sex. But here it is. Healthy lean men were the study population. Which again comes back to the bias that I believe is inherently getting included in all of this, just through the social media influencers that are promoting it. All right, they were young, healthy, lean men. Now the trial lasted for five weeks, which is a pretty good length of time for a study. And the participants followed a low protein diet where they could only get 9% of their calories from protein. And interestingly, when they went on the low protein diet, they needed to consume about 20% more calories, almost 600 calories a day just to maintain their body weight. Let me say that again. They had them shift over to a very low protein diet, 9% of calories from pro, from protein. And in so doing, in order to maintain their body weight, they needed to eat 20% more calories. That's pretty crazy. Now, even in the midst of this. So they lost about 1 kg of fat and they didn't lose any muscle. Now a confounder there is though that they could have had, they didn't measure muscle, but they just measured fat free mass with water. So maybe there was some water retention, maybe there was a little bit of muscle loss. But based on this good study, it seemed like they didn't. Now let's come back to the mechanism. FGF 21 levels surged dramatically to a level that you don't often see in humans with any sort of thing. But FGF 21 levels went up by over, by over 360%. So like a, it almost went up like four times and at, at a peak compared to the normal protein group. And no surprise, this correlated with a lot of changes in mitochondri function, but even in the fat cells. Now this is something that my lab has focused on before. You've heard me discuss this phenomenon of mitochondrial uncoupling where my lab has found that when ketones are up, the mitochondria in the fat cells are burning more energy but wasting it as heat. So it's not, it's not coupled to burning more energy from glucose or fats in order to create more ATP, the functioning kind of energy unit for the cell. No. So normally you'd say, well, the cell needs this much energy and so it's going to burn the fuel to get that much energy, but not when the mitochondria are uncoupled. And that's what they found in this study that they noted that there was a significant increase in this metabolic inefficiency, which sounds like a bad thing, but in this case it's a good thing because it's the uncoupling. The mitochondria are inefficient, so they're burning fuel not because the cell needs energy, but it's just wasting it as heat. And that would absolutely explain some of the phenomenon that they found, which is or some of the phenomena they found, namely one being an increased metabolic rate or the need to eat more food in order to just maintain body weight. Now interestingly, these benefits were independent of whether the non protein calories came from carbs or fats. So I mean it's pretty inconvenient for those of us who feel like we've got a pretty great grasp of, of what makes fat cells get big and what makes them small. Everyone would focus on either fats or carbs. They would say it's just the calories or it's the insulin effect. And this study is when, like I said, kind of like a big middle finger parting, please, the crass metaphor here to, to both camps because it's saying, well you're all wrong. It's actually just cut protein, you cut protein, FGF 21 levels go through the roof and, and, and then you are going to be burning energy like gangbusters because of so much mitochondrial uncoupling. So the study highlights very clearly protein restriction is a key driver of metabolic benefits and it's very likely why the sugar diet experiences such remarkable is reported to find such incredible results. Now that study that I just shared with you differs from the sugar diet because it also allows a lot, it allowed a lot of fat. So I need to be clear. That study that I just cited reporting the big improvement in FGF 21 was not a perfect reflection of the sugar diet. Okay, now for the sake of time, I just want to mention that there are other mechanisms here like mtor. MTOR is going to be down and when MTOR is down with protein restriction, you're going to have more autophagy. Autophagy itself is an energy consuming process. It's going to be increasing the energy expenditure of a cell. Also you could have an increase in ampk and AMPK further promotes autophagy and there may even be an increase in growth hormone. There's a little bit of evidence to suggest that protein restriction is increases growth hormone. Now what does growth hormone do? You might have heard me articulate this before. Growth hormone actually does not promote growth. It directly only promotes fuel use including lipolysis or fat burning. If you want to actually look at hormones that promote growth, that's the insulin like growth factors also known as the somatomedans like IGF1, those actually promote growth. Growth hormone does not. Growth hormone promotes fuel mobilization like as I said, lipolysis. Now as we near the end here, if protein restriction appears to be the major mechanism for the sugar diet and based on that study from 2025 and some in nature metabolism that I just shared, it appears to be the case. I would be curious to see what happens if people go on a fat diet, which, which also. Which has not been done. There's no evidence on this. But what would happen if a person was eating 90% of their calories from fat and getting very, very low carb, very, very low protein? Would they see similar results? I, I bet they would actually. And it might even have more advantages because you're going to be creating more ketones which are going to be a fuel for the brain. So perhaps some improvements in cognition. So I just want to note that as much as there is in fact, Dr. Sean Baker, those of you who want to scroll through his social media, he actually conducted his own experiment on this where he did a fat version of the sugar diet, where the sugar diet, you know, which is really, really high carb. He just said, well, what if we just went really, really high fat and reported also some amazing improvements, albeit just over a few days. So I just want to note that. And while there are people who advocate periods of so called fasting when you're just eating protein, I actually wonder whether people would be more responsive beneficially to just having fat fasts where they're fasting from everything but they're just adding a little butter to their warm drink, perhaps. I confess that's actually something I sometimes do. If I want to go on a longer fast, I will do that and it makes the fasting effortless. And by the way, my blood sugar levels are. And exquisitely great levels and my ketones are up, which both of which I like. Now, one, one final comment on this is a concern that I. Any, any eating pattern that leans so heavily on carbohydrates is built around the one macronutrient that humans don't actually need to survive or even thrive. I would say there are such things as proteins that a person must eat. Essential amino acids would come in those proteins. There are such things as essential fats that a person must eat to maintain their health and survive. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So just at a foundational level, I can't help but wince a little at a diet that is so heavily focused on the one macronutrient that is not essential. Yes, you've heard me. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Now, I'm not saying that. Let's not eat any. I'm not saying that, but you could. All right, in Summary, the sugar diet's probably effective through its protein restriction and the surprisingly, surprisingly high increase in FGF 21, which promotes a host of favorable metabolic changes. I do think that this is just the modern version of the of Walter Kempner's rice diet, you know, emphasizing very simple sugars. There are a lot of anecdotal reports and they just all happen to be from very lean, very highly physically active men that when you try to find similar, similar or comparable reports in women, you just, you don't. At the end of it all, if this is something you want to experiment with, I'd just say be very mindful of what your history is with food, what are your own habits or even addictions, and just be very mindful of tracking your health metrics. Thanks for listening. Remember, more knowledge, Better health Looking to improve your own metabolic health? Visit insuliniq.com for courses, coaching, consultations and a 10 day free community membership trial to dive deep into the science behind metabolic health. Become an insider@Benbickman.com, where you'll enjoy my exclusive content ad, free podcasts, live stream, Q and A access and more. There to me that if you start to apply this diet broadly, is everyone going to respond the same way? One important point to that is that I think the sugar diet's efficacy could depend on individual traits beyond being a guy who's very lean, who's very physically active, but including things like self control and susceptibility to addictive eating behaviors. High carb diets that are rich in refined sugars or simple sugars like fruits, fruit juices and even sweets, because a lot of them are just even eating like gummy candies, it could absolutely exacerbate some food addiction behavior really driving these reward reward pathways like what we see with substance abuse. Remember in all of the human studies that look at the neurobiology of addiction to foods, it is always, it always comes back to carbohydrates. Not that there isn't evidence to suggest that high carb and high fat is also a rewarding addictive thing. But it's never just fat, it's never just protein. It is always the common variable being carbohydrates. Um, and in fact, with that topic in mind, there are studies showing in humans that low carb approaches like ketogenic diets actually improve binge eating and reduce food cravings and addictive food behavior. So for people with high self control and no signs of addictive eating, like guys that are extremely lean and used to frankly a high degree of I, I say self abuse, but I don't mean that in an ugly way. I mean these are people who are used to, to really punishing their bodies through workouts, et cetera. High, high self control, high self discipline, that this very high simple sugar diet might be more feasible because they can manage the potential hunger spikes or the potential cravings just through just gritting their teeth and having discipline. But in these cases, in these cases, I think the reporting of the short term benefits, like the energy boosts, et cetera, I think it's, it can work in them and it doesn't lead to over consumption or addictive eating behaviors. But for those with lower self control or addictive patterns, and let's face it, that kind of describes most people who are overweight, with or without type 2 diabetes, which is a disease of poorly metabolizing glucose. But these rapid glucose spikes and then the drops could absolutely trigger cycles of binging, which could undermine any of these improvements. But I just note all of this to just underscore the importance of personalizing diets based on who you are and how you are and how you behave. Now one other point on this is some gender considerations. Because while it is easy to find lean, highly physically active, very muscled men that advocate the sugar diet, it's actually harder. Just as a fun bit of homework, it's harder to find women who report the same things. So when it comes.