Short rant on eating frequency, insulin... and mct oil

So as it seems that some people follow a high frequency eating pattern, like 5 meals a day, I thought I'd make a quick post for som general concepts regarding all of the metabolic stuff :-)

1) With 5 meals a day, your body will be digesting food, in our case fats and proteins, pretty much all day. Meaning, when you get ab at 8 am having your breakfast, having dinner at 6, with digestion going on for, say, 4-6 hours, your body is digesting food 14-16 hours

2) Even if those meals do not show up at all or only very little on your ketomojo regarding glucose, you still are probably lowering ketones significantly, because of insulin spiking for hours on end.

3) Contrary to current mainstrem believe (via missinformed youtube gurus) insulin is NOT a fat storage hormone. Its first and foremost job is to shuttle nutrients from your bloodstream into cells, most of those being muscle cells.

4) That means that proteins WILL raise your insulin levels as your body wants to get rid of it from the bloodstream, shuttling them into all kinds of cells

5) Fats will also rise insulin, thought the graphs you might have seen show zero to nothing. Muscle cells also use fats as energy, you mught have heard of the "fat burning zone" so those need higher insulin levels as well to get their fats into it

6) Fat going into fat cells does not need insulin to work, fatty acids just "blob" into fat cells, thats the reason theres no or almost no insulin response with people in studies within a sedentary setting

7) So back on topic: You degesting your 5 meals will raise your insulin for 14-16 hours. How much insulin is it? veeerrryyy little. As you do eat 80%+ fats, the digestion is super super slow. But still, insulin will go up. And here is the kicker:

8) Tiny changes in insulin levels will prevent your ketones from going up, they will probably go down a bit, in best case they stay the same. I will look for studies on this, but those are very hard if not impossible to do, as you would have a control group eating keto with omad and one group eating 5 meals a day, while measuring insulin and ketone response. Insulin is not measured oftentimes in those studies

9) Okay, but what is the alternative you may ask? Well, on the other side of the meal frequency spectrum, we have OMAD, one meal a day. It is a huge meal. But it is one meal. Meaning, after digesting it, it may take not 4-6 hours but rather 6-8, your insulin and glucose will come down... and your ketones will be able to rise again. You all know that ketones go up the most with fasting (My definition of fasting is 24+hours)

So the question is: Is the AUC the are under the curve response of glucose, insulin and ketones more benefitial with a) 5 meals or b) a OMAD protocol? Maybe this is different in every person, but i quite doubt it, i think there is a definitive answer to that question. But you can simply experiment on yourself: After having a consistant GKI reading, keep the protocol for another 5 days, then try a omad protocol for 10 days.

As we cant measure insulin and your glucose response is probably very low, we can only use ketones as an indirect indicator of insulin spikes. So: what are your ketones before and 1 hour after every 5 meal? And what are the ketones before and 1,2,3 hours afte your omad? Then you can do some calculations and get the auc result for the whole day pretty easily :-)

P.S: All of this may be not be of the importance if you ingest MCT oils with your foods as those will raise your ketones artificially and keep you at a great gki level no matter what you do. Thing is, MCT oil is empty, so Id recommend using cod liver oil for every third meal to give your body essential fatty, acids!

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