The muscle mass trend that is reviving interest in sugar
Insulin is a key hormone that allows our cells to use sugar; thanks to it, muscle increases its energy and water reserves, but it also promotes the formation of body fat in the body’s fat tissue and the liver. It is increasingly mentioned among consumers, not necessarily when diabetes, the directly related disease, is present, but among athletes, people with excess weight, and in relation to some skin changes, perhaps making it one of the most measured hormones in both healthy and sick people.
Thanks to technological advances—internet, AI—health care, culture, education, and social media, measuring insulin and blood glucose has become part of people’s everyday lives through watches and bracelets that can perceive, record, regulate, and even intervene to monitor indicators of health or disease. These devices are being used to guide physical activity, provide medication dose reminders, and report real-time information on normal or altered body functions so that users can have control over their health conditions (Lu et al., 2020).
While the advancement of these technological sensors creates many opportunities for the development of specialized systems for health care and precision medicine, there is discussion around their recreational use, which has become a trend in sports activities more than in clinical practice (Lu et al., 2020), generating more anxiety in those who use them when making food decisions, precisely because they do not have the ability to interpret that information in the context of their own needs and routines.
This is the case of blood glucose monitors that many athletes use to determine when and what they need to eat. This trend is based on the carbohydrate-insulin model and seeks to describe, on an individual scale, the effect of food on metabolism; the model states that excess calorie consumption is not the cause of excess body fat, but rather the distribution of those calories among different foods and, as a crucial factor, the glycemic load of each and every food that makes up our daily diet, as predictors of the amount of sugar in the blood after eating. Insulin is an anabolic hormone; that is, it serves to “build” protein and maintain an athlete’s muscle cells, or to “build” fat in the liver and other parts of the body, changing body composition (Ludwig et al., 2021)
If we think about the population-level effect of reduced-fat foods, for example, this explains the wide availability of high-glycemic-index foods, especially due to added sugars and modern processed carbohydrates (Ludwig et al., 2021), such as corn-derived maltodextrins and high-fructose syrups, which are used as fat substitutes to provide the texture and consistency consumers expect. The carbohydrate-insulin model interprets the obesity epidemic by including factors that go beyond just the amount of sugar, such as protein and fiber intake, fat composition, the order in which foods are eaten within the same meal, mealtimes, hormonal peaks and valleys better known as circadian cycles, level of physical activity, and the influence of environmental factors as well
The existence of probiotics is even known, microorganisms that live in our intestine and can influence body weight control; science has called the regulation of energy balance and glucose metabolism the gut-brain axis, in which, in addition to the pancreas and insulin, the liver and intestine are fundamental. The scope of the gut microbiota is studied in terms of controlling what we choose to eat and how much, the hedonic aspect, that is, flavors, colors, textures, and our ability to “manage” calories (Van Hul et al., 2024).
Smart Alerts vs. Proprioception and Self-Regulation
The fear that the healthy and health-conscious consumer has developed toward sugar is more the result of anxiety than self-knowledge; it is the consequence of demonizing a food instead of educating people about the right measure.
For example, a device that provides information on heart rate, distance traveled, and calories burned during aerobic exercise does not perceive the changes the body experiences during an intense Pilates session. Why? Because when the brain gives up control of the unconscious, survival-based breathing in which we remain, and we take control of the seconds in which we inhale, exhale, and remain in apnea or “without air,” that is the basis for managing the use of our energy reserves—body fat—with strength and movement. A device that measures these changes within our own body does not yet exist, and according to mindfulness, this is our capacity for proprioception and is key to emotional stability.
Muscle Supercompensation
It is a natural phenomenon that demonstrates the mechanism muscle has to process carbohydrates when its energy reserves decrease, prioritizing the use of glucose obtained from food in the formation of muscle sugars, glycogen. In humans, carbohydrate intake after exercise increases glycogen formation in step with the increased release of insulin from the pancreas; this increase has two phases: an initial rapid phase, which does not depend on insulin but rather on the decrease in glycogen levels, and the following slow and prolonged phase, which does depend on insulin (Katz, 2022).
If carbohydrate consumption continues for several days after exercise, the muscle exceeds its reserves, which is why it is called supercompensation (Katz, 2022); in other words, a person who has a consistent physical activity routine and has increased their muscle mass does not become “deconditioned” by stopping exercise and changing their diet during 15 days of vacation. They may have a supercompensated muscle that retains more water and also more sugars converted into glycogen, and they did not necessarily increase body fat. That is the magic of insulin and sugar in a body accustomed to strength exercise.
In conclusion, popularizing personalized health concepts through health devices is an inevitable advance and will come to play an important role in self-care; however, more research is needed in the development of future applications, making it essential to accompany and educate users so that this information can be properly interpreted, avoiding false alarms and additional sources of anxiety regarding the normal functioning of the body (Lu et al., 2020). This becomes especially important if the interpretation of the information quantified by these devices is framed within the proposal of the carbohydrate-insulin model, which proposes that by regulating consumption times and types of sugars (Ludwig et al., 2021), it is possible to reduce the effect of this hormone on the increase of fat reserves in the liver and body fat mass, because life must be sweetened in just the right measure.
