The Cause of Diabetes in the Obese.

There was an interesting study done by Dr. Guenther Boden of the Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia and colleagues recently. They confined six normal-weight men to hospital beds for a week, encouraging them to stuff themselves with food — to the tune of 6,000 calories per day. Their objective was to investigate the genesis of obesity-associated insulin resistance.

This study seemed to show that increased oxidative stress was related to acute obesity onset. And the researchers suggested that a Protein, the GLUT4 glucose transporter, was affected by the excess of reactive oxygen species. This protein is produced by fat cells after insulin stimulation, and provides the means by which glucose is taken up from the blood. Obviously, if GLUT4 isn’t functioning properly, blood glucose levels will be adversely affected.

Refer to http://acsh.org/2015/11/6000-calorie-diet-yields-clues-to-insulin-resistance/

Maybe, I'm a little off here but it seems to me that an interesting follow-on study should look at the opposite state. There is a large pool of individuals undergoing RNY surgery. They drop a lot of weight, they halt the progression of obesity and in many cases their diabetes goes into remission and it does so within days. Maybe tracking the GLUT4 levels in these patients might give the researchers a large pool of data to put a nail into this research.