Glucose, insulin, and triglyceride responses to high and low carbohydrate diets in man.

Abstract

We administered alternating high fat and high carbohydrate diets to 15 patients and encountered a wide spectrum of plasma triglyceride response. An attempt was made to correlate this response with various measures of glucose and insulin metabolism. Glucose tolerance tests were performed just before the dietary studies, and the observed elevations of plasma glucose, insulin-like activity, and immunoreactive insulin correlated well with the magnitude of the triglyceride response that resulted from the subsequent ingestion of the higher .carbohydrate diet A similar high degree of correlation existed between the plasma triglyceride response and the average levels of plasma glucose and immunoreactive insulin reached during 9 hr. of a representative day of ingestlon of either the high fat or the high carbohydrate diet However, despite the presence of hyperlnsulinlsm, a high carbohydrate diet did not produce hypertrlglyceridemia In a patient with hypoglycemia secondary to an islet cell adenoma. We suggest that hyperinsulinemla, in the presence of normal to moderately elevated levels of plasma glucose, may be an important cause of the enhanced hepatic triglyceride production that underlies endogenous hypertriglyceridemia.