How Losing The Wrong Fat Can Trigger Diabetes

Everyone “knows” that fat increases diabetes risk. Except when it doesn’t. And also except when it actively helps regulate energy metabolism.

So the “one size fits all” advice of “lose fat”, really can sometimes be way off the mark.

As a quick aside before we continue, body fat is often blamed for a lot of things that it’s not actually to blame for, and we wrote about this previously:

Fat’s Real Barriers To Health

We’ve also written about how different kinds of fat can have different impacts on health:

How To Make Your Body Fat Heart-Healthier

So, what’s this about losing the wrong fat actually being a trigger for diabetes?

The adipocyte paradox

Why fat is important: adipose (fat) tissue is an active organ that:

• stores excess energy safely as fat
• releases hormones that regulate metabolism and appetite
• helps keep blood sugar and lipid levels under control

We wrote about that a bit here: The Body Fat That Can Help Against Diabetes?

The paradox: while excess body fat can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, losing healthy fat tissue can also cause diabetes. This occurs where people lose fat from certain parts of the body, and in so doing, develop severe insulin resistance (and thus, type 2 diabetes)

Researchers (Dr. Jessica Maung et al.) found that this happens because losing healthy fat tissue—not just gaining excess fat—can disrupt metabolism and increase the risk of diabetes and fatty liver disease.

In other words, type 2 diabetes is not solely a disease of the pancreas’ insulin-producing beta cells, and healthy fat cells also play a critical role in maintaining normal blood sugar and overall metabolic health.

To test this idea further, Dr. Maung and her team studied fat tissue from people with familial partial lipodystrophy type 2 (FPLD2) and used that data to create a mouse model in which they switched off the lamin A/C gene in fat cells, mimicking the genetic mutation seen in the disease.

When they did this, the damaged fat cells:

• lost their ability to process and store lipids normally
• became very inflamed
• developed malfunctioning mitochondria, reducing energy production
• gradually deteriorated to the point that they eventually disappeared

…which then has the effects we saw, because as fat tissue disappears:

• excess fat can no longer be stored safely
• lipds accumulate in organs such as the liver
• hormone production from fat tissue is disrupted
• insulin resistance worsens, further increasing the risk of diabetes and fatty liver disease,

You can read the paper in full, here: Altered lipid metabolism and inflammatory programs associate with adipocyte loss in familial partial lipodystrophy 2

What does this mean in practical terms?

Most importantly, that just losing fat is not a panacea and can even be harmful sometimes.

For most people most of the time, the process we described above won’t happen, because it depends on there being faulty fat cells to remain when one loses the healthy ones.

But it’s just something to be aware of, and also a good reminder to focus on holistic health, rather than a single metric like fat loss.

And if you must pay attention to certain metrics, then perhaps consider other metrics that are Better Than BMI.

Take care!