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I consider the amount of insulin a food or beverage causes the body to produce a key benchmark for nutrition research. For any nutrition claim, I want to know how much of the causality is working through insulin and what effect is left over when insulin production is held constant either experimentally or statistically. You can see why I take this view in "Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon" and "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid."

Bonnie Kavoussi pointed me to the graphic above, which does a good job at showing how to avoid the types of food that are the very highest on the insulin index. However, taking the insulin index that I discuss in detail in "Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid" as the gold standard, let me point to a few problems with this graphic: 

1. The Keto Food Pyramid doesn't do a good job at distinguishing between types of food that are medium on the insulin index and those that are low on the insulin index. Avoiding high is most important, but leaning toward low in the choice between low and medium also matters. In particular, any fruit (including berries), as well as most types of meat, poultry and fish need to be eaten in moderation.

2. While skim milk is high on the insulin index, whole milk is not.

3. While some types of beans are high on the insulin index, other types of beans are reasonably low on the insulin index.

4. While I suspect typical American spaghetti is indeed quite bad, existing evidence on the insulin index suggests (surprisingly) that there may be some types of pasta that are not so bad. More research is needed on this.

5. It is only raw carrots that are OK. Cooked carrots have a higher glycemic index, suggesting a high insulin index.

6. Potatoes should be on the banned list.

7. Most important of all, soft drinks, punch and juice need to be on the banned list!

In addition to the key posts mentioned above,

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon,

don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

• 3 Achievable Resolutions for Weight Loss

• Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts

• Lisa Drayer: Is Fasting the Fountain of Youth?

• Jason Fung's Single Best Weight Loss Tip: Don't Eat All the Time

• 4 Propositions on Weight Loss

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon

• Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

• What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet

• The Problem with Processed Food

• On Exercise and Weight Loss

• David Ludwig: It Takes Time to Adapt to a Lowcarb, Highfat Diet

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

• Yes, Sugar is Really Bad for You

• Best Health Guide: 10 Surprising Changes When You Quit Sugar

• Letting Go of Sugar

• Heidi Turner, Michael Schwartz and Kristen Domonell on How Bad Sugar Is

• Which Is Worse for You: Sugar or Fat?

• Does Sugar Make Dietary Fat Less OK?

• Sugar as a Slow Poison

• How Sugar Makes People Hangry

• Michael Lowe and Heidi Mitchell: Is Getting ‘Hangry’ Actually a Thing?

• Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression

• Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

• How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed

• Why You Should Worry about Cancer Promotion by Diet as Much as You Worry about Cancer Initiation by Carcinogens

• Good News! Cancer Cells are Metabolically Handicapped

• How Sugar, Too Much Protein, Inflammation and Injury Could Drive Epigenetic Cellular Evolution Toward Cancer

• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?

• My Annual Anti-Cancer Fast

IV. Eating Tips

• Our Delusions about 'Healthy' Snacks—Nuts to That!

• My Giant Salad

• Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index

• The Keto Food Pyramid

• Hints for Healthy Eating from the Nurse's Health Study

• Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy

• Eating on the Road

• Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review

• In Praise of Avocados

• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice

• Which Nonsugar Sweeteners are OK? An Insulin-Index Perspective

• Black Bean Brownies

• On Food Preparation Memes

• Christmas Dinner 2018 with the Kimballs in Colorado

• Freakonomics: The Story of Bananas

V. Calories In/Calories Out

• Nina Teicholz on the Bankruptcy of Counting Calories

• Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out

• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy

• The Trouble with Most Psychological Approaches to Weight Loss: They Assume the Biology is Obvious, When It Isn't

• How Low Insulin Opens a Way to Escape Dieting Hell

• Kevin D. Hall and Juen Guo: Why it is so Hard to Lose Weight and so Hard to Keep it Off

VI. Other Health Issues

• How Not Getting Enough Sleep Messes You Up, Part 1

• Fighting the Common Cold

VII. Wonkish

• Evidence that High Insulin Levels Lead to Weight Gain

• Framingham State Food Study: Lowcarb Diets Make Us Burn More Calories

• Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes

• Evidence that Gut Bacteria Affect the Brain

• Prevention is Much Easier Than Cure of Obesity

• A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research

• Don't Tar Fasting by those of Normal or High Weight with the Brush of Anorexia

• Magic Bullets vs. Multifaceted Interventions for Economic Stimulus, Economic Development and Weight Loss

• Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners

• The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness

• After Gastric Bypass Surgery, Insulin Goes Down Before Weight Loss has Time to Happen

• Biohacking: Nutrition as Technology

• A Low-Glycemic-Index Vegan Diet as a Moderately-Low-Insulin-Index Diet

• David Ludwig, Walter Willett, Jeff Volek and Marian Neuhouser: Controversies and Consensus on Fat vs. Carbs

• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

• Layne Norton Discusses the Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes Debate (a Debate on Joe Rogan’s Podcast)

• Sutton, Beyl, Early, Cefalu, Ravussin and Peterson: Early Time-Restricted Feeding Improves Insulin Sensitivity, Blood Pressure, and Oxidative Stress Even without Weight Loss in Men with Prediabetes

• Critiquing `All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality with Low-Carbohydrate Diets' by Mohsen Mazidi, Niki Katsiki, Dimitri P. Mikhailidis, Naveed Sattar and Maciej Banach

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

• Exorcising the Devil in the Milk

• How Important is A1 Milk Protein as a Public Health Issue?

• Is Milk OK?

• 'Is Milk Ok?' Revisited

• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So

• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It

• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science

• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be

• Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt

• Eggs May Be a Type of Food You Should Eat Sparingly, But Don't Blame Cholesterol Yet

• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)

IX. Gary Taubes

• Vindicating Gary Taubes: A Smackdown of Seth Yoder

• The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes

• The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes

• Diseases of Civilization

• Gary Taubes Makes His Case to Nick Gillespie: How Big Sugar and a Misguided Government Wrecked the American Diet

• Against Sugar: The Messenger and the Message

• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents

X. Twitter Discussions

• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice

• 'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets

• On Fighting Obesity

• Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'

• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography. I defend the ability of economists like me to make a contribution to understanding diet and health in “On the Epistemology of Diet and Health: Miles Refuses to `Stay in His Lane’.”