Blood Sugar Hack: The FASTEST Way to Burn Fat, Optimize Hormones & Reverse Disease | Dr. Ben Bikman

70% of all calories consumed globally come from starches and sugars and so the average individual because they've been told is eating five or six times a day it's all carbohydrate heavy my biggest critics online are the dietetics and I'm just like guys you've done a shitty job look at the health of the country and look at people who eat hospital food stop talking to the average person who wants to lose weight the traditional view is cut your calories but if you're not addressing your insulin that's just going to promote hunger Hunger always wins before you

know it you'll be right back where you were without insulin you die I've read studies saying that low insulin is four times more deadly than high insulin if you do some research about insulin and Alzheimer's you wouldd want to be on a low carb diet but you might want a little squirt of insulin every now and then in your brain because it seems to help what concerns me is if you take a little bit of insulin and you put it in a nasal spray and you spray it up your nose it's a way of treating

Alzheimer so why is it when I raise insulin my brain works better you're listening to the human upgrade with Dave free today we are going to have an amazing conversation with Dr Benjamin beakman or Ben beakman who is an absolute boss when it comes to bioenergetics metabolism and the way the body actually works and as you might know I kind of have a mitochondrial fetish I developed in the late '90s because I had chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and brain fog 300 lb of weight and I learned from people in their 70s and 80s who

were running a longevity nonprofit group and soon they asked me to run it and I'm the only guy under 50 so mitochondria have been at the very center of biohacking it's like you change the environment around you so you have control of your biology because your mitochondria listen to the environment so now we have Dr beakman here to talk about what's really going on in there he's a fantastic teacher very very learned human being and I'm excited to share his wisdom with you today Ben welcome to the show hey Dave thanks so much it's nice

to be with you again this is great this is our second or third interview I think it's our third I think it's our third too your YouTube channel this sub I've seen from you lately on Instagram is so good you're one of the few people in Academia who's just willing to say well here's what the evidence says even though it's not popular and I just so appreciate that do you take a lot of hits like do you have colleagues like no cholesterol is bad and then they're they're like try to not have lunch with you

and eat vegan crap and all that yeah yeah well that's a funny little kind of side comment but yeah I mean one of the most sobering moments of my career came as a pre- tenured professor when I had a bunch of other professors try to get me fired um from the the dietetics department actually in particular I was deemed a heretic of sufficient um vess that they tried to get me removed uh so yeah it's there have been some naysayers no doubt yeah well thank you for finding the good fight and if I can just

say there are a very few number of functional dietitians all of the other dietics or dietitians they are the McNuggets in hospitals people they are the school lunch people and they are so brainwashed or maybe just downright evil I'm not sure but they're the ones saying put you know corn syrup and canola oil in baby formula and it's it's just not how you do it by the way I'm not saying that that is an all bit formula but certainly around the world it is and that my biggest critics online are like the dietetics the dietitians

people and I'm just like guys you've done a shitty job look at the health of the country and look at people who eat hospital food stop talking and then I just move on do you do the same thing or are you more polite well no I think I I mean I definitely have to be a little diplomatic depending on who I'm talking with but I agree generally that while there are certainly um dietitians and these licensed individuals who challenged the the prevailing thought it is probably the most dogmatic field I've ever encountered that and if

you deem yourself worthy to step into that territory you need to be ready um for the fiery darts cuz they come after you well they're very well funded by big Pharma and big aegs so there there's that you've been I'd see an outspoken voice on insulin resistance and how it relates to disease and you're doing it both in a public sphere with your YouTube and you're doing it in your book you know how to not get sick so talk about insulin resistance what is it and where does it come from yeah insulin resistance is best

defined as a a pathology with two parts so it's a two-sided coin one side of the coin is the obvious side and many people don't appreciate that there's another but that obvious side of the coin is the fact that the hormone insulin isn't working particularly well at C places of the body that is the insulin resistance part that some cells of the body not all some cells have become resistant to insulin's effects now all of this is compounded by the other side of the coin which most people do not appreciate but if you are invoking

the term insulin resistance you're invoking two parts the one I just described but then the other which most people Overlook which is hyper insulinemia or high blood insulin there is no separating that to that it does not matter if insulin resistance exists in the organism insulin levels are higher the two ideas they are inseparable so that is insulin resistance and and of course the relevance of it is just the fact that it contributes to well not only because it's so common um worldwide it's the most common health disorder but it's so connected in even in

a causal way to virtually every chronic disease all of these what I like to call plagues of Prosperity while they do have individual noxious stimuli that can cause them they have a common one as well and so the drum that I try to beat so loudly is that there is a common origin to so many of these problems and it's insulin resistance so rather than chasing these indiv putting all of our efforts into chasing individual stimuli let's really put most of the effort into addressing the most common thread that if we can pull that one

out everything else just starts to crumble the number one cause of insulin resistance is yeah number one CA so more and more Dave as I've thought about insulin resistance which I do a lot I've I've come to the conclusion that there are two paths to insulin resistance there's the the fast insulin resistance and then there's slow insulin resistance and and that's a bigger conversation that I don't know that we want to get into yet but briefly slow insulin resistance is the result of fat cells that have under gone significant hypertrophy so that's the connection of

how fat tissue explains insulin resistance now don't assume that that everyone listening that that just means only as we get really fat and obese depending on the ethnicity it can be only a little bit of fat gain and it's already resulting in larger fat cells that are causing insulin resistance so that's an insulin resistance that settles in a little more slowly and it reverses a little more slowly fast insulin resistance which is the one to I think most explicitly answer your question is the result of stimuli that can literally trigger insulin resistance within hours but

then they can be resolved within hours to days or maybe a week or so and in that case the one that I believe is the of all of these what is the most relevant cause of insulin resistance it is in that fast lane the most relevant is too much insulin and and so just to really bring this full circle because it does kind of create a bit of a circle I posit that as a person is eating uh chronic constant carbohydrate consumption which is the global diet 70% of all calories consumed globally come from starches

and sugars and so the average individual because they've been told is eating five or six times a day it's all carbohydrate heavy the average individual spending every single waking moment in a state of elevated insulin never giving the body enough time for the insulin to come down as insulin wants to start to come down they've bumped it back up again and so it's that chronic insulin that starts to make the body somewhat deaf to the insulin and and that's and then it starts to feed the cycle where too much insulin is causing insulin resistance which

is in turn creating more a need for more insulin which is creating more insulin resistance I've read studies saying that low insulin is four times more deadly than high insulin is that true that's that's remarkable um I could not believe that to be true and would only believe it in the context of type 1 diabetes um that might be if if the population is a type 1 diabetic population then I would believe that because it would suggest the person is underdosing to the point of lethality um but in a in a non-type 1 diabetic I

would absolutely not believe those outcomes but that's an important Point Dave because a lot of the confusion that people have with regards to even the insulinogenic effect of macronutrients like they will say um fat causes an insulin release um and yet every single study that has ever shown that was based on a type 1 diabetic population where because of their chronic hyper glucagon levels MH there is this sort of unexpected Quirk of eating fat in a person with type 1 diabetes but in a non-diabetic population there's zero studies to show that fat has an effect

on insulin none and so even in my own lab a data data we just have generated we're about to publish I can state it authoritatively dietary fat has no effect on insulin and there's never been a study that has ever shown it thank you for saying that um when I write about fasting and intermittent fasting I I've consistently said if you have some butter and MCT oil and coffee or something like that it has no effect on insulin or mtor and a third party actually went out and tested 300 different breakfast options to see their

effect on blood sugar and on insulin and coffee with butter and MCT was at the very top of the list is having no effect whatsoever that's why you can do it during a fast true or FSE oh Dave yes you and I are completely aligned in fact to the to the point that I have I I've actually wanted to try and with your audience you're going to make it happen I actually think there should be some Nuance within the conversation of fasting that I have more and more I consider there to be two types of

fasts one which is a kind of true classic fast where you're not eating or drinking any calories that I call a caloric fast and then what you and I are just describing is what I call a metabolic fast there which is what what determines whether the body's in uh like at the level of the cell all of the biochemistry like the most famous effect being autophagy who determines whether autophagy is turned on or off well it's actually insulin for the most part and this is why famous fasting SL starvation physiologists like Dr George Cahill who

is a legend to me he described insulin as the hormone of the FED State and in his estimation which we ought to take seriously he he said it's insulin that really determines whether the body is in a Fed State high insulin or a fasted State low insulin well what if you're eating in such a quirky way that you are putting calories in but you're keeping insulin low so ketogenesis is uninterrupted mtor is not turned on and there's no ceasing or inhibition of autophagy as far as the cells are concerned you're still fasting that's a that's

a pretty metabolically relevant scenario where I believe more and more that as much as there are people who say we need to be doing protein fast where you're just eating protein I during the fast I actually think there's more value in doing fat fasts to be honest now there's no studies that have compared those two so I don't mind if people disagree with me but for all the reasons you and I have just outlined I actually think a fat fast is Superior in its outcomes than any other form of fasting having tested them all on

myself and had hundreds of thousands of followers over the last 10 years I I find the same results and people get really mad like well the in the myice studies it was just water it's cuz they didn't test the fat thing and then I funded some research at the University of Washington around exclusion Zone water and cells and how certain types of lipids like C8 MCT make mitochondria work better by changing what like very esoteric stuff that's Dr Joe Pollock's work and maybe that's why but what I do know is the two types of fasting

you're talking about like a caloric fast or a metabolic fast I I characterize them as there's a spiritual fast where you're okay to be maybe at a lower level performance and you're you're going to push yourself and be introspective and then there's a working fast where it's the middle of the week I have a job and kids and stuff to do so a little bit of fat makes the fast completely painless and you get the metabolic benefits because I couldn't do what I do if I was never you if I was always just fasting on

water I think it'd be miserable yeah yeah oh in fact because you just invoke spirituality I will just add a hard amen I completely agree with everything you just said I always look for alignment and areas where we maybe see things differently because look I have a perspective I could be wrong and you know a lot so let's find the areas where okay that makes sense and then the areas where maybe I'm full of crap what concerns me is if you take a little bit of insulin and you put it in a nasal spray and

you spray it up your nose it's well a way of treating Alzheimer's it's also a really potent cognitive enhancer so why is it when I raise insulin my brain works better yeah yeah so I have to speculate a little bit Dave just because I want to um and I want everyone listening to know if whenever whenever I mention I'm speculating it's because I I don't know of a specific study that I can rely on to answer so what I suspect is happening is that with the inasal administration you're able to get that insulin absorbed directly

through that upper kind of wall of that nasal cavity so this is insulin is not getting systemic right um in other words it's not getting into General circulation you are just kind of shooting it right up to the brain especially the hypothalamus which is you know right in that lower part or just above that nasal cavity and it could be now I'm I'm theorizing it could be that as the insulin peruses directly up through that layer the epithelium of the nasal cavity and up it just directly opens the doors and allows the rush of glucose

to come in it would be my speculation um now it wouldn't be contributing to the elevated insulin induced insulin resistance again because if I had you on a table and I was measuring your blood insulin levels systemically like from a your your arm um vein um we wouldn't get any there would be no no change there's no change in insulin at the level of the entire body there's no systemic um alteration this was such a modest and such a direct administra I suspect it's just moving right up into the hypothalamus opening the doors because some

of in of the brain's glucose uptake is dependent on glute 4 which is an insulin itself an insulin dependent glucose transporter whereas other parts of the brain including in the hypothalamus it has um other other doors other glucose Transporters that are just always open the moment glucose goes up in the blood it will flow into that cell whatever the cell May be the kidney or the liver but then parts of the body including the hypothalamus will have some of these insulin dependent doorways where insulin has to come and knock now the door opens and glucose

comes in so it could just be that you are just bypassing any systemic circulation and going right to the brain saying hey brain I want you to open those doors and really pull in a bunch of glucose that makes good sense to me and I've always been a fan of having exogenous ketones present and doing a little bit of nasal insulin so I'm like all right neurons you've got your ketones gal cells you've got your glucose let's go and that is a pretty darn good state of high performance I just don't know how often it

would be safe to do it which is why I don't do it very often I don't either I I would because too much insulin will cause insulin resistance I do think that'd be one reason I'd say to use it judiciously like once a week kind of yeah yeah oh yeah that'd be I think perfectly fine um but then second there there's another part of me that just thinks well is is that is that epithelium that layer of the nasal cavity it's not natural for it to see insulin would there be some long-term effect am I

stimulating too much growth am I going to make the epithelium start to get a little thicker I this is of course entirely speculative oh yeah but if it's like on the order of once a week like you're saying that would have that's such a modest bis such a modest frequency that that wouldn't have any of these effects I'm confident this is so fascinating and I know we're getting a little bit nerdy on things uh and at the same time there are a lot of people who are 50s 60s 7s they're getting early onset brain stuff

and if you do some research about insulin and Alzheimer's you would want to be on a low carb diet but you might want a little squirt of insulin every now and then um in your brain because it seems to help and all the metabolic stuff that you talk about and I talk about if someone's listening to the show today and they're saying well how do I know if I have insulin resistance how can you tell with lab tests and how can you tell with symptoms yeah yeah let's start with symptoms just because that's going to

be something people can rely on a little more well immediately um with regards to symptoms if you have just been told you have high blood pressure insulin resistance is the most common cause of what's just called idiopathic or just run-of-the-mill insulin resistance uh of of run-of-the-mill hypertension so if you have hypertension that's definitely a knock in favor a check in favor of you having insulin resistance high blood pressure most common manifestation if you have a family member with type 2 diabetes you're on that Spectrum as well very likely you're much more likely to have insulin

resistance and maybe the final one of the symptoms before mentioning some clinical tests is is the skin itself where there are two um distinct skin manifestations that are direct result of insulin resistance one is called acanthosis nigin then the other one is skin tags right skin tags is a little more obvious where it's just like a teeny little like mushroom stock like it's not a big rounded mole it's a teeny little bump people are probably thinking of it correctly um right now you can imagine there's these just almost like a little mushroom of skin and

you tend to get them around the neck you can also get them around the armpit usually anywhere where there's going to be a skin fold or a wrinkling or crinkling of skin you can see these skin tags and then the more complicated term I just mentioned acanthosis nigin that's also at those same locations like the around the collar of the neck um where we all have a little bit of a skin fold and then around armpits and groin Etc the skin can get a little darker and now depending on pigment of skin pigment that may

be easier or harder to see the natural pigment of the person but the skin will also start to have a texture and appearance of like crinkled tissue paper so if we took a tissue paper crumpled it up and then opened it back up that's kind of how the skin might look so this darker crinkled skin and skin tags that is proof positive of insulin resistance and then just if wondering that's also imminently reversible as the insulin resistance goes away the skin resolves in that regard so skin is kind of a a window to the metabolic

soul in that regard I remember when I was about 13 I started growing those skin tags I had hundreds of them they around my neck armpits and they used to sometimes get a little irritated they'd bleed and yeah and one day I was I'm done with this and I took like little fingernail scissors and I just cut all of them off because they have a tiny little stock They Don't Really bleed when you do that yeah and it just frustrated me I had no idea what it was I thought maybe they're warts and I'm familiar

with that as a sign of insulin resistance and there's a lot of listeners right now going oh my God I started growing those they they went away when I went into kosis for the first time and when I did the whole bulletproof diet thing I just I don't have them and I didn't have to cut them off they just disappeared that's right yeah so the nice thing about the skin in this regard is that it is so Dynamic you know we are growing and sloughing skin literally every moment and so as as the insulin levels

start to come down that hyper excitability of that layer of skin cells because insulin basically starts to stimulate this kind of sporadic growth insulin likes to grow things that is not inherently bad we need it without insulin you die so lest anyone thinking Dave and I are painting insulin as the villain no but the Poison's in the dose if you will where we're talking about when it's gone beyond normal levels insulin's resulting in this kind of frenzied growth of these skin cells but again the nice thing with the skin it gets sloughed off so readily

literally all the time that once the stimulus to keep growing goes away I mean give it like just week just a couple weeks and they're likely going to start literally just you'll notice them smaller smaller and they're gone as they just wear off um and now the clinical tests just for the sake of time and and not getting into too much depth I'll just mention two one is just getting insulin itself measured right um this is I believe one of the greatest mistaken approaches of conventional clinical care despite all of its problems we have a

glucose Centric Paradigm of metabolic health and the conventional clinician is content just once a year measuring someone's glucose levels and glucose is a late signal that while glucose levels is are staying normal over years and the person's developing hypertension and erectile dysfunction and migraines it's insulin that's been the canary in the coal mine metabolically it's getting higher and higher and higher so look at your insulin I generally Outline Three ranges if it's six micro units per Mill and lower that is uh that's really good solid sign absolute green light less than six yep and then

if it's seven to Mid teens I just say seven to 17 then it's sort of you know hey possible problem now I I as a scientist I don't like being a little soft in my wording I like to be very clear and definitive but insulin is a hormone and every hormone has its own EB and flow so the reason I kind of give a bit of an if with that range is if someone had their insulin measured it's 11 or 12 they would say oh shucks I'm busted yet that might have been just a peak

moment where your insulin might have been kind of peeking up as it has a natural circadian rhythm to it and so if it's in that middle range you might be all right all the more reason to rely on the second one I'll just mention in a second but you might not be and then if it's high teens and Beyond absolute red light even the normal volatility of insulin shouldn't be getting that high in a in an insulin sensitive person so high teenss into 20s warning you're insulin resistant Red Alert now the other metric is valuable

because it's not as volatile and it is surprisingly um accurate or or a good predictor a poor man's method and that is the triglyceride to HDL ratio so just take your fasting triglycerides divided by your HDL and that's going to be really good if that number there is some um differences across the ethnicities right so the general rule is 1.5 if that ratio is above 1.5 that's that's that's a that's a red light that's a warning now in some other subsets of of populations around the world like East Asians Japanese Korean that number ought to

be actually closer to one so it's a little more strict so triglyceride to HDL ratio of one is your cut off lower the better and then in in blacks and I think Hispanics it can be a little higher where the normal C off is going to be about 2.0 okay so it's going to be around that 1 to two range um if that if it's higher than that warning metabolic disregulation does it change for men and women yeah that's a great question no no because those numbers are pretty static across the Sexes it's funny you

bring that up though because the one lipid that isn't is free fatty acids right if anyone ever measures free fatty acids which is not the same you know triglycerides are what the liver is making or what you're eating free fatty acids are 100% a product of what the fat cells are breaking down and women due to estrogens most gals don't appreciate this but a woman at any moment is burning 40% more fat than her male counterpart and you see this you see this in her in her free fatty acid levels Now Dave before we fellas

claim defeat here and and say we've been robbed she's also putting in more fat at any moment too and so because she's eating more fat or because her no no not at all just because of sex hormones so this so estro estrogens are both stimulating the breakdown and the building up so females just have a much much higher rate of turnover in their fat cells you know so so it ends up because the the overall Dynamic is she will have more fat on her body than her male counterpart which she's supposed to it's by Design

because she carries the Met metabolic burden of reproduction she needs to have this kind of metabolic Insurance before she ever commits to the metabolic marathon of reproduction but she's also turning it over a lot faster so she her free fatty acids will be normally about 40% higher than what you see in a guy but the other lipid measurements are generally going to be in the at least those ones are going to be generally in the same range what I have found 99% of the time when people go on something like the the bulletproof diet which

is clean cyclical keto the right kinds of animal fats uh controlling the type of protein toxins all all the stuff that teaching for a long time HDL goes through the roof and triglycerides drop which is exactly what you want for this ratio it sure is and when I went to my my first longevity doctor when I was maybe 29 um it was a long time ago uh and I came in with that pattern he just looked at me said well your your lipids are are technically disordered but really good because you know my HCL is

like how did you get it so high and why is why is your triglyceride low and it was because of the idea of intermittent fasting and things like that yeah you're doing it right that's the right way to do it and it is a consistent finding that you you start to control carbohydrates triglycerides are going to come down because it's namely the elevated insulin that is spiking the production of triglyceride Rich lier proteins from the liver so as carbs go up triglycerides will go up as carbs come down triglycerides will come down I have a

a confession to make about an experiment I've been running uh for the past probably year I am down to about 5% body fat like I I am like crazy crazy lean and this is on uh using you know $26,000 uh clinical grade uh bio impedance things and lots of different measures and I used to weigh 300 lb so is that amazing what a testament to just how adaptable and dynamic the the human body is it blows me away and uh like my new book cover I'm on there with my shirt off and I'm like the

fat computer hacker who would never have I didn't want pictures of me when I was fat so I'm still kind of stunned by it but here's the problem 5% might be below ideal for longevity I think closer to eight is where I want to be and like I'm really having a hard time putting on fat and I have half of a large bath towels worth of extra skin for when I was obese so I went in a couple weeks ago I just posted about this on online and they removed a a passport size piece of

skin from each side of my face and neck this isn't from aging skin this is obese skin probably Possible little aging I don't know um and been healing really fast but they're saying Dave we need some fat to put in with stem cells in your face to get the volume back so I've have been pounding the carbs been like 400 G of rice and honey and fruit and watermelon and I have not put on any fat they found 20 CC's when they like completely emptied my butt of all the fat they could find oh my

gosh so how is it that I'm not getting fat on 400 gram of carbs I'm doing 200 grams of anal protein a day I'm only eating good fats like what's going on yeah yeah well so I I can't state definitively but generally there are going to be two essential variables that determine the growing and the shering sh of the fat cell now your audience is Savvy enough to know that there is more than just one variable which is the traditional view being that it's just purely calories in calories out that is so easily disproven right

now but and I'm not saying like just so everyone knows I'm not saying calories don't matter um but that is the only message anyone ever hears that people think that's what I'm saying and if I kind of claim any Authority and I I'm loathed to do this I have such a General disregard for higher education and terminal degrees like a PhD which is ironic I know but I'm surrounded by phds and so I've seen how dumb many of these people are and I I hope I'm not one of them and I don't necessarily just mean

my colleagues here I love them all dearly but the my if I'm going to make any sort of stake of claim here I have a unique PhD is and you noted this in the introduction it's very uncommon there are only I think two institutions on the planet that Grant a dissertation a PhD in bioenergetics bioenergetics is a particular niche of of of research that combines the metabolism biochemistry and Physiology but with a heavy focus on thermodynamics and and the relevance of thermodynamics in living systems because L anyone have has forgotten thermodynamics was originally posited as

a as a view to make the steam engine that it is in the realm of physics and it is it is an odd uh or it's an awkward fit to try to fit principles of physics in principles of biology I actually think that it it I I'll make this kind of a bold claim I consider the introduction of calories into biology as as part of what got us where we got it wrong it it so thoroughly distracted us from from I think what matters most that it it actually brought us to where we are I

think the whole war on fat in part was born because of this improper introduction or invocation of of thermodynamics so now having said all that calories matter and those carbons need to be accounted for in some way but a cell like especially a fat cell it needs to know when it's time to eat and when it's time to break down and and and the fat cell wants to be and everyone pardon me if it sounds like I'm being silly I am after all a professor who teaches 18year olds so I've have to sometimes be a

little juvenile in my description of things but the fat cell needs to know that it's playing nicely in the entire neighborhood of the body that it needs to know okay what are the demands of the brain right now what are the demands of the muscle um there's no direct nerve that's connecting them it's hormones that generally will tell the overall Orchestra when it's the woodwinds section to play when it's the brass section or when is it time for the muscle to be needing energy but you couldn't you don't want muscle to be exercising and pulling

in energy to break it down at the same time fat is taking in energy to store the body in its overall balance of metabolism wants to balance out the two parts of what is metabolism anabolic versus catabolic insulin is the hormone that sends that signal so this is my really long-winded way of saying I have right now down the hallway in my lab fat cells growing in Petri dishes like literally right now I'm not even being um hyperbolic here those fat cells when we first plate them and they're sticking to the cell to the bottom

of the dish they are in a bath of tons of calories tons of fat and tons of glucose everything a fat cell wants in order to grow but it stays small until we do one single thing which is ADD insulin into the culture the moment insulin comes into that little culture media we call it or that bath now the fat cells would say if they were part of the greater hole ah it's time for me to eat this is my signal that it's time to store energy rather than break it down and now we look

if we look at those fat cells just four to six hours later they're actually thicker chubbier if we look at them six hours later still they're bigger again so all of this is just to say that there must be a stimulus tells the fat cell to grow which is elevated insulin and then there must be sufficient calories to fuel that growth you cannot have one without the other and just to really put a fine point on that if a person had high insulin and low calories they will die because they would become hypoglycemic and there

would be no ketones being produced because the high insulin would be inhibiting ketogenesis and then the brain would have been deprived of its two fuels and the body would shut off the brain would shut off now in contrast if insulin's low and calories are really high what happens then now the person is burning up almost they they burn to death where their their metabolic rate in their ketogenesis is Unstoppable because there's nothing to tell the body to stop burning energy and so they die from keto acidosis and hypoglycemia but this is a scenario which is

so real that and it works where you can eat as much as you want that people with type 1 diabetes some of them have learned and are so tempted that they can deliberately underdose their insulin level and be into a state of ketoacidosis and massive hypoglycemia and feel miserable and wretched and yet they will be as thin as they want just everyone imagine the Temptation you know they don't have to vomit up their food they don't have to starve themselves through traditional anorexia they can eat everything that want they can enjoy the sensation of eating

it and swallowing it and digesting it which has it all of its own gratification and all they have to do is not poke themselves with a needle and inject their insulin that's a condition called dimia and all of this is just to say there are two parts the fat cell must be told to store insulin or to store fat via High insulin but it needs sufficient calories to fuel that growth it's one thing to tell the fat cell let's grow then the fat cell has to grow so low insulin and high food intake equals thin

and lots of energy but I guess they feel like crap oh yeah I mean they yeah you can read case reports where the the people will say like I I felt I feel like I'm dying but I want to stay thin wow yeah that's unhealthy I I mean just imagine yeah yeah I did notice when I was testing out the the edges of the recommendations before I published the bulletproof diet and I published that in 2014 I published online in maybe 20 13 I went for about a year and I was eating 4,500 to 5,000

calories a day on purpose like more than I wanted like forcing myself to do it eating no carbs and I was sleeping less than five and usually less than four hours a night on purpose like I'm going to set myself up to get fat I'm going to prove that I don't get fat the way I should but I kept losing weight I I grew abs for the first time on in Crazy amounts of this I know my insulin was low because I had it measured um it was actually pretty arm low to remember the number

off the top of my head and that probably explains what I didn't feel like crap until kind of maybe halfway through I started getting cortisol effects where I would wake up dozens of times a night my Sleep Quality went down um you start getting uh reductions in testosterone thinning of hair and all of that and I stopped it but I I meant to do it for a month to just make fun of the calorie people and I ended up doing it for a lot longer cuz I'm like I'm actually in a really strong state of

high performance why did my brain work so well when I did that at least for the first 6 months well Dave so you brought up a lot of stuff and I and I I don't want to not answer the question you started with which is why you're not getting fat um so let me come back to that first part and then to answer this part right now yeah I mean ketones are the preferred brain fuel uh one of the Notions I attempt that I I need to disabuse my students of is that they've been told

the brain prefers glucose and you need to eat this much glucose there's multiple things wrong with this not true not true but to just to really establish the relevance of that I showed them research from Dr Cahill where you can take someone with a glucose level of I'll I'll use the same kind of units here let's say five Millar which would be kind of 80s milligrams per deciliter and if their ketones are at 1 to two Millar so less than half of what the glucose is the brain's already getting most of its energy from the

Ketone so don't tell me the brain prefers glucose if anything the brain has a preference for ketones which Dr Richard V and many many others my own lab has reported papers on this it enhances mitochondrial performance for every for every oxygen unit of oxygen that the mitochondria are consuming when they're fueled with ketones are producing more ATP yes so the what we described that in my publication is that the ketones were resulting in a tighter state of mitochondrial coupling which is how much energy am I breaking down in order to produce this energetic molecule ATP

and it was it was better now in your case of what you're trying to do now one of the reasons I point the finger at carbs m is because of what it does to insulin and so in your situation you are either now so exceptionally glucose tolerant that even though you're eating hundreds of grams of carbs if if we were to act you're you're clearing it so quickly that it's never resulting in substantial insulin spikes or well I I get that that's it you're just that insulin sensitive and glucose tolerant hba1c went up uh in

a way that I don't like so I'm I'm on low carbs now yeah but do you but are you still in ketosis pretty often have you been measuring your ketones dur this not with the finger stick but I just use Exogen as ketones several times a week so I I know there's ketones present of a meaningful portion of the time well I would be curious if you like in a morning so one day like on on on a today you ate 500 you 400 gam of carb but tomorrow morning if you measured your ketones if

you are in ketosis then your insulin's not really going up that high interesting not only so the other point I meant to make is that you're either it's a combination of you're super insulin sensitive and you're just maybe so physically active I have known really active individuals who eat hundreds of grams of carbs and they're still in ketosis the next day because they're just burning so much of the glucose and the the magic of the working muscle is that it can pull in that glucose without the need for an insulin Spike um as I mentioned

earlier insulin wants to store energy which is antithetical to exercise which wants to break down energy it wants to break down what's been stored and so exercise quickly lowers insulin due to the sympathetic stimulation basically the body starts moving and then the the brain starts to tell the pancreas hey you got to shut down insulin production and it does so very quickly and so all of this can combine that if a person's already insulin sensitive which you certainly are combined with high levels of physical activity if you aren't getting elevated insulin for pronounced periods of

time it doesn't matter if you're eating those calories you're not going to store it as fat even if my blood sugar goes up but my insulin isn't going up you're saying yeah well it could that's exactly right yeah so glucose is not a perfect surrogate for insulin as much as we wish it were yeah it is important because while we can measure glucose so readily um it is we are years away from having a continuous insulin Monitor and they're not the same like for example if Dave were to take a 100 grams of carbohydrate and

then immediately go exercise we would see that spike it depending on how intense the exercise is it may even stay high for a while but no insulin was required during that exercise as it starts to come down it's not because insulin went up it's because the muscles are pulling it in on its own because again when the muscle contracts it has an insulin independent way of opening its doors you'd mentioned mtor earlier and I know you're familiar with mtor's opposite which isk when you start to contract and relax the muscle it's flooding the muscle cells

with calcium calcium as it goes up will activate an enzyme called calcium calm modulas kinas or caminas so a calcium activated enzyme caminas will then activate ampk ampk will then activate as160 which activates glute 4 and now we've opened the glucose doors and we've been able to pull in that hungry muscle basically says to insulin hey I'm too busy to wait for you to tell me what to eat I'm just going to eat this because it's here and I'm going to pull it in this is why even going for a walk after you eat carbs

or doing doing some squats doesn't really matter not even weighted squats just do you have 30 air squats and you can watch i' I've used a glucose monitor for long periods of time and you can see oh yeah I eight carbs it's going to go up and then you do a little bit and if you actually do a real workout with weights or something um and real resistance you're not going to get much of a spike at all yeah so that might be part of your problem honestly Dave you for you to gain weight you

may have to start changing so many habits I don't exercise that much I I do really good exercise with AI stressing the system from the upgrade lab stuff I do about like 20 minutes a week of real exercise and it's carefully scripted to to exhaust and then recover very quickly uh so I don't think my volume is high but my my recovery is high and my intensity is high so I'm like I'm I'm a weird robotic cyborg biohacker guy testing out weird stuff and I just like you would probably know why is it possible to

have my average glucose go up um and to eat ridiculous amounts of carbs sometimes more than I want and then to not gain one pound and it sounds it sounds like you you figured it out yeah well I I think that if we'd really really need to know what your insulin levels are it's entirely possible that your fasting insulin levels are still in an exceptionally good range and that what you think is a big insulin spike it could be much more modest um than you realize and and if that's the case then you're kind of

getting into that you know physiological scenario of what we see with diabulimia which is that the insulin levels are getting so low that it's just incompatible with storing fat that makes so much sense okay I want to touch on one more thing about calories in calories out uh cuz you and I have both been trolled by these like Angry 25-year-olds you know cancel out a a Snickers bar with a diet coat kind of people and I I just laugh like well if calories counted there's a million calories in a gram of uranium and and they

go but you have to be able to absorb it I'm like oh thank you so calories don't count calorie absorption counts and then they start twitching usually which helps them burn more calories which probably is good for their weight loss and then I say well do you know about zerinol and no well it's a drug derived from mold toxin that's 10,000 times more estrogenic than normal estrogen and if you give it to a cow which ranchers do the cow will get fat on 30% less food so if the drug can exist and there's tens of

millions of dollars being spent because it works it's not about the calories I'm not saying that they AR relevant at some way but this idea that I'm going to somehow know how many calories I burned without being in a calorie chamber that's nonsense because only half your calories are from moving the rest of the stuff is respiration temperature humidity stuff that no one's going to measure so you don't know how many you burned and you don't know how many you ate because the dumb little apps like as a guy who makes you know hundred million

dollar plus of food things the number of times that I've gotten in trouble because when I buy a freaking cashew the calories per gram varies based on the time of year so you can't even say a gram of cashew always has the same calories and so my labels have to be within a a very narrow window and so it's complete fantasy that we can measure what we're taking in or what we're putting out which is why I'm like this is just a distraction which is what what you've been saying as well well yeah and you

can see why I feel so strongly as much as I appreciate thermodynamics um but the problem is we don't eat Heat let me a calorie is a unit of heat we don't eat heat like does does if we if we eat a warm Snickers bar is that does that have more calories in a cold Snickers bar you know because it if it's if it's just pure calories and it is then drinking a hot coffee you know that's not a good example um but mean it's not calories that matter in an Ideal World if we really

wanted to have a food label that gave uh an idea of how fattening this food will be which is what the calories are trying to do the whole reason we have calories is this idea that hey you need to control your body fat so look at these calories and count them all it it is such a Fool's errand for all the reasons you mentioned we it is impossible for the average individual to capture every calorie coming in let alone every calorie going out now I by going in not only did you mention how even on

a label it might have gotten it wrong but you don't know how much you're absorbing you don't know what the thermic effect or the caloric cost of digesting and absorbing that food is and and and again it's not units of heat that you're getting so in the ideal world if there if we deemed it necessary to have some Metric on a food label it would be some combination of how much is this going to spike your glucose and how much is it then going to spike your insulin how many other carbons are coming with it

CU dietary fat matters if insulin's High at the same time and because then you're storing those carbons very readily but it' be some kind of algorithm that would give like a fat index or a fattening index rather an obesogenic index that would say the combination of carbons or calories if we have to use that term and Insulin Spike means that what you're about to eat is going to be more obesogenic than say something else that would be more of an ideal scenario because again it's not units of heat calories don't really work in that sense

but one other comment on this that I thought while you were explaining um the scenario earlier when insulin comes down as I've mentioned now a couple times it is so antithetical to the body storing energy that someone will say well where does that energy go you have to account for it and and I agree that you have to account for the carbons they need to go somewhere but the body it is so antithetical to storing carbons when insulin's low that the body has these release valves pressure valves in two forms one is that when insulin

is low metabolic rate goes up we've known this for 100 Years by studying people with type 1 diabetes there is a substantial elevation in just resting energy expenditure just the the cost of living the body is just running hotter the engines idling faster when insulin's low my lab published a report finding that part of it is because of the effect of ketones we found that when a person was in ketone and we did human fat biopsies that their metabolic rate from their fat tissue was three times higher than when they weren't in ketosis so there

is just this increase of metabolic rate in fat tissue itself so when insulin comes down metabolic rate goes up that's one part of it the second part of it is the that's the wasting in the form of heat what I just described then it's wasting in the form of ketones everyone remember ketones have a caloric value that is almost the same as glucose and when you're in ketosis you are breathing out ketones which is to say you're breathing out calories wow and you're urinating out calories because you have ketones that are getting excreted in your

urine and remember ketones have a caloric value or in other words carbons that could be used that's amazing we're wasting them how did I not know that I never thought of it so that's one of the benefits of intermittent fasting or being on a ketosis kind of diet you'll breathe out calories and you'll pee out calories yeah I mean so the collective effect of all of this could be as high as 5 to 600 calories holy crap I mean that's a that's a lot of stair stepping that's a lot of exercise to try to get

I mean anyone next time you're working out see how long it takes you to get to five or 600 calories burned as opposed to just being in no it's so long it's so hard just being in a ketogenic State you're doing it without even thinking about it this is why you and I are ble to say don't count calories if you're hungry like to the average person who wants to lose weight the traditional view is cut your calories but if you're not addressing your insulin that's just going to promote hunger Hunger always wins before you

know it you'll be right back where you were so let your first step on your weight loss journey be I'm going to lower my insulin calories will take care of themselves just control carbs eat good protein and good fat and when you're hungry eat if you're not hungry don't eat and with this plan in mind in will come down again calories will take care of themselves are people going to lose muscle mass if they go into ketosis and they lower insulin oh that's a great question I'm I'm happy to answer it because of for I

can rely on some good research two thoughts come to mind one was the Scottish man I think um who fasted for 384 days and then work for my own lab so let me start with the Scottish guy this is a documented case report where he literally fasted for more than a year and Dave something I actually thought about early when you were describing kind of your own feeling and then the cortisol it's it's for people to understand the difference between a fast and starvation yes the difference between those two is fat tissue if you have

fat tissue to burn that means you're making ketones which means you're feeding the brain everything it could ever want as you start to run out of fat now you run out of ketones now the brain has to rely on glucose and what's the main source of glucose it's going to be amino acids in that state not in the normal state in the normal State it's most of the source of of glucose is coming from lactate by the way but when with long-term fasting to the point of I've run out of fat tissue now the body

starts breaking down muscle to get those amino acids to convert those into glucose and cortisol helps it happen now in this guy he had so much fat because he was morbidly obese he didn't lose muscle he maintained his muscle mass throughout this entire fast now in my lab we published a report finding in fact it was right after we did the fat cell study where we looked at how fat cells um respond to ketones by increasing the metabolic rate and there's a lot of wasting of energy we did a comparable study not quite as strong

we didn't use humans but we did a comparable study with muscle tissue and ketones and we found that ketones enhance mitochondrial coupling of the muscle so the muscle is getting more efficient with its use of energy and it they the muscle cells were were more robust as we kind of insulted the muscle cells with some chemical stimuli to kind of knock on them and hurt them a little bit when muscle cells were fueled with ketones they were more rigorous they were tougher they were more viable and more resistant to injury suggesting that at the end

of it all people have long said that ketones defend muscle now what they meant by that was that if ketones are up then there's going to be less breakdown of muscle because we don't need those amino acids for glucogenesis which is true but my lab added evidence to this which is to say that ketones really are defending the muscle because when muscles are fueled with ketones they're literally tougher they're harder to kill these are really good Arguments for cycling in and out of ketosis I found that when I stayed in ketosis for long periods of

time that I would develop insulin resistance this seems like a common occurrence so that's one of the reasons I recommend cycling uh so talk talk about insulin resistance and people in ketosis for a long period oh I'm so glad you I have a chance to bring this up yeah so Dave you'll um you'll you'll not be upset for me to say that's not insulin resistance oh cool what people are describing in that case of a ketogenic diet causing insulin resistance it's not insulin resistance insulin is working exceptionally well what it is is an acute glucose

intolerance now let me let me sort of provide some interesting context here people have heard of the concept concept of metabolic flexibility yeah which is this idea that when you eat a mixed macronutrient meal with carbs you go to glucose burning mode and you can detect this and then when you enter a fasted State about 5 to 6 hours later because insulins come down you go to a fat burning state so the body shifts between sugar burning and fat burning um some scientists at the University of Pittsburgh years ago 25 years ago now I think

documented this concept of metabolic inflexibility which is where there there are people who have insulin resistance because that's the cause of this that when they eat they're in glucose sugar burning mode when they're fasting they're still in glucose and sugar burning mode because their insulin is still elevated which is insulin resistance so they're stuck in Sugar burning mode now in the long-term adherence to a ketogenic diet I like to say you kind of have an inverse metabolic flexibility scenario where it's almost like the body is stuck in fat burning now it's not what has actually

happened is if you've been in a long a ketogenic diet actually it doesn't even take long it's it's as even if a person fasts for 24 hours what I'm about to describe happens to them as well so if someone goes and takes an oral glucose tolerance test they go drink a bunch of glucose you measure a glucose curve and you see it come up and down and say about 2 hours it's back down to about 100 Mig per deciliter that's a good response now if this person were to then adopt a well even fast for

24 hours let alone being a ketogenic diet if they take that same oral glucose tolerance test now you would say wow my glucose went higher and it took even longer to come down it didn't come down until 3 hours or 3 and a half hours the Temptation is to say I'm insulin resistant now because if you were looking at a person with type two diabetes that is what's happened but that's not what's happened in this person who maybe just fasted a little too long or is on a ketogenic diet in that case it's because of

a lack of preformed insulin in their beta cells so basically when we eat carbs the insulin uh the beta cells want to be ready and they literally have a bunch of prepackaged insulin in the beta cells stored like on the shelves behind me ready to go here I am in my beta cell office insulin glucose comes up I get a knock on the door I know okay I got to address the glucose I'm going to start shipping out all of this insulin I have made right now which is called the first phase insulin release but

I am constantly monitoring the glucose I know this isn't going to be enough and so at the same time I've been shipping out my preformed insulin I've started making more insulin that's the second phase insulin release when a person has fasted too long well 24 hours or so that's not too long but prior to a norog glucose tolerance test it is or they're on a ketogenic diet the beta cells are so efficient and I'm sympathetic to this because I hate clutter that the beta cells basically start to say hey I got all the stuff on

my shelves here and I'm not using it I'm just going to get rid of it and so it literally breaks the insulin down to its base amino acids and then just recycles them and does anything it wants with them but it starts to think I don't need all this insulin and then all of a sudden hold on Red Alert we need glucose has just flooded the system a crud the the beta cell says well I don't have all the insulin made so there goes that first phase insulin response that i' normally have but I still

have the ability to make a bunch of insulin it's just going to take me a little longer so body pardon me beta cell for being too efficient it's going to take us a little longer to clear that glucose but says the beta cell to finish off this weird story if you do this again within a 20-hour peri period or so I'm going to keep this insulin here just in case we do it again so my long-winded way of saying it's it's it's that there is become an acute glucose intolerance because of a very temporary reduction

in insulin on hand preformed and so if a person is on a ketogenic diet or they're going in for an oral glucose tolerance test and they think that they're going to crush it by fasting for 24 hours you've actually set the stage to get a f positive or you're going to fail that glucose tolerance test or get a worse score because you haven't eaten carbs recently so eat some carbs 8 hours or so before you go take the test and and it doesn't have to be sugar just eat some starches and then the beta cells

will say ah okay maybe we're going to start getting into carb consumption again I'm going to hold on to some insulin so that when we do this test in 8 or 12 hours I'm going to be ready for it and then you'll pass it with flying colors because a ketogenic diet will improve insulin sensitivity exceptionally well remember Dave that everyone remember the way I described insulin resistance earlier applies every time we invoke the term insulin resistance which is insulin will be high if insulin is low it is not it is impossible for the body to

have insulin resistance so this scenario isn't reflective of insulin resistance but just rather a temporary state of glucose intolerance cuz the body's kind of been saying well I'm not sugar burning I'm fat burning oh hold on wait you want me to go back to Sugar burning all right well I wasn't quite prepared so pardon me while I just sort of make some adjustments and I'll be better prepared next time you just taught people how to pre-load insulin if you're in ketosis and you're going to do a life insurance test that would be important 100% And

and I want people to know that like if I imagine you know a pregnant gal who's been in a ketogenic diet to help with her PCOS and get pregnant now has to go in for her oral glucose tolerance test you you want to eat some carbs in in at least some period of time before you go in 8 to 12 hours just to have that insulin on hand and you'll be just fine oh that's such a gift I thank you for sharing that there's some other things that affect insulin and insulin resistance like circadian rhythm

we know melatonin going up will make you insulin resistant we know that at night you're insulin resistant so does it matter when we measure our insulin and when we measure our blood sugar when we eat yeah yeah it does in fact tragically measuring insulin in the morning is probably one of the worst times and that's why I kind of described that there's that bit of that gray area that kind of orange light range or yellow light range where insulin might be a problem or it might not be and and and I actually kind of bake

that into the formula because of the morning volatility that in when we're waking up in the morning we will have higher cortisol levels uh naturally which starts to just mobilize the glucose to get ready for the brain to come back online um if you will you know as the body starts to wake back up and get alert um but also insulin can start to climb in response to that glucose climb and so mourning is one of the worst times but it's the most convenient because we're fasting overnight we need a fast state if in an

Ideal World we wouldn't measure fasted blood levels until you know late morning or early afternoon to let that can can you adjust for that like let let's say you you do your insulin test in the morning and it's should you just subtract a point off of the morning score to get a more accurate I don't know I don't know that's a really really good question that's never been explored this is this is yeah you'd want to I mean what You' want to do is take that same person measure their morning and then measure their afternoon

consistently across a group of people and then find out that okay here was morning giving us a little bit of that false positive range or a false concern here was afternoon so if we make this kind of algorithmic adjustment it allows us to get the morning which is the easiest time to do it everyone wants to do their fasted tests in the morning so they can end their fast I get it but yeah it would be nice to be able to kind of have an adjustment on hand to say okay well actually it came in

at 15 micro units per Mill but based on what we see across the population if we were to measure this four hours later it would have come back down to to seven okay so you're actually doing great okay yeah that's never been done wow well this seems like something your lab would be uniquely suited to do I vote for that we've talked about doing squats after a meal or going for a walk to lower blood sugar which ought to also lower blood insulin we hope are there other non-dietary things we can do the biohacks like

red light therapy pulse electromagnetics cold plunges what do those do yeah so the only one I can speak to is some Authority is cold plunge um although I think everything you've just mentioned does help including just sauna it's the interesting Quirk of just temperature extremes with cold immersion yeah I mean the results are really remarkable um across the board and I am an Unapologetic advocate of cold immersion but there's something to be said for there are two mechanisms that cold therapy will engage one which is shivering induced thermogenesis and then it's mitochondrial uncoupling yes um

and and the uh the brown fat being the most famous example of that but um with the Shivering of course the the the whole body contraction of the muscles that's that's really I mean you are exercising you are Contracting and relaxing muscles in order to generate heat well that heat has to come from burning something and a lot of that something is going to be glucose now at the same time you're shivering you're also sending a signal to mitochondria particularly in fat tissue that hey mitochondria and fat tissue I need you to become less efficient

which which is to say I need you to burn energy to create heat CU heat is a a waste product you know and but when the body gets cold it actually gets a little well wasteful it starts to want to burn energy just to create more heat and so you have this uncoupling where the mitochondri it's basically like you're you're you're revving the engine in your your car but you're keeping your foot on the clutch at the same time and so you're getting a high RPMs but you're not getting any speed you're not moving so

you've uncoupled the burning of the fuel in the engine with the movement of the car wow you know which is not the same that I mentioned earlier earlier I mentioned that ketones help the muscle be more coupled in that case now you're reving the engine and you're seeing movement with the speedometer but with cold and with ketones generally you're uncoupling it where you're revving the engine but you're not moving anywhere you've uncoupled those two actions and so cold therapy is an incredible way but there also are kind of other hacks um like apple cider vinegar

is surprisingly effective but you were kind of saying non-dietary so yeah of all of those I I personally leverage whenever I can take advantage of cold immersion and sauna they're exceptional in this regard I I do them a lot the other thing that I noticed has a big effect on my blood glucose stability which is a proxy for insulin is Darkness at night so I'll wear the the true Dart glasses that trick the brain into thinking that it's nighttime and if I wear these for an hour or so before bed especially if I'm traveling I

have much more stable blood glucose the next day and I think there Darkness at night to reinforce the and Rhythm works yeah it does work just to put a really clear statement on that one of the reasons um East Asians have such unexpectedly high levels of glucose is because that these are cultures that have the highest bright blue light exposure later into the evening that is one of the reasons there are some other quirks of phys ology across ethnicities but it is an absolute consistent feature of East Asian culture lots of bright blue light um

into all hours of the night which absolutely will disrupt circadian rhythm to such a point that you'll have higher cortisol levels the next morning and in turn higher glucose um volatility environmental toxins and insulin resistance is there a connection oh oh for sure yeah in fact in my my first book you mentioned my how not to get which is this one over my shoulder um one step over outside of the camera is my why we get sick book I actually devoted a small section to as I talked about the origins of insulin resistance to describe

some of the evidence um looking at certain molecules from like plasticizer agents and detergent agents and more and more even certain pesticides and herbicides yes uh so these are all chemicals that have varying direct or indirect effects at promoting insulin resistance where the direct effect is such like lectin have a direct effect as a as a kind of food anti-nutrient toxin lectins have a direct effect of causing insulin resistance whereas some of the um detergent molecules like diethyl stilbestrol it's not going to have as much of a direct effect but rather an indirect effect by

promoting the growth of the fat cell um and when fat that comes back to the kind of slow insulin resistance that I alluded to earlier where when the fat cell gets too big it starts to generate its own form of insulin resistance um which just as a interesting aside it actually starts to promote insulin resistance to try to prevent further growth but in the process starts to kind of spread that insulin resistance with a couple different signals throughout the body so yeah I mean what we eat and drink and even even breathe uh We've published

papers working with my colleague Dr Paul Reynolds we just published a paper um late last year actually finding this was an animal study where when these animals were exposed to diesel exhaust particles even when they ate the exact same amount of food as their litter mates just exposed to normal room air their fat cells got significantly bigger so once again our little rant earlier don't tell me it's all about calories there are these signals even some things we breathe that are going to influence the overall Dynamic energy storage the balance of metabolism so yeah there

are unfortunately we live in a bit of a dirty world and and where people are able to to mitigate some of these risks now I I know that in some some people feel a little overwhelmed I still firmly believe macros matter most if you can just focus on one thing focus on getting your macronutrients balance which is give me the right ratios for macros yeah yeah well for me it's very simply control carbs so don't get your carbs from bags and boxes with barcodes as much as you can hold fruits and vegetables depending on your

overall scenario and then it's prioritized protein and don't fear the fat that comes with that protein and just don't fear fat and general but as a reminder in nature all protein comes with fat there's no exception so every as much as we love protein people talk about protein there's always a little part of me that says and don't forget about the fat that is supposed to come with that protein the body digests it better the combination of the two is more anabolic than just the protein alone so macros matter most and then all these other

kind of more micro influences that's not to say they're irrelevant they matter but thankfully if a person is eating fewer carbohydrates that is the most offensive macronutrient Source now you can have like proteins depending on the source they can also be somewhat influenced and a little polluted although animal proteins have much lower levels than plant proteins do but even still just as a person controls carbs you end up inadvertently getting rid of things like the antinutrients you're going to get far fewer levels of pesticides and herbicides just as you're eating less carbs because those are

the main vehicles for those kinds of things and whereas fats and proteins have generally gone through the animal and the Animals cleaned out some of those things on their own or they're stored in other tissues that we don't eat as much of um certainly the muscle is going to be one of the cleaner tissues in the body so that's that's why a person I would say don't expend all your energy depending on where you are at and what your financial capabilities are and your bandwidth to focus on this if you are just managing your Macros

you are I believe addressing the variable that matters most but these other things do matter but don't let that overwhelm you would be my advice I like to Outsource my liver in kidneys to cows yeah that's yeah well said they pre-filter all of the plants for me so then I can eat them and the results are profound when you do that or it can be sheep if you're not into cows or whatever yeah no no but you you and I yeah ruminant meat so if it's a multi a polygastric animal um that to me is

some of the best meat you can get so we're we're line there one of the potential causes of insulin resistance is excessive damaged omega-6 fats because they go into the cell membrane and they mess with things how much of this is caused by carbs versus just eating all this canola corn soybean and all those things yeah yeah so Dave you are you are putting me in a position where I am going to have so the uh I I don't mean for this to sound disparaging in all sincerity I don't you can disparage me like I'm

I'm curious well no no not you even not you but like I I don't want like this um when I say seed oil crowd I I don't mean to like put everyone in a little tribe here but there of course there are people who they will say Ben focuses on carbs that's not the real issue it's seed oils I just want to remind people my main focus is insulin resistance it is not other problems so so within the the direct realm of insulin resistance I will claim that hyperinsulinemia is more of a problem than than

seed oils now at the same time I want someone to know that if I'm actually talking about like liver fibrosis ah seed oils are actually probably more problematic um cancer and damaged mitochondria um that feed cancer cells seed oils are probably more problematic so as much as it seems like I'm disrespecting the seed oil view I actually am not I'm just trying to kind of Stay in My Own Lane where I really am kind of more of an expert I respect that greatly and so it's possible that eating excessive seed oils contributes to insulin resistance

because of cell membrane changes but that's not what you're studying you're studying the effects of insulin directly on this yeah and so acknowledging what you're an expert in and and not going into areas that you haven't studied I can only respect that good good yeah in my case I think it's advisable to minimize those I haven't eaten seed oils totally agree in a long time totally agree but let me let me just kind of answer the way you frame the question because I do have thoughts on it so the connection between seed oils and insulin

resistance I do not believe that it's a direct effect wow okay for example you can incubate cells with linolic acid and they will not become ins resistant that's a pretty good piece of evidence yeah it is it and and I want someone to to hear because I've literally done that um I've incubated cells with all kinds of stimuli and then you just it's a simple set of experiments now I'm going to incubate with some insulin for 10 minutes I'm going to harvest those cells and now I'm going to look at the signaling the the the

protein phosphorilation States across a handful of proteins that will tell me okay how well did insulin work so with a a high degree of authority I can tell you linolic acid does not cause direct insulin resistance what if it's fried for two weeks and then you do it okay so now we're not even putting on linolic acid so this is a really good point if you start to just put on like um the peroxides of of this that starts to change thing where it is but just so people appreciate how difficult it is to work

with these molecules they are so reactive that they just become toxic cytotoxic where the cells just start to die and so you can't really even you to try to find the right dose is actually problematic so the highest expression of insulin resistance is death yeah yeah that's right yeah I mean what so so what if you're insulin resistant if you're killing all your cells so that's a really really good point that as much as I've just been talking about linolic acid um uh the conversation really ought to be looking at the peroxides right so so

that's a really really important consideration that I need to keep in mind so linolic acid alone doesn't appear to cause insulin resistance the degree to which its peroxide metabolites do um I I don't know but I I bet it I bet it does I bet there's an effect there but even still the way I describe the relevance of linolic acid is through what it does in the fat cell so it takes me back to the fat cell because linolic acid's unique that you can track it if you eat more of it you store more of

it and and and this has been shown in fat tissue from humans when linolic acid gets converted to these more rea Ive molecules like 4 h& in a fat cell it forces the fat cell to grow through hypertrophy rather than proliferating through hyperplasia and the difference there is that if you have more fat cells but they're small than you're insulin sensitive from the level of the fat tissue at least because small fat cells are insulin sensitive and happy fat cells they're they're very anti-inflammatory as well linolic acid converted to 4 h& one of the more

common reactive um metabolites tells the fat cell hey there's no proliferation happening here you're just growing through hypertrophy the hypertrophic fat cell is an insulin resistant and pro-inflammatory fat cell so when I talk about linolic acid or seed oils with with some caution I don't like to say that they're a direct cause of insulin resistance like other ones are insulin is a direct cause inflammatory proteins are a direct cause like in that same cell culture I can put on cyto they're insulin resistant in minutes um stress hormones I can incubate those cells with cortisol or

epinephrine they'll become insulin resistant but if I do it with linolic acid like I said it's not quite the same effect but with the with all of the Myriad metabolites that can be generated it is very possible that some of those could have a direct effect but when I talk about it I try to be a little cautious and and just say well it might but I don't know if it's direct but I certainly believe it's an indirect because of its effect on the fat cell that that is so academically honest and controversial and it

sounds like you don't eat a lot of linolic acid on purpose either because it's probably not good for you but well and again when someone when someone's obeying that first rule the the control carbs I believe the vast majority of the linolic acid seed oils that people are getting are coming from bags and boxes with barcodes so if you're just controlling carbs and eating less of that the good good news is your linol Lake your seed oil's essentially gone to zero cool Ben I know that we're running up against the end of the show because

you've got in a appointment coming up here and I just want to thank you for your your willingness to go against the mainstream in Academia and to do it with data and Science and to not be pissed off all the time about it like it's easy to get angry yeah you could tell you have this like playful curiosity like but this is how it works and I love your Vibe I love your knowledge and just keep doing what you're doing thank you you're at Ben bean.com your book is how to not get sick or how

to not to get sick what is your YouTube channel yeah so you mentioned the First Source please guys go to my website it's just Ben and B ik.com but yeah my YouTube is Ben bman and then all my social media is just Ben bman PhD but yeah I mean all of this is just my own effort to as much as I'm an academic and I love it I also hate the constraints placed on it where no one's going to read my peer-reviewed journal articles and why would they you know so I wanted to have a

way to just share the the fundamental research with people in a kind of digestible way and that's always been my hope W you're doing a great job keep it up and you're always welcome to come back on the show thanks Dave it's been a pleasure see you next time on the human upgrade podcast