The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 520. Is Your Diet Killing You? | Dr. Benjamin Bikman

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Jordan Peterson sits down with bestselling author and bioenergetics Ph.D., Dr. Benjamin Bikman. They discuss the epidemic of insulin resistance in America and its profound effects on health, the sugar addiction crisis, how dopamine hijacks your brain, how to navigate the American diet, and the potential to fix it invitationally from the top down over the next four years. Benjamin Bikman earned a Ph.D. in bioenergetics at East Carolina University with a focus on the adaptations to metabolic surgeries in obesity. He continued to explore metabolic disorders, with a particular focus on insulin resistance, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Duke-National University of Singapore. As a professor at Brigham Young University and the director of its Diabetes Research Lab, Dr. Bikman has continued to study insulin, including its role as a regulator of human metabolism, as well as insulin’s relevance in chronic disease. In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Bikman actively serves as a research mentor to undergraduate and graduate students. He and his students frequently present and publish their findings. This episode was filmed on January 27th, 2025.  | Links | For Dr. Benjamin Bikman: On X https://x.com/BenBikmanPhD?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/benbikmanphd/?hl=en On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@benbikman Read Dr. Bikman’s most recent book, “How Not to Get Sick: A Cookbook and Guide to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance, Lose Weight, and Fight Chronic Disease” https://a.co/d/iPrxgTE 

If only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking, oh, I really want a stick of butter. They want something sweet and gooey. We crave carbs, and they have myriad metabolic effects, one of which is to spike insulin. What happens to type 1 diabetics if they eat nothing but fat? The fat cells get big. They get so big that they have to tell insulin,

I'm done. A government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat, and boy, they got it wrong. All those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension. A purely plant-based diet is so deficient in nutrients, it is utterly incompatible with human survival. Studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat,

his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets. Listen to that, man. Hello everybody. The first thing I think I'll tell you is that I'm on tour again from February through June through the out the United States in Canada and in Europe. And if you want more information about that go to JordanBPeterson.com and check it out so that you can come and see me and my wife and if you're inclined to do that. I'm talking today to Dr. Benjamin Bickman, who's a professor of cell biology at Brigham Young University and a lecturer at Peterson Academy. He's done three courses for us. And we're talking today primarily because I'm interested in, and not me only, obviously,

in the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. And I've been talking to the people who are integrally involved in that movement and trying to determine, strategize about the direction. And that's a very complicated thing to do. And one of the things I wanna do is figure out where the most bang for the buck might be had with the least amount of trouble. Almost every problem is like that.

There's lots of causes of a given problem, but there's one or two causes that are 90% of the problem. And you want to focus there and maybe have a chance then. And so I talked to Dr. Bickman today about insulin resistance. And really to put that in more simple terms, excess carbohydrate intake. And that's the carbohydrates that are rapidly transmuted metabolically into sugar. And that's pretty much all carbohydrates, by the way.

And the fundamental problem with America's health is an abundance of carbohydrates. And so we discussed insulin resistance, which is a metabolic condition that arises as a consequence of too much carbohydrate intake. And then we discussed the multiplicity of cascading catastrophic health effects that produces. Type two diabetes being particularly well known, let's say as a secondary consequence but cancer, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction more generally depression, anxiety, there's almost no serious medical condition that's widespread that can't

be traced to excess of carbohydrate intake. And so obviously, it seems to me, that's where the focus should be. And so we walk through the biology, we walk through the practicalities, we walk through some hypotheses about how that problem might be redressed at the government level, but also at the level of individual behavior. And so this is very important. There's likely nothing you can do that will improve your life more, both in the short run, but even more importantly in the long run than to Modify your diet away from high carbohydrate intake and so we walk through why that is so join us So dr. Bickman, I've been talking to the maha people

about their plans and It's clearly the case that Americans Westerners more broadly, but particularly Americans maybe, are suffering from a slew of unfortunate medical conditions. So what I'd like to know from you to begin with is if you had to rank order the magnitude of the medical problems that presently confront the West, let's say, particularly the US. How would you do that? There's a very specific reason I'm asking.

You know, whenever there's a problem, maybe you can, if it's a complex problem, maybe you can point to like a dozen, two dozen causal elements. But if you focus, you'll find that three of those are the major contributors. And you could spend an immense amount of time on all two dozen, or you could focus like hell, maybe on the worst problem and gain 50% of the ground. If you spread your forces out across the entire panoply of problems, you're not gonna get anywhere like if there are 24

stakeholders in The system that are making America sick and you take on all 24 All you're gonna do is fight endless battles So I'm curious if you had to zero in you know to where you'd get the most bang for the buck Yeah, when you look at the health of America, what do you see as the major impediments, the major problems? Yeah, yeah, but if you look at the top 10 killers,

you can actually thematically lump them all into what I call the cardiometabolic crisis, where that encompasses the problems that are overtly metabolic, like type 2 diabetes, which is a top 10 killer. I think it comes in around number six or seven, but also number one, which is heart disease. And now there are others in the top 10,

like Alzheimer's disease, for example, that you wouldn't think, you'd say, okay, well, Ben's not including Alzheimer's disease in these cardiometabolic killers, and yet I actually am. Even certain forms of cancers are viewed increasingly as a metabolic problem. So it might be that I'm the guy with the hammer and so I see the nail,

but the nail is poor metabolic health. And that's certainly the focus of my efforts. But I like how you framed the question, as much as metabolic health is an underlying issue or a common soil from which all of these noxious plants are growing that we call diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary problems,

the alternative view isn't that these are each distinct problems. It's just that there are various manifestations of the same problem, namely insulin resistance being the most common disorder. Within the United States, a study published out of University of North Carolina a number of years ago found that 88% of adults

have at least one part of what we call the metabolic syndrome, which is a kind of cluster of complications. Interestingly and tellingly, what we call the metabolic syndrome, which is a kind of cluster of complications. Interestingly and tellingly, what we call the metabolic syndrome used to be called the insulin resistance syndrome. And as much as you framed it from a Western view,

just to help people appreciate this, we aren't even in, we're maybe around in the US, number 20 or so with type two diabetes worldwide. The Middle East, they're experiencing these problems far worse than we are. Even Southeast Asia, these countries where you'd look at the population and think, well, you look healthy. You're only maybe a little overweight. But there are ethnic differences where body fat, which is so important to this, will predispose

people to these metabolic problems at varying levels. But to answer the question succinctly, the problem is a cardiometabolic crisis, and at the heart of this is this very poorly understood, well, poorly known, poorly discussed problem called insulin resistance. Yeah, okay, okay. So, lay out the relationship

between insulin resistance and obesity. Oh yeah, oh, that's a great question. So insulin resistance, it's the most common problem. It's the most relevant for chronic disease. Naturally, we wanna know, all right, well, where did the villain come from? What is the breaking bad story?

I typically describe and teach that there are two paths. There's fast insulin resistance, which has its own noxious stimuli, that it comes quickly and it can go quickly, but then there is slow insulin resistance, and this touches on your question, so I'll answer it with that one in mind. One of the ways in which insulin resistance develops

is by fat cells that get too big. Now to really confirm, as much as we have an obsession on fat, on body fat, we actually look at it kind of incorrectly. We would say, okay, Jordan has 20 pounds of fat, whereas Ben has 30 pounds of fat. So Ben's naturally going to be sicker than Jordan, and yet it's not the mass that matters most, it's actually the size of each individual fat cell. This is why in that cardiometabolic crisis,

the list of what's killing us, men die more from all of those except Alzheimer's disease. So if you look at the top 10, nine of them go to men, and it's not even close. Men die more from these problems than women by orders of magnitude almost. But women are fatter than men. So it's clearly not an issue of fat mass.

Yeah, yeah, so if you look at it as a percent body fat, a woman's going to be fatter than a man by design. That's supposed to be that way for reasons that we won't get into. But men have less body fat, but we have bigger fat cells. So I promise I'm answering the question. But as a fat cell gets bigger and bigger, it's almost like a naughty little child

who's taken the water balloon to the tap. Now they're filling it, filling it, filling it, filling it. Oh boy, you better take that balloon off or it's gonna pop. Now the fat cell acting in its own best interests, it has to adapt two ways to ensure that it doesn't pop. It doesn't wanna die in the body. We don't want our fat cells.

We don't want any cell to die. That's a very messy, very inflamed process. So one thing, the fat cell as it gets ever bigger, it can't turn off the fuel coming in. But what it can do is change the fuel coming out. So insulin has an absolute choke hold on fat cells. This is a little outside the question, so I won't quite get around to it yet,

but insulin is an absolutely essential signal. As much as we focus on calories, insulin tells a fat cell to grow. And now the fat cell is growing and it's telling insulin, insulin, I am about to pop. And so I have to stop listening to you. And so I'm going to become deaf or I'm going to become resistant

to what you're telling me to do. And whereas earlier insulin was telling it to hold on to all of this fat, now the fat cell starts leaking out fat, even though insulin was originally telling it not to. This creates a problem that we can refer to as ectopic fat deposition, because now the fat cell is leaking out these things called free fatty acids at the same, so blood fat levels are going up.

Now that's not normally a problem necessarily, but that should only happen when insulin is low. Now we have this weird state where insulin is high, which should be telling the fat breakdown to slow down. I'm getting into deep biochemistry actually really quickly. So normally if insulin is up because we've eaten some carbs and stuff, then fat in the blood would be down

because insulin would be telling the fats to hold onto it. But now, or when we're fasting or low carbohydrate diet, then insulin is down and now we're mobilizing more fat. So normally the biochemistry in the endocrinology is such that if insulin's high, fats are down. If insulin's low, fats are up. Unless the fat cells are overfilled or have undergone hypertrophy or a growth expansion,

now you have high insulin and high fats. And so the body can't burn that fat, it has to store it. And so now we start storing fat in tissues that are ill-suited, like the pancreas is getting fat. The liver. Why isn't it just excreted? Wow, that's a great question. So actually, if you'll allow me,

I love that you just asked the question why. I tell my students that when you ask a scientist a why question, especially a cell biologist, my answer is God only knows. So I don't know why God designed the system to work that way. Why not excrete the fat? But I can- Maybe it's because historically the probability

of prolonged nutrient availability at that level was like zero. Oh yeah, for sure. Right, I mean- Yeah, we're living in a very unique day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the rule would have been historically, if you have extra food-

Hold onto it. Hold onto it. Oh yeah, yeah. Because hard times are coming. So that is in fact reflective though of insulin's effect. It is so determined to store energy that it will literally depress metabolic rate. It will prevent any wasting of energy.

So that's the first problem with touching on the question of what's the connection between obesity and insulin resistance because there is a connection. So the fat cells get big, they get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'm done. I can't get any bigger, so I'm gonna leak out the fats even though you don't want me to. But then there's a second feature

that just compounds the problem, which is as the cells are getting bigger and bigger, and fat cells can grow unlike any cell in the body. No cell in the body is capable of the expansion that a fat cell is capable of, much to our chagrin. But as the fat cells getting bigger and bigger, they're pushing each other further and further away from capillaries, from the smallest base unit of the blood vessel and all of its life-giving oxygen.

And as it's getting pushed further and further away, the poor chubby fat cell is becoming hypoxic or suffocating. And in an effort to ensure its survival, it starts slowly dripping out these pro-inflammatory proteins called cytokines, basically just hormones that turn on inflammation. And there's a whole bunch of them, dozens of them. But some of them will correct the problem. It's like a trail of breadcrumbs and rather than Hansel and Gretel coming, it's getting to the capillary

and stimulating the growth of a new blood vessel. And so it's kind of the fat cells way of crying out, hey, I'm lacking oxygen, come feed me. And so we have that happen. So both of these things, the poor, we pity the poor fat cell. It's become so filled because of our lifestyle, which is a whole other topic worth diving into,

but it becomes insulin resistant to ensure its own survival, spreading fat to be stored throughout the body, and then it becomes pro-inflammatory to try to correct its blood supply, and that then, the inflammation is one of the fast causes of insulin resistance that I alluded to a moment ago, that any time inflammation is turned on on the body,

yes, that is an immune process, but the overlapping of the immune and the metabolic is profound. Just a moment ago, you and I were speculating on why the system may be designed the way it is. One thing we know for certain is that of all the systems in the body, the immune and the metabolic are not only essential to survive times of deprivation and to defend the host,

but they work hand in hand. After all, what good is it trying to mount an immune response if the warriors don't have any energy to work with? So anytime inflammation is up and it's staying up, that's going to cause insulin resistance. And indeed it is one of the main causes of insulin resistance. Okay, okay. Okay, so let's walk through this from stage one and also let everyone know what the health consequences are. So I'm gonna start the outline you tell me if I get it wrong and Elaborate wherever you want. All right, so

We have access to an endless number an Endless array of carbohydrates and they're very easily converted into sugar. Yes So we have access to sugar of various forms and to carbohydrates in absolute plenitude. Yes. Right, and so that's easily converted. That's very high energy source, very dense energy source, and it's easily converted to fat. And so that's what happens.

And the reason that happens is because we're evolved for lean times and we store excess energy like a grizzly bear or a camel and we do that so we don't starve to death in the winter. And thank goodness for it. Right, right and you see this, I guess some of the proof of that is that islanders who tend to be evolved to get through lean times,

they're very, very efficient in their metabolism. If they go on a North American high carb diet, they just balloon. Oh yes. Okay, so now, too many carbohydrates and sugars, too much fat. Now, the consequence of the fat is manifold. One of the consequences is, you alluded to two.

One is that insulin resistance increases, and the other is that inflammation increases. Okay, so I think what we should do first is we should outline the role of insulin in bodily metabolism. Okay, so why don't you do that, and then tell everybody why insulin resistance is bad. Because what you've done so far is make a case

for why it promotes cellular fat cell function, but it also has catastrophic effects systemically. So talk about what insulin does and then talk about what insulin resistance does. Just so everyone's clear, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to zero in on the most egregious of the multitude of health problems That might plague us and we're making a case for Insulin resistance as perhaps the worst it contributes to all sorts of diseases But it's also highly associated with obesity which has a variety of health problems as well

Okay, so let's focus on insulin to begin with tell people what insulin does and then what insulin resistance does. Yeah, brilliant. Insulin is an absolutely essential hormone in the body. As much as I am going to go on in the next few minutes and paint the picture of it being a villain, it's critical. If you don't have it, you have a disease called type 1 diabetes and you will die. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence. In the absence of insulin, the body will not last long. And so think, so it is here for a purpose. We

need it. However, we need it to work in our favor. And to do that, we need it to be generally keeping in a normal range. And so you just a moment ago framed the question by pointing a finger at carbohydrates. I agree with that completely. That's a whole topic. As much as over the past decades, we vilified dietary fat, oh boy, we got it wrong. And wouldn't you know it, you know, in the first time in history, as far as I know,

a government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat and boy, they got it wrong. No surprise, right, that has happened so often when you take things to that level. So if we put the blame where it belongs, not only are carbohydrates the only macronutrient that people have an addiction for, no one's addicted to fat, no one's addicted to protein,

if only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking, oh, I really wanna stick a butter. No, no one, they want something sweet and gooey, they want something salty and crunchy. So we crave carbs and they have myriad metabolic effects. One of which is to spike insulin. So this is answering the question of what does insulin do?

Insulin's most famous effect, but not its only effect. And I would even say not its most important effect. Its most famous effect is to look at that rise in blood sugar or blood glucose and say, that's beyond homeostasis, this isn't right. If that stays high for long, it's going to start harming the body, because hyperglycemia alone is pathogenic.

And so insulin acts as a hero and says, your problem, I'm going to take care of you. It brings the temperature back down, like a thermostat, the perfect example of homeostasis, brings the glucose back down to normal. And then insulin, having done its job, retreats back into the background, if you will. But one of-

What's its chemical role in relationship to the conversion of carbohydrate to energy? Oh yeah, yeah, right. That's a great question. So glucose, you'd mentioned a moment ago, and as you did so, I sort of couldn't help but think of the kind of a metaphor of like engines where the body has two primary fuels.

At any moment, it's either sugar burning, blood glucose, or fat burning. One is like a kind of race car engine. Boy, it's gonna be really quick. You don't have a lot of fuel and you're gonna get terrible gas mileage, but Boy, it's gonna be really quick. You don't have a lot of fuel and you're gonna get terrible gas mileage, but boy, it's gonna be a quick ride. The other is like a big diesel engine,

rumbling down the roads of Alberta, hauling, going across the Trans-Canada Highway and taking its load. It's gonna go forever. It's never gonna run out of fuel. That's the fat metabolism. That's fat metabolism. And now the next question is, well, who decides insulin decides?

Insulin, once again, when it comes to any metabolic effect, you need never go further than insulin. There are other hormones that wanna pretend that they matter. Thyroid kind of matters, cortisol kind of matters. Insulin rules them all. And insulin, if it's up, it dictates it's time for sugar burning.

If insulin's down, then the body says, all dictates it's time for sugar burning. If insulin's down, then the body says, all right, it's time for fat burning. In fact, that's where the whole ketogenic aspect comes from. When insulin's down, it is so incompatible with the body storing energy that it literally begins burning more fat than it knows what to do with. It's met its energy needs already,

but it can't stop burning fat and so it starts burning more than it knows what to do with. It's met its energy needs already, but it can't stop burning fat, and so it starts burning more than it needs, and that more, if you will, becomes ketones. It's sort of a metabolic release valve, like a pressure release valve, of a way of saying, I'm burning more than I need, and so I've gone beyond what the cell requires, so ketones are gonna become a good alternative.

But then back to, or transition. Would you think that the, like historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, easily digestible high sugar carbs would have been essentially non-existent, right? It would have been- Imagine what we would have had to do to get them. We either had to prepare for battle against a hive of bees.

Right, right. And when we could find them. Yes, when we could find them, or further, when we could find a digestible carbohydrate. You know, maybe berries or something, because people need to- Or tubers. Yeah, that's right.

We have to appreciate that what we eat is either going to defend itself by claw or by chemical, and a plant doesn't have the advantage of running away or attacking back. So if we dropped any number of us in the wilderness, good luck. Even if you're surrounded by plants. Well, we have to understand too that we might think

that historically human beings existed on the kind of vegetables that we have now or fruits. But all those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension. I mean, if you look at the origin plant of corn, I mean, it doesn't look anything like, looks nothing like corn.

Even look at an apple. Look at an apple 100 years ago, it was these teeny little crab apples. Sour things. Now they're these big juicy sugar bombs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But the more we eat these sugar bombs and they're like, the more glucose is going up,

the more insulin has to come up. And now we've come to what I believe is in fact the main driver of insulin resistance as I transitioned to insulin resistance, which is too much insulin. And people may hear that and think, hold on, you're talking about insulin resistance. Too much insulin is the main cause of insulin resistance.

And it, lest it seem a little unexpected, it is a fundamental biological principle. Too much of something will cause a resistance to that something. Whether it's body or soul, if we are exposed to a stimulus over time, that noxious stimulus, it becomes noxious and we try to adapt. Well dose matters, right?

There's lots of things that are healthy in proportionate dose. Okay, so now we're eating carbs continually. All the time. So we're relying on this fast energy source. One consequence of that is storage in fat. One consequence of that is if there's too much storage in fat is that triggers its own form of insulin resistance.

But you also alluded to an insulin resistance, I believe that's merely a consequence of insulin that spikes too high. So there's multiple reasons for insulin resistance in a heavy carb loaded diet. Oh yes, all of them become relevant there. Yeah, so we've now kind of gone to both here. The slow insulin resistance is the slow

and steady growth of the fat cell, which we outlined earlier. And that's a consequence of insulin being up, telling the fat cell to grow. And then the fat cell saying, okay, insulin, what do you want me to grow with? Ah, it's the calories. So you have to have both for a fat cell to grow. An insulin stimulus and sufficient calories

to fuel the growth. Then we have the fast insulin resistance. I mentioned inflammation, that is one. And then the other one that is the main one, I argue, is too much insulin itself. And then once the body becomes insulin resistant, now you really can start going down that list of chronic diseases that are the top 10 killers.

And to a one, you can see how insulin resistance is either the main contributor or one of the main contributors. Like all of them. Like type two diabetes is entirely a disease of insulin resistance, where over time, if you have two variables, the insulin and the glucose, one of the great tragedies from a metabolic scientist

with diabetes, type two diabetes, is that we have a glucose-centric paradigm. Just to use this as an example of how insulin resistance contributes to disease, the conventionally trained clinician only looks at the glucose. They may not have even ever measured the insulin. And when I give these kinds of talks to physicians,

they can't even wrap their head around insulin being a marker that matters. And yet the irony is it's the one that matters most. Because over the life of the person with type 2 diabetes, their insulin has been going higher and higher and higher. But the glucose is staying normal. Blood glucose. Blood glucose.

And so when they come in for their annual checkup, the physician just says, well, glucose is normal, so you're good. But you have high blood pressure. Well, guess what the leading cause of high blood pressure is? Insulin resistance. Or they may say, you have fatty liver disease.

Guess what the leading cause of fatty liver disease is? You have early signs of cognitive decline or dementia. None of those are glucose problems. Exactly. Yes, where now the brain's becoming insulin resistant. And if we could shift the paradigm to an insulin centric paradigm, that they would have detected.

And then it's 20 years later where they finally see, oh, your glucose is high. Well now it's what you need to have. Yeah, but it's worse than that, I think, if I remember correctly, because, so you said that one of the ways that physicians are marking whether you're healthy is to look at your blood glucose levels.

But they age correct those so that the norms for you at 50, what would be normal at 50 is diabetic at 20. But that makes no sense because if your blood sugar levels are as high at 50 as they would have been in 20 if you would have been diagnosed diabetic, it's just as bad for you at 50. So it's an insane correction. In fact, it's even more pernicious. If you look over time at what the diabetic cutoff used to be over the past 70 or so years since that became a marker.

So that's been gerrymandered as well. It's been slowly coming down. And you would say, well, why bring it down? It's because the easier it is for people to stumble over, the easier it is to diagnose, and then the easier it is to say, I need to give you a drug. And that is what I believe is partly at the heart

of the glucocentric paradigm. You can't drug insulin. It's too stubborn. There's no drug that's gonna push your insulin down, but there are drugs that will push your glucose down. And so it's a hell of a way to diagnose someone with a problem sooner and give them a drug prescription, multiple drug prescriptions, but the great irony,

or I would say irony as if it's an innocent mistake. Murderous irony. Yes, the more the clinician is pushing the glucose down, indeed with some medications that push the insulin up even higher, they actually kill the patient more. Even though you've corrected their blood glucose problem, just the absolute proof, it's not the marker that matters. It's certainly not the marker that's causing disease.

So the more aggressively you're giving the diabetic more and more insulin, type two diabetic, more and more insulin to push the glucose down, they become three times more likely to die from heart disease. You're literally tripling their risk. Which drugs do that? Yeah, that will be drugs like a class of drug called sulfonylurea, which is what's called

an insulin secretagogue. It basically takes the beta cells of the pancreas that make insulin and say, hey, we know you're already working overtime. It's not enough. We need to put you in the gulag You got to work double shifts and we've bumped up drives the insulin levels up that drives the sugar levels down Yeah, so again, but it increases insulin resistance across that's exactly right. So they get fatter and they die faster Cancer risk doubles Alzheimer's risk doubles. It's because those aren't how common are those drugs? Oh extremely common even more common is just giving the type 2 diabetic insulin directly You're literally giving them more of the very thing that's killing them so distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes before we go on

Well you and I can both there aren't a lot for some Canadians to be proud of but banting and best to legendary There aren't a lot for some Canadians to be proud of, but Banting and Best, two legendary scientists from Ontario were the first to discover the one hormone that was absent in type 1 diabetes. At the time it was called juvenile onset, because it was something that would manifest around the age of 10 years old or so. But in type 1 diabetes,

that is when the body has killed its own beta cells. Is that an immune problem? An autoimmune disease. It's an autoimmune disease. Yep, so the body has for some reason said cells. Is that an immune problem? An autoimmune disease. It's an autoimmune disease. Yep, so the body has for some reason said to the beta cells of the pancreas, you don't look familiar, so we're going to kill you. And so the person has no beta cells, no insulin,

no way to control metabolism, and they kind of burn to death, if you will, in a way. They just- What happens to type one diabetics if they eat nothing but fat? Yeah, well, that's a great question. In fact, this allows a transition into the actual dynamics of fat cells.

So if you had, in fact, if you look at the earliest diet that was given to diabetics, type one diabetics, before they started using insulin, it was almost entirely carnivore. You look at these old fashioned prescriptions, it was this much fatty meat, and it would say fatty meat. Don't eat meat that is too lean.

It's because these are fuels. Fat is a fuel that doesn't need insulin to tell it what to do. It can get into the cells of the body, the brain, which doesn't use fat, it readily uses ketones, which you'll make plenty of if you're burning a lot of fat.

And so that would be the best way to ensure the type 1 diabetic lived as long as possible. But the great tragedy, when we discovered what was missing, professors Banting and Best, by giving these patients insulin, that changed things. Now these people could live a long, happy life, but it shifted the paradigm, which was eat whatever you want and cover it with your insulin. That is a term any child term any parent listening to this who is a child with type one diabetes will have heard this.

Asinine advice. This is a disease of not metabolizing glucose very well. Why would we tell them? And that includes carbohydrates. Oh yes, oh yeah. Because they're converted to glucose. That's exactly, yes, thank you.

Yes, so all dietary carbohydrates are gonna be converted to blood glucose, to some degree or another. Some a lot, like the sugar bomb apple, some very little, like a cruciferous vegetable, like broccoli or something. The inedible vegetables. Yeah, exactly, the ones that you put

in front of a newborn, a young little toddler, and they're gonna push it off to a plate, because they inherently know, I don't want this. Yeah, so the type 1 diabetic, what used to be a carnivore diet, basically became the same standard high carb diet. But you look at these poor kids with type 1 diabetes, it is a life of constant fluctuations, the constant anxiety.

And yet now we know in human studies, what happens if you control the carbs, get them off the roller coaster? Sure enough. It flattens. It's a flat line and their insulin dose just plummets. And depending on how much you have to pay for insulin, that's a wallet saving therapy. Let me summarize. So, human beings have two metabolic pathways.

The one that we relied on until very recently wasn't the carb pathway. That's really an emergency and windfall metabolic system. Quick burning, limited supply. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we have enough carbs to fast. Like truly, if a human was just relying on their, even, you don't even have to go that dramatic. You have someone fast for 24 hours,

they've essentially burned through all of their mobilized carbohydrate storage, their glucose storage. That's done. It's gone. In effect, that's going to coincide perfectly with ketogenesis, with the ramping up of ketones in the blood. So there's an additional, we'll go sideways here for a second, well there's an additional issue there that isn't well understood. As I understand it, that historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, there would have been lots of times when we had access to like no carbohydrates. Okay,

so now, and maybe some of those times as well, to not much protein and fat. So just not much food. Yeah. Okay, so what happens then? Well, you go into autophagy, right? So what happens is your body starts to digest its own tissues. Now those could be fat, the fat, which would be fine because that's what it's there for. But if you go past that, then there are more, there are tissues that are starting to be digested,

auto digested, that aren't merely for storage, but the body has a hierarchy of self consuming. So it consumes damaged tissue first, which is of course what it would do, because if it digested healthy tissue first, you would just die. So that's a stupid solution. Now, the advantage to digesting damaged tissue

is that when you have access to food again, you regenerate. And so one of the consequences of being reliant on an emergency food supply continually, carbohydrates, is that you never enter an autophagy condition. And so you don't repair yourself very well. Well, first of all, do you think that's true? I mean, I've looked into this and that, it looks to me like a carnivore diet mimics autophagy, and maybe that's why they're effective. In fact, not only mimics, it enables it.

Like, just to be clear, you're touching on like this topic of longevity, which I have followed the modern, I don't wanna hijack the question. No, no, no, go ahead, hijack away. Okay, well, yeah, with longevity, you'd think, well, what is a metabolism scientist going to say? Everything, I have everything to say about longevity

because it is this process of the cell constantly wondering how am I doing? Is it time to build or is it time to break? And one of the quirks of longevity or aging is that a cell actually needs to go through both. That I have looked, I have looked with, and guess who decides whether it's building or breaking? Hormones.

Hormones. Yeah, well life is optimized death, right? I mean, you have to die continually. The excess and the, what would you, everything excess about you and everything is malfunctioning has to die in order for you to propagate yourself across time. So life isn't life, it's life is a balance

between growth and death, right? So you wanna optimize death and you optimize death with autophagy as far as I can tell and the carbohydrate or a carnivore diet optimizes that or can optimize it. It takes you out of this emergency food supply that makes you fat. I wanna ask you about insulin resistance now. Now your insulin levels are chronically too high

because you're eating too many carbohydrates. And tell me the mechanism for insulin resistance and then tell me about its cascading effects so that we can understand the relationship between insulin resistance and diabetes and Alzheimer's disease and obesity and heart disease and cancer and pretty much everything is aging for that matter. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Blind blindness, diabetic, neuropathy, etc. cetera. So let's walk through that. Eat too many carbohydrates,

your insulin levels are chronically high. Insulin resistance follows. Then you get insulin, okay, how? How does it follow? What happens? Yeah, well, in fact, depending on it, so everything you just asked is so substantial that not only did I wanna put it into a book,

but even a Peterson Academy course, it is an answer of about seven hours or so. But it is so relevant because again, it's the most common problem. So when insulin is elevated for too long, it literally starts to certain cells, not all cells. And this is one of the reasons why insulin resistance is so pathogenic.

It's because some cells become deaf, some cells don't. And so as you have insulin going up higher and higher to the deaf cells, that's not so much a problem, but to the cells who are as acutely sensitive as they were before, now it's stimulating too much. So one interesting example that we haven't even mentioned is infertility. As a Bible believing fellow,

I feel very strongly that it is in our, it is a commandment to reproduce. So anything that compromises reproduction, as a scientist, I'm quite fascinated by. The most common forms of infertility in men is a problem called erectile dysfunction. The most common problem in women that's a problem of infertility

is polycystic ovary syndrome. Both of them are caused by insulin resistance. But it's a perfect example of the kind of two-sided problem where insulin resistance is on one side of the coin, insulin isn't working very well, but you always have the other, which is that insulin is elevated. So these are two sides of the same coin.

And these two problems of infertility, which again, we hadn't even mentioned yet. Are both a reflection of one or the other. So in the case of polycystic ovary syndrome, most common infertility in women. People don't appreciate that all estrogens, or maybe I'll back up. In order for a woman to have a normal ovulatory cycle, she has to have a big spike in estrogens.

So there has to be a big estrogen spike, and then that enables, it facilitates ovulation. If she doesn't have this big spike in estrogens, the eggs in her ovaries are able to grow, but one never becomes the dominant and actually ovulates. And if one doesn't ovulate, all of those eggs stick around. So then they become cysts. That is the heart of the problem here.

Well, it's the manifestation of the problem. Most people don't appreciate that most, all estrogens were once testosterone. That in men and women, all of the estrogens circulating through the body and in the women critical to ovulation have to be converted from testosterone. Well, there is an enzyme called aromatase in her ovaries have a lot of aromatase.

Whereas the testes in her male counterpart have relatively little aromatase. He's still converting some of his testosterone to estrogens, but not as much. She's doing it a lot more. Insulin inhibits aromatase. So in her body, her ovaries, which maintain an exquisite insulin sensitivity

are looking at all of this insulin and responding, saying, okay, insulin, among the many things you're telling me to do, you're inhibiting the aromatase, which means I have all this testosterone and I can't convert it to estrogens. So not only will she not have the estrogen spike, thereby not ovulating,

but she will also have too much testosterone giving her some of the other symptoms of PCOS, like male pattern baldness or more hair on her body and acne and other problems. Have people been using low carb diets to treat infertility? Oh yes, there are case reports published the most common medication that is given to a woman with PCOS, even if the physician doesn't know

to test for insulin resistance, they give a prescription for a drug called metformin, which is the most widely used insulin sensitizing drug. And it will help, although it's not solving the problem, it's just sort of masking it. So yes, no harm. So you said erectile dysfunction. Well, so that's the male counterpart.

Right, so listen to that man who are listening to this program because erectile dysfunction obviously doesn't only affect reproduction, it affects sex. And so if you're not able to get it up anymore, one of the ways in principle you could treat that is by reducing your carbohydrate intake dramatically. Which would also stop you from dying. Yeah, not only will we be more attractive, but more capable of taking advantage of that physical attraction by not suffering from erectile dysfunction.

So really what's happened is we've really, because we've become so, a society of such insane abundance, we've deviated from our normal diet to an emergency rare diet. So now we can just eat the diet we would eat in an emergency that was rare all the time. And it turns out that that's not a good idea. Not in the long run. Yeah, for the sake of the species.

Yeah, and then with erectile dysfunction, it's not a problem of the insulin being high, but normal physiology in the man, and women in various locations of the body, is such that when insulin flows through a blood vessel, if the blood vessel is insulin sensitive, the endothelial cells that line the blood vessel wall, they will see the insulin and it will stimulate

the production of a molecule called nitric oxide, which will induce vasodilation, an absolutely critical process for erectile function. But those blood vessels become insulin resistant and now the normal process of vasodilation in a man having normal erectile function is compromised. Okay, so let's step back now. So you said insulin levels rise

and then a variety of tissues in the body become insulin resistant because they don't, they can't tolerate being overstimulated. But some of them don't and so they are overstimulated. Okay, and then you... Overeas included. Right, right. And we talked about the reproductive consequences

but what other tissues become hyper, are in a hyper reactive state because of too much insulin? Yeah, right. So there are not many. Most of them go the way of the insulin resistance, like the man's side of things. And that's like, for example, what causes Alzheimer's disease, where the brain's becoming insulin resistant.

But the insulin sensitive side would be a tissue like the liver, where one of insulin's effects at the liver is to tell the liver to make fat. Now, the liver is more complicated. I kind of joke with my students that it, when it comes to metabolism, the liver's the soccer mom. It is sort of giving, it knows what to do with everything. You have a problem, the liver can solve it.

It is the ultimate handler. It is the nexus of all nutrient metabolism, whether it's lactate or ketones or fats or glucose or proteins, amino acids, the liver handles all of them. It is the soccer mom, it does everything. And when it comes to insulin, one of the many responses to insulin is to tell the liver to make fat.

That effect is as insulin sensitive as ever. And so now in the high insulin, insulin resistant body, the liver is seeing all of that insulin and one of its effects is to tell the liver to make more fat, thus. Is that when you get fatty liver? Then you have fatty liver, the most common liver problem.

We also now are seeing signs of fatty liver in children, which is historically unprecedented. And alcohol does that. Alcohol does, too much fructose, another pointing the finger at. Like in high fructose corn syrup, you mean that kind of fructose, which is subsidized to a degree that's absolutely stunning

and which is in virtually every processed food. Yes, so there's so much of what I rage against when it comes to the government getting involved, is it's happened, it's subsidizing the most problematic things like my fructose corn syrup. But even if you and I were drinking orange juice right now, that's a straight shot of glucose or apple juice. If we were meant to drink that fructose,

then we wouldn't even have to eat it with the apple. You think, you and I could drink four apples worth of fructose and not even think about it. And yet we'd never want to sit there and eat four apples because the fiber and things would want to slow it down and we'd feel a little more full. And so we just, we naturally wouldn't focus as much on it. But this environment that we live in,

it's almost like we are eating for winter all the time. All the time, yeah. Because fall used to be the time of abundance. It was fall when we would reap the harvest, it was fall when the plants would be kinda coming into season, and boy, let's get ready. Yeah, like let's lay on some fat, like a bear, because winter's coming.

But winter never comes anymore. Winter never comes. because we're gonna be entering some? Yeah, like let's say on some fat, like a bear. Because winter's coming. And in the north, that would be not good. Winter never comes. And so anyway, as we go from top to bottom, you can find insulin resistance, you know, the brain, just to find point on it. The brain is one of the high metabolic rate organs in the body. Right now, we're having a stimulating conversation.

It is entirely possible. I bet our brain is number two, or probably number two, highest metabolic rate at the moment because it's so hungry. It's so demanding. Even when we're sleeping, it's busy. So it needs to be fed constantly. The brain doesn't burn fat for energy for reasons that we don't really understand actually. The brain is its own hybrid though, burning glucose, blood sugar, or ketones.

Now, there is in fact a man whom I love and admire is a scientist in Northern Ontario. And Stephen Kuhnane, he presented this idea of a shore-based evolution, suggesting that the reasons humans departed in part, we are the only land-based mammal born obese. What Mr. Fuller pushed that theory too, by the way. Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it accounts for lots of things like female fat distribution, kind of webbed hands and feet, our ability to swim, hairlessness. Omega-3, the value of omega-3 fats, eating these kind of short-lived foods. Well, where else would you live if you could?

Not in the prairies of Alberta, that's for sure. No, no, on a warm beach where there were lots of shellfish, obviously. That's pretty straightforward. It would Not in the prairies of Alberta, that's for sure. No, no, on a warm beach where there were lots of shellfish. Absolutely. That's pretty straightforward. It would be a good way to do it. So the brain has these two fuels, glucose and ketones. Ketones are utterly unregulated.

If they're going up, in fact, one of the things I love disabusing my students of is the false idea that glucose is the preferred fuel for the brain. Yeah, right. Every sort of knuckle-dragging, mouth- mouth breathing professor will just spout that off without actually knowing a thing about brain metabolism. The reality is, if someone has glucose levels

at five to six millimolar in a normal range, and they're fasted or on a ketogenic diet, even when their ketones get to one or two millimolar, so over here, the brain has already shifted so that up to 60 plus percent of its energy is coming from the ketone. So don't tell me. So when it has a choice, it'll pick ketones.

Indeed, and when the moment ketones come online, the brain switches. Even if there's still way more glucose than ketones, don't tell me this is the preferred fuel, when this one, even at a fraction of the level, is already the dominant source. Right, right. So the brain. That's so cool.

We've been talking to this, my daughter in particular, this guy here in Arizona who runs an old folks home. And he's been, so it's like a palliative care old folks home. And he's been putting his charges on a ketogenic diet and people are leaving his home. Yeah, it is one of the great sort of swept under the rug. Right, right, so do you know like if you have someone who's suffering, especially from early stage Alzheimer's,

which we've discussed as type three diabetes already, if you switch them to a ketone diet, have there been studies done already showing what the consequences of that, the short-term consequences for cognitive function? Because that'd be the fastest way to test whether that was helpful. Yeah, so as a clinician, you'll appreciate this.

But as a biomedical scientist, I sort of am frustrated by the lack of other studies, but the number of case reports that are being published keeps climbing, climbing, climbing, that the brain, as it becomes insulin resistant and it can't get as much glucose, it's like the rhyme of the ancient mariner. It's this sort of metabolic, this version of it,

where even if the body's hyperglycemic, if the brain is insulin resistant, it's basically crying out glucose, glucose everywhere, nor not a drop to drink. It can't use that glucose because it's insulin resistant and it needs insulin to help open the doors to get the glucose in. But the ketones are unregulated.

So to the case reports, yes, there are documented, peer-reviewed instances where you can take a patient whose cognition is so compromised, they can't tie their shoelaces, or they can't draw out the face of an analog clock. You'll give them a piece of paper and a pen, draw out the clock, one, two, three, and so on. Put them into ketosis, have them do those tests again.

They can tie their shoes. They can draw their faces. It's still a little, but within hours. Within hours. I wonder if anybody's tried that with 45-year-olds for fluid IQ tests, because that'd be a quick test, right? You take the same people.

I should talk to Michaela about that because we could do that study really quick. Take 50 year old people, ah, take obese 50 year old people. Now you're talking. Do a fluid IQ test, put them in ketosis which would take like 48 hours, yeah, about that. Or nowadays you can drink ketones for goodness sakes.

They've become so obviously beneficial. My university just won the cross country national championship. So how fast could you put someone into ketosis? Within an hour, depending on what you're drinking. So you can bring them in for one day, you could give them fluid IQ test, put them into ketosis and give the test again.

Yeah, you could even swap, do it sort of placebo with one day after another. You're drinking something then you're drinking ketones. You wanna do that? Let's do it. That's the beauty in basic science. We could fund that. Well, the brain thrives on ketones. My own lab, we've published reports documenting

how when a person's in ketosis, we actually had people and we were pulling fat biopsies from their belly, little pieces of fat, taking it to my lab and testing the metabolic rate. The metabolic rate went up three times. As soon as they're in ketosis. As soon as they're in ketosis. The fat tissue just starts, it basically signals

when ketones are up, insulin's down, it's sort of party time with metabolism. It's let's just get moving stuff. Metabolic rate goes up, autophagy turns on, things. That quickly. Oh yeah. Okay, so how would you put someone in a state of ketosis with a drink?

Yeah, so. How do you do that? There are multiple different, now ketones have become so obviously beneficial. It increases metabolic rate. It helps people physically perform better. Race car drivers take it. Tour de France athletes take it.

Cross country athletes take it. It's a viable fuel. So as ketones have become more and more accepted for all their benefits, there's been a bit of a race to say, all right, well, how can we do this best? And there are multiple different versions from the lesser effective, but much cheaper,

things called ketone salts. Then you go through the ketone esters, and then you get the bio identical ketones. And they're all of kind of varying efficacy as they get more effective, the price goes up. But I'll say, having seen my beloved Baba, my grandma up in Alberta die from Alzheimer's disease, it is so terrifying that one of the reasons

I adhere to my own low carbohydrate diet is because I wanna keep my brain as healthy as possible. The fact that I stay lean and healthy, well, that's just a plus. That's, well, even my fear of cancer. Cancer cells don't use ketones, they use glucose. And so all the more reason to keep my glucose in check. And so, so with regards to that specifically, so are there studies indicating a decrease in the rate of cancer propagation on zero carb diets.

Yeah. Are they case studies? You know, so that's a really good question. And I'm gonna respect how you framed it, which is, can you prevent the cancer? That's not been, there's no paper on that. What there are papers on is looking at untreatable, particularly brain tumors.

This is where most of the research is at the moment. At Boston University, they are absolutely leading the charge on this. One of the most effective therapies they're doing is putting them into deep ketosis. If they have an inoperable brain tumor. It can take an inoperable brain tumor and not only stop it in its tracks,

but literally start to shrink it. And is the shrinkage a consequence of autophagy? Well, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so coming back to a topic you mentioned earlier, certainly it's part of autophagy? Well, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so coming back to a topic you mentioned earlier, certainly it's part of autophagy and probably just good old fashioned necrosis. You simply are dying because you can't survive. Cancer cells will metabolize,

they rely on glucose as their main fuel. And they propagate rapidly. So they're more dependent on glucose than ordinary cells. And they don't wanna have to rely on blood flow, where they basically are growing so quick that they outpace the blood flow. Right, right. And glucose doesn't need oxygen to burn.

It can be fermented. But just to really elaborate how clever this area of research is, this group at Boston, they took a tumor cell, and the whole theory of cancer is that it's genes, it's from your nucleus. It's a nuclear genetic disease. And yet they took the nucleus from a tumor cell

and put it into a healthy cell, and the cell was totally normal, it didn't do anything. They literally transplanted the genetics. Now, what they also did was take the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. That's where you're burning the ketones and the fat. Then they put the mitochondria from the tumor cell into a healthy cell.

It had cancer. It became a cancer cell. So they're changing the entire paradigm of cancer, saying that it's not a genetic problem. So are the cells adapted to glucose metabolism? Are cancer cells adapted to glucose metabolism? And if you force them to rely on something other than glucose, they die.

It's incompatible with their rate of growth and they can't sustain it. So ketones are at the front. I've also read that if you're undergoing radiation therapy, for example, or what's the chemical treatment? Chemotherapy. Chemotherapy, more specifically chemotherapy, that if you put yourself into ketosis, you have much less, you have much modified negative reaction to the chemotherapy.

In fact that is- Much less- Yes, the negative side effects. Yeah, yeah. When you think about chemotherapy, it really is a matter of the oncologist, the cancer physician saying, how much poison can I give you? So that you, enough of you survives,

but I kill what we don't want, namely the cancer. So chemotherapy is a miserable way to go. And I have my own strong thoughts on the very field of oncology and the use of chemotherapeutics. I think by and large most of them are not worth. Not worth the trouble. Not worth the trouble.

But you maybe will live another week if anything and you will have bankrupted your entire family doing so. But even back to the glioblastoma, the inoperable brain tumor area, part of what they've shown is that ketogenic diets can act as a kind of adjuvant therapy, that the actual amount of dose of the chemotherapy required is much, much lower.

It's far more effective. Because you're already compromising the tissue. You're already killing them, now you're just pushing them over the edge. I mean, this is so much, this is why I beat this drum so loudly, that you look at, like, at the end of this conversation, one of my great hopes is that someone listening

opens up their morning medicine cabinet and they take out their two medications for their diabetes. They take out their medication for their blood pressure. They take out their medication for their PCOS or their erectile dysfunction, thinking because there's different pills, these are different problems. And yet if they start to institute just the simplest,

albeit not easy, but the simplest lifestyle changes to start correcting the glucose, correcting the insulin, they'll find, much to their delight, that those medications can just stay in the medicine. They're correcting their problem one at a time. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of the conversation and just summarize. So what we were attempting to do right off the bat with regards to the Maha movement was to focus on the Pareto distribution,

bang for the buck, it's right. Where's the biggest criminal? Let's stop that. And maybe we don't have to worry about anything else. And maybe we could stop one thing. And what would that be? Well, you talked about insulin resistance, and then we tied that to diet.

That's high carb, high sugar diets cause insulin resistance. Well, then what does that cause? Well, causes insulin resistance, causes obesity, which also causes insulin resistance. And then insulin resistance has a cascade of effects. One of them, well, erectile dysfunction is one of them. L-cypress is one of them.

Cancer is one of them. High blood pressure, heart disease. Right, these are very bad things. Oh yeah, the biggest of the bad. Right, right, right, right. So we're really at the root of the cause of the so-called multiplicity of negative consequences. Yeah, and you said root.

In so much of, so conventional medicine is giving medications, which is trimming at the branches. Yeah. Only to have them grow back. Well, let's just chop the damn tree down. And to do so, you've got to go right to the soil, which is lifestyle. Yeah, so you said go to the root.

There is a root problem, and no medication's going to address it. Right, right, right, right. Well, the medication is going to work if you keep consuming exactly what's causing the multitude of problems. And even if it addresses one of your symptoms, like erectile dysfunction pill, that doesn't mean it's gonna address the fact that your

diet is making you prone to Alzheimer's. That's right. Right, right, okay. And it's only putting a band-aid on. Any medication, when it comes to metabolic problems, no medication can solve the problem. It will just mask it, which is why something as reversible as type 2 diabetes.

Ask one dimension of it. Yeah, one aspect. So something as easily reversible as type 2 diabetes, a disease of too much insulin, bring your insulin down, eat less carbs. The traditional view would be to say, and the clinician will say this, type 2 diabetes is irreversible.

Because if you treat it with conventional means, it is. You will never get off those drugs. The dose will go up, you'll have more drugs, more and more drugs, because you're not actually solving the problem. Type 2 diabetes is absolutely reversible. It's just you have to respect that it's food. The food we eat is the culprit or the cure.

Yep. Okay, so let's talk about lifestyle modification. Okay, so I wanna talk about two things. I wanna talk about government subsidy, let's say, and the food pyramid, the original food pyramid, and how it was developed, because there's a story that'll curl your hair. Oh, it's so appalling. Oh, it hair. Oh, it's so appalling.

It's so appalling. It's just, you can't read that without, what would you say? It's like a traumatic loss of naivety to believe that something that catastrophic could have been consciously perpetrated, yet it was. It's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. Okay, so lifestyle change.

So we think of the typical supermarket, okay? Now people have often been counseled to eat around the edges, right? Don't go in the middle of the supermarket. Why? Because that's where all the processed food is. Well, is the problem processing? I don't think the problem is processing.

The problem is all processed foods are emergency, hypercaloric, glucose-centric foods. Right, so they should be, they're there like when you come across a beehive. They're not to eat every day. So you go around the edges and you eat, well, and you tell me if you disagree with any of this, because we wanna make it simple for people, right?

So you stay away from the processed foods because they're too high in concentrated carbohydrate and sugar, fundamentally. Now there may be other reasons to avoid them as well. The chemicals that are in them, the fact that they've been designed to be addictive, et cetera. But to me, that's trivial compared to the fact

that now mostly they're just the equivalent of sugar. Okay, now you graze around the edges. That means the kinds of vegetables you don't really like. Right? Dairy, including butter, including yogurt, all of that. So that's food that people actually like. Not sweetened yogurt, no sugar. Stay away from the damn sugar.

Meat, and that's about that fundamentally. Right, and definitely don't drink soft drinks. No, no, absolutely, yeah. I mean, you don't want your food to come from, the less you are able to formulate a diet where your food isn't coming from bags and boxes with barcodes, the better off you're going to be. And the way you just described it, you've done it.

To me, I mean, first and foremost, we are, we have more in common with a wolf, digestively speaking, than we do our closest animal relative, like chimpanzees or apes or any other primate. If you look at the digestive system- Chimps spend eight hours a day chewing. Yeah, they have to eat constantly-

Oh, that's a hell of a. Yeah, they have to eat constantly because it is such a nutrient deficient diet. Their colon, their large intestine, is substantially bigger than the humans because they have to ferment so much. Moreover. Brain comparatively smaller. Very small brain, very big intestines.

Yes, yes, yes. That's the vegan evolutionary pathway, by the way. Yeah, and you wanna shrink your brain, remove animal-sourced foods from it, and yes, you'll be like your other prim Yeah, and you wanna shrink your brain, remove animal sourced foods from it, and yes, you'll be like your other primate cousins and start to shrink your brain. But unfortunately, you don't have the colon to ferment as much as they do.

Moreover, you're probably not prepared to eat your own feces, which is what they'll do to get vitamin B12. A purely plant-based diet is so deficient in nutrients, it is utterly incompatible with the human survival, let alone human reproduction. I consider it, in fact, I feel so strongly about this that I actually consider it to be quite devilish

or overtly satanic that I think of, if you'll allow me to invoke some scripture, we often talk about Christ's great commandments, love God, love your neighbor. And yet there was a commandment that preceded those, which was God's commandment to Adam and Eve, be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth. That was the first commandment.

And the older I'm getting, as both a man of religion and of science, I sort of use that commandment as my litmus test. If this is an ideology or a principle or a practice that is going to make it harder for people to reproduce, then there's something wrong with it and I must reject it.

And so even when it comes to dying. Reproductive capacity is species health across generations. It's the equivalent of health, except across generations. So obviously anything that's anti-reproduction in its essence is, there isn't anything more pathological than that. Whether you invoke God, whether the commandment to Adam and Eve, or whether you invoke evolution, whose great design is to just have an advantage to reproduce, you all come back to reproduction. See, one of the things I'm seeing on the Maha side is that it's difficult to bring unity

to the field of preventative medicine. I mean, many people are concentrating on the panoply of chemicals that are in like fruit loops. And fair enough, fair enough. But for me, the problem with a fruit loop is that it's basically just a sugar level. Oh, you and I are totally aligned on this. Okay, okay.

You have to manage your macros. All the other micro stuff, yeah, that matters a little, but if your macronutrients aren't aligned, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and I have rules for each of them, then all that other stuff is fluff. Yeah, it's noise, essentially. It's noise.

You'll lose a needle a little, but not enough to do anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, so, and then the thing is, if you're only able to fight one battle at a time, you better fight the right battle. That's right. And it seems to me, now, it's also the case that there's no recommended daily allowance

for carbohydrates. Yeah, oddly enough. I know, that's very odd, so expand on what that means. Yeah, so it's odd for multiple reasons, including I consider it the most pathogenic because of everything we've been describing, but it's also the one that is utterly unessential. You appreciate this, but most people don't.

Even within the United States, the Department of Agriculture years ago had a statement where it says something like, I'm going to loosely quote it, the lower limit of dietary carbohydrates is zero. Right, zero's a low limit, man. Yeah, that's a pretty low number. That's for sure. And yet, that's the one you tell me to eat the most of,

born from the food guide pyramid and its ill-fated ideology, or born from the modern obsession sort of a pseudo religious view that we can't kill anything. And what a naive view, life is death. Everything that is alive benefits because something died before it,

and we benefit from all of that stuff. So we have this kind of perverse shifted view of nutrition where we focus on carbohydrates. The one thing we don't, we literally don't need to eat it. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate and yet 70% of all calories globally come from carbohydrates. So. They do have the advantage of being cheap in the short run.

Yeah, especially if it's subsidized, it's cheap for the person who's purchasing it. Yeah, well that's a separate issue. Because you could imagine, humanity's been solving a sequence of problems. And once one problem, and it was real, was there just wasn't enough calories. Okay, so you probably want to address that

so people don't starve, and fair enough. And maybe you can address that more cheaply with corn than with beef. Okay, and so there we've given the devil his due, but that doesn't mean that that constitutes an optimized diet. And that's where I think the people who created the food pyramid were criminal.

Oh, criminal, yeah. Because the story, and this is a story you're fleshing out, is that the base of the food pyramid were criminal. Oh, criminal. Because the story, and this is a story you're fleshing out, is that the base of the pyramid, so that's where you get the bulk of your calories, according to the hypothetically scientific guidelines of the government, which were never scientific, in the least, right from the beginning, is that that's where you should derive

the bulk of your calories. And then fats and meat are a tiny, tiny element of that. And that's, they knew from what I've been able to, from what I've seen in my investigations is that the people who designed that bloody pyramid were told by their own scientists that they were gonna produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Yeah, Dr. Philip Handler was the president of one of the leading scientific societies

in the United States at the time, and I'm gonna loosely quote him, but he says, what right has the federal government to conduct such a grand experiment Yeah, no kidding! with the population of the United States as its test subjects? Yeah. That it had never been done? With no control. No, that's right, it had never been done.

And no consent. And look at what's happened. People want to blame meat for all what ills us, which talk about an insane ideology. But you look at red meat consumption from the early 1900s till now, it's been a steady decline. And yet what's happened to heart disease, even at the superficial 30,000 foot view, blaming meat for the ills of these diseases of civilization, these plagues of prosperity, it makes no sense.

Meat consumption has been plummeting. Well, now we've got the bloody greens who are doing the same thing. And the globalist utopian vision, this is the C40 vision, this is a consortium of municipalities all around the world, including many of the world's biggest cities. They want a 95% reduction in meat consumption.

That's not all. 95% reduction in private automobile ownership. Oh yes, of course. A one short haul flight per person every three years. Oh my. Three items of clothing per year. That sounds like a perfect way to enslave people. Oh, it's just beyond comprehension.

But the meat element is particularly egregious, as far as I'm concerned, because there are forms of agriculture that are meat intensive, that revivify soil. And the idea that that's contributing to something like a climate catastrophe, that I can't imagine a stupider lie than that one. Although there are some.

It is tragic because for multiple reasons, just as a fun aside, when men, studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat, saturated fats in particular, his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets. Like this is antithetical to human production. Well wouldn't you think that that's a biological sign of scarcity?

Yes, that's right. Well it's no bloody wonder that you're- Don't reproduce. Don't reproduce now because all you have to eat is broccoli. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's right. It's a sobering view, which is, whenuitable. Don't reproduce now, because all you have to eat is broccoli. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's right. It's a sobering view, which is when you look at the food guide pyramid,

one of the literal authors of the food guide pyramid wrote this and proposed it heavily influenced by his religious creed, where he is an adherent, for the sake of being respectful, I don't wanna cast stones here, whose religious view is that meat is bad, in part because it elicits carnal desires.

And so it's a literal function of this individual's religion at the time. Again, in opposition. Did Kellogg believe that as well? Oh, in fact, Kellogg was one of the adherents. Because he was just as, he was completely, he was. So this is the Seventh-day Adventists were the ones who helped write the food guide pyramid

and then helped create some of these, guess who is the main origin of the American Dietetics Association? The Seventh-day Adventists. And so no wonder it's part of this. To literally get licensed as a dietitian, you have to play the game and say meat is bad because it's, and as a religious man again,

I can't help but just have a grim humor where in the New Testament, the apostle Paul, who I love because he was so, he was like a lion, in some of his writings to Timothy, in 1 Timothy chapter four, anyone go read this, he's prophesying of the latter days. And so it's just an irony that it's religious ideology that helped give birth to these ridiculous ideas

when if you actually scrutinize the text, it doesn't support it. So Paul prophesying of the latter days says, in the latter days, people will be seduced. Now he is quite bold and says, seduced by the spirits of devils. Now I'm not saying every person who believes this is devilish, but he says there will be two things

that will kind of identify them. They will command to abstain from marriage, which is directly opposed to God's commandment to Adam and Eve, and then two, command to abstain from eating meat. And then he goes on to say which God has ordained for the use of man. And so it's ironic to me that religion is invoked

to create these terrible ideas, and yet a sort of studious view of religious text would never support such a thing and indeed Directly oppose it. Okay, so let's let's sum up and before we move to the daily wire side, so there's a fervor in the America in America at the moment with regards to health and I think Really? That's probably a consequence of the fact that everyone's fat and it's like what the hell, like how did this happen? And we spend so much on healthcare.

And that as well, these ballooning healthcare costs that aren't helping the problem. And a growing distrust of the pharmaceutical band-aid treatment to the problem. And of government policy in general, especially policy related to such travesties as the food guide. Okay, so everybody's kind of woken up and gone, well, this isn't working.

All right, so what's the fundamental problem? Well, we've walked through it. The fundamental problem is that carbohydrates are too cheap, plentiful, and promoted. And that's making everyone insulin resistant and fat and promoting Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and erectile dysfunction and other reproductive malfunctions and cognitive decline. We didn't even talk about depression and anxiety. Depression is often, and this has been known for three decades, that there are variants of depression

that are immunologically related. They're inflammatory, it's an inflammatory condition. Right, right, and so that's a huge problem because depression per se is probably 75% of mental health problem, all things considered, right? Elevated levels of making emotions. With case studies finding ketogenic diets are once again therapeutic. probably 75% of mental health problem, all things considered, right? Elevated levels of making a motion. With case studies finding ketogenic diets

are once again therapeutic. Yeah, yeah, Chris Potter. You can look across, yes, exactly, you can look across a span of neurological disorders that seemingly are unrelated. Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, migraines, depression, and yet all of them have been documented to have what's called a brain glucose hypometabolism,

where in each of those instances, if you're actually measuring the degree to which these people are able to take in and metabolize glucose in the brain, it's significantly lower than their counterpart who isn't suffering from that neurological disorder. All the more reason to give the brain a fuel that it can get, namely ketones. Right, right. so one of the suggestions that might emerge from a discussion like this is that if you are unhealthy, why wouldn't the first thing you try be a ketogenic diet?

Control carbs. Yeah, yeah. Always that as my rule number one. Yeah, yeah, start with that. Yes. Kind of no matter what's wrong with you. Yes, control carbs. If it's chronic

and you're having a hard time treating it and the direction isn't good, you should give some serious consideration to radically decreasing your carb intake. And there's no downside. Yes, there's no, I mean people have to appreciate, well what's the downside? There is none. Right, because there's no recommended daily allowance. Exactly, this is the one. There are such things as essential fats. You better get them. There are such things as essential proteins, or amino acids, you better get them.

Crickets chirping. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So lest it seem like you and I are being just crazy, no, rule number one, control carbs. They are the one that is the main contributor to your disease in the first place, and two, you literally do not need them. So let that one be the first.

So the negative consequences are zero. Zero. Right, right. So you have a broadly applicable medical intervention that's dietary based, that's very likely to be successful in treating a whole variety of diseases, including ones that will kill you in ways you do not want to die, which would be Alzheimer's and diabetes, let's say,

or any degenerative neurological condition. And the side effect profile is nil, except that you get thinner and better looking, and your sex life improves. Okay, that's a good place to end. Yeah, I'm sold. I've convinced myself again. Yeah, yeah, okay, so I think what we should do

on the Daily Wire side is talk a little bit more about how this came about, right? And delve into that for everybody's edification, hypothetically including our own. For all of you watching and listening, you can hear my guests' lectures on Peterson Academy. Tell me the lectures that you've done so far for us. You've done three, I believe.

I've done three, yeah. And this is so orchestrated by Michaela, who's just been such a champion for this message. So the first one at Michaela's explicit invitation was Why We Get Sick, which was essentially a longer version of everything we've been talking about. Six or seven hours of what is insulin resistance, why does it matter, where does it come from and what to do about it.

And then after that, I was invited back to just say, they sort of thought we need a little more kind of basic science and biology. So I have two other courses and I have an affection for alliteration. Basics in biology and fundamentals of physiology. So those are the three, why we get sick, basics in biology and fundamentals in physiology.

Right, so you can dig more, people who are watching those can start at the surface and get the bulk of the information like we did today. That's right. But then they can dig down for deeper understanding. As a professor, it really is sort of a seven hour version of what I would take a semester to do. Yeah, yeah.

Which I appreciate the point of this as much as you and I both rail against traditional higher education. Anyone who's curious and thinking, you know what, semester to do, which I appreciate the point of this as much as you and I both rail against traditional higher education. Anyone who's curious and thinking, you know what, I kinda liked my high school biology and I wouldn't mind a little more, well, I got the class for you.

Or they wanna go a little further and understand how the systems of the body, how's the heart working, how's the brain functioning, how are the lungs being dynamic, the muscles, well, that's physiology. And then the last part of it is when things start to go wrong, if you will, but a version of everything we've been talking about, which is basically the metabolic origins of chronic disease, that's why we get sick.

Right, right, right, right. Okay, well I think that's what we'll focus on on the daily wire side, but I want to tilt the conversation again or focus the conversation more with regards to pathological policy in the past, why that emerged, because it really is a story that'll just, it just curdles your heart to understand what was done to the American population with the food pyramid. It's beyond comprehension. But more importantly, perhaps, to understand and to investigate how that might be put right, because the Maha people are trying to figure out how to communicate directly with the American population to reverse this as rapidly as possible and as sustainably as possible,

without a heavy-handed sort of top-down approach. So we could discuss that practically on the daily wear side. So all of you who are watching and listening, join us for that.