520. Is Your Diet Killing You? | Dr. Benjamin Bikman
Summary
Dr. Benjamin Bickman is a professor of cell biology at Brigham Young University and a lecturer at Peterson Academy. He's done 3 courses for us, and we're talking today primarily because I'm interested in, and not only in the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement, and I've been talking to the people who are involved in that movement and trying to determine, strategize about the direction. And that's a very complicated thing to do.
Transcript
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If only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking,
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We crave carbs, and they have myriad metabolic effects, one of which is to spike insulin.
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What happens to type 1 diabetics if they eat nothing but fat?
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They get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'm done.
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A government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat, and boy, they got it wrong.
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All those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree
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A purely plant-based diet is so deficient in nutrients,
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it is utterly incompatible with human survival.
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Studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat,
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his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets.
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The first thing I think I'll tell you is that I'm on tour again from February through June
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through the United States, in Canada, and in Europe.
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And if you want more information about that, go to jordanbpeterson.com and check it out
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so that you can come and see me and my wife if you're inclined to do that.
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But I'm talking today to Dr. Benjamin Bickman, who's a professor of cell biology at Brigham Young
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And we're talking today primarily because I'm interested in, and not me only, obviously,
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in the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
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And I've been talking to the people who are integrally involved in that movement
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and trying to determine, strategize about the direction.
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And one of the things I want to do is figure out where the most bang for the buck might be had
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but there's one or two causes that are 90% of the problem.
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And so I talked to Dr. Bickman today about insulin resistance.
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And really, to put that in more simple terms, excess carbohydrate intake.
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And that's the carbohydrates that are rapidly transmuted metabolically into sugar.
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And that's pretty much all carbohydrates, by the way.
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And the fundamental problem with America's health is an abundance of carbohydrates.
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And so we discussed insulin resistance, which is a metabolic condition that arises as a consequence
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And then we discussed the multiplicity of cascading catastrophic health effects that produces type 2 diabetes being particularly well-known, let's say, as a secondary consequence.
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But cancer, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction, more generally, high blood pressure, you name it.
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There's almost no serious medical condition that's widespread that can't be traced to excess of carbohydrate intake.
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And so obviously, it seems to me, that's where the focus should be.
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We walked through some hypotheses about how that problem might be redressed at the government level,
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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,
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than to modify your diet away from high-carbohydrate intake.
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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,
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but particularly Americans maybe, are suffering from a slew of unfortunate medical conditions.
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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 U.S., how would you do that?
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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.
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But if you focus, you'll find that three of those are the major contributors.
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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.
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If you spread your forces out across the entire panoply of problems, you're not going to get anywhere.
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Like, if there are 24 stakeholders in the system that are making America sick, and you take on all 24, all you're going to do is fight endless battles.
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So I'm curious, if you had to zero in, you know, to where you'd get the most bang for the buck, when you look at the health of America, what do you see as the major impediments, the major problems?
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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.
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I think it comes in around number six or seven, but also number one, which is heart disease.
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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.
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Even certain forms of cancers are viewed increasingly as a metabolic problem.
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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.
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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,
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the alternative view isn't that these are each distinct problems.
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It's just that there are various manifestations of the same problem, namely insulin resistance being the most common disorder.
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Within the United States, a study published out of the 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,
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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.
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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 U.S. number 20 or so with type 2 diabetes worldwide.
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The Middle East, they're experiencing these problems far worse than we are.
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Even Southeast Asia, these countries where you'd look at the population and think, well, you look healthy.
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But there are ethnic differences where body fat, which is so important to this, will predispose people to these metabolic problems at varying levels.
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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.
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So lay out the relationship between insulin resistance and obesity.
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So insulin resistance is the most common problem.
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Naturally, we want to know, all right, well, where did the villain come from?
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I typically describe and teach that there are two paths.
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There's fast insulin resistance, which has its own noxious stimuli, that it comes quickly and it can go quickly.
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But then there is slow insulin resistance, and this touches on your question, so I'll answer it with that one in mind.
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One of the ways in which insulin resistance develops is by fat cells that get too big.
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Now, to really confirm, as much as we have an obsession on fat, on body fat, we actually look at it kind of incorrectly.
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We would say, okay, Jordan has 20 pounds of fat, whereas Ben has 30 pounds of fat.
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So Ben's naturally going to be sicker than Jordan, and yet it's not the mass that matters most.
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It's actually the size of each individual fat cell.
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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.
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So if you look at the top 10, nine of them go to men, and it's not even close.
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Men die more from these problems than women by orders of magnitude almost.
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But women are fatter than men, and so it's clearly not an issue of fat mass.
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So if you look at it as a percent body fat, a woman's going to be fatter than a man by design.
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That's supposed to be that way for reasons that we won't get into.
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But men have less body fat, but we have bigger fat cells.
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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.
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Now they're filling it, filling it, filling it, filling it.
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Oh boy, you better take that balloon off or it's going to pop.
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Now the fat cell, acting in its own best interests, it has to adapt two ways to ensure that it doesn't pop.
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So one thing, the fat cell, as it gets ever bigger, it can't turn off the fuel coming in.
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But what it can do is change the fuel coming out.
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So insulin has an absolute choke hold on fat cells.
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This is a little outside the question, so I won't quite get around to it yet.
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As much as we focus on calories, insulin tells a fat cell to grow.
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And now the fat cell is growing and it's telling insulin,
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Insulin, I am about to pop and so I have to stop listening to you.
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And so I'm going to become deaf or I'm going to become resistant to what you're telling me to do.
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And whereas earlier insulin was telling it to hold on to all of this fat,
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now the fat cell starts leaking out fat, even though insulin was originally telling it not to.
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This creates a problem that we can refer to as ectopic fat deposition.
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Because now the fat cell is leaking out these things called free fatty acids.
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Now that's not normally a problem necessarily, but that should only happen when insulin is low.
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Now we have this weird state where insulin is high,
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which should be telling the fat breakdown to slow down.
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I'm getting into deep biochemistry actually really quickly.
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So normally if insulin is up because we've eaten some carbs and stuff,
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then fat in the blood would be down because insulin would be telling the fats to hold on to it.
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But now, or when we're fasting or low carbohydrate diet,
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then insulin is down and now we're mobilizing more fat.
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So normally the biochemistry and the endocrinology is such that if insulin is high, fats are down.
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Unless the fat cells are overfilled or have undergone hypertrophy or a growth expansion,
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And so now we start storing fat in tissues that are ill-suited,
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So actually, if you'll allow me, I love that you just ask the question why.
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I tell my students that when you ask a scientist a why question,
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especially a cell biologist, my answer is God only knows.
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So I don't know why God designed the system to work that way.
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Maybe it's because historically the probability of prolonged nutrient availability at that level was like zero.
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So the rule would have been historically, if you have extra food, hold on to it.
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So that is in fact reflective though of insulin's effect.
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It is so determined to store energy that it will literally depress metabolic rate.
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So that's the first problem with touching on the question of what's the connection between obesity and insulin resistance?
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They get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'm done.
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So I'm going to leak out the fats even though you don't want me to.
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But then there's a second feature that just compounds the problem,
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which is as the cells are getting bigger and bigger and fat cells can grow unlike any cell in the body.
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No cell in the body is capable of the expansion that a fat cell is capable of, much to our chagrin.
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But as the fat cells getting bigger and bigger,
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they're pushing each other further and further away from capillaries,
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from the smallest base unit of the blood vessel and all of its life-giving oxygen.
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And as it's getting pushed further and further away,
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the poor chubby fat cell is becoming hypoxic or it's suffocating.
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it starts slowly dripping out these pro-inflammatory proteins called cytokines,
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basically just hormones that turn on inflammation.
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And there's a whole bunch of them, dozens of them.
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it's getting to the capillary and stimulating the growth of a new blood vessel.
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And so it's kind of the fat cells way of crying out,
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So both of these things, we pity the poor fat cell.
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It's become so filled because of our lifestyle,
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which is a whole other topic worth diving into.
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But it becomes insulin resistant to ensure its own survival,
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spreading fat to be stored throughout the body.
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And then it becomes pro-inflammatory to try to correct its blood supply.
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And that then, the inflammation is one of the fast causes of insulin resistance
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That any time inflammation is turned on on the body,
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but the overlapping of the immune and the metabolic is profound.
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Just a moment ago, you and I were speculating on the,
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One thing we know for certain is that of all the systems in the body,
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the immune and the metabolic are not only essential to survive times of deprivation
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and to defend the host, but they work hand in hand.
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After all, what good is it trying to mount an immune response
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if the warriors don't have any energy to work with?
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So anytime inflammation is up and it's staying up,
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And indeed, it is one of the main causes of insulin resistance.
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Okay, so let's walk through this from stage one
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and also let everyone know what the health consequences are.
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You tell me if I get it wrong and elaborate wherever you want.
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All right, so we have access to an endless number,
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and we store excess energy like a grizzly bear or a camel,
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and we do that so we don't starve to death in the winter.
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islanders who tend to be evolved to get through lean times,
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they're very, very efficient in their metabolism.
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and then tell everybody why insulin resistance is bad.
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But it also has catastrophic effects systemically.
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and then talk about what insulin resistance does.
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which has a variety of health problems as well.
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Yeah, insulin is an absolutely essential hormone
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we need it to be generally keeping in a normal range.
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would have been essentially non-existent, right?
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But the meat element is particularly egregious,
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that I can't imagine a stupider lie than that one.
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Like, this is antithetical to human production.
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Well, wouldn't you think that that's an evolution,
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And so it's a literal function of this individual's
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were the ones who helped write the Food Guide Pyramid
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guess who is the main origin of the American Dietetics
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who I love because he was so, he was like a lion.
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in 1 Timothy chapter four, anyone go read this,
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And so it's just an irony that it's religious ideology
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that helped give birth to these ridiculous ideas.
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And then two, command to abstain from eating meat.
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And so it's ironic to me that religion is invoked
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And yet a sort of studious view of religious text
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And I think really that's probably a consequence
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Okay, so everybody's kind of woken up and gone,
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We didn't even talk about depression and anxiety.
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You can look across a span of neurological disorders
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Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, migraines, depression,
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to have what's called a brain glucose hypometabolism,
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it's significantly lower than their counterpart
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who isn't suffering from that neurological disorder.
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If it's chronic and you're having a hard time treating it
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Yes, there's no, I mean, people have to appreciate,
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Right, because there's no recommended daily allowance.
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There are such things as essential proteins or amino acids.
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There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.
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So lest it seem like you and I are being just crazy,
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So you have a broadly applicable medical intervention
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which would be Alzheimer's and diabetes, let's say,
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except that you get thinner and better looking,
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and delve into that for everybody's edification,
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you can hear my guests' lectures on Peterson Academy.
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Tell me the lectures that you've done so far for us.
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who's just been such a champion for this message.
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So the first one at Michaela's explicit invitation
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Six or seven hours of what is insulin resistance?
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we need a little more kind of basic science and biology.
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basics in biology and fundamentals of physiology.
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Basics in biology and fundamentals in physiology.
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People who are watching those can start at the surface
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and get the bulk of the information like we did today.
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But then they can dig down for deeper understanding.
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but a version of everything we've been talking about,
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which is basically the metabolic origins of chronic disease.
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with regards to pathological policy in the past
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to the American population with the food pyramid.
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Because the Maha people are trying to figure out
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without a heavy-handed sort of top-down approach.