Transcription
Many people struggling with bumpy chicken skin on their arms, multiplying skin tags, rosacea, or other frustrating skin conditions have no idea that their diet is at least partly, if not mostly, to blame. They're often told it's just genetic or bad luck, but it's really high insulin.
At the end of this video, I'm going to tell you about the test that you can ask for that, if you get your doctor to check them, will immediately uncover if you have hyperinsulinemia or not. Stick with me for the next 11 to 13 minutes and I'll show you the seven skin signs of high insulin that you probably don't know about and your doctor probably doesn't know about, either. Let's do it.
Now, three terms we need to get out of the way real quick so you understand what I'm talking about. Number one is insulin resistance, which is when your cells ignore the insulin. Typically, it's because your cells are too full of glucose to start with, so even though your insulin is telling them, "Hey, let this sugar in." they're so full of sugar that they cannot. The next is metabolic syndrome, which is basically just a doctor's fancy term for the same kind of thing. The really important concept that more and more doctors are talking about lately is hyperinsulinemia, chronically high levels of insulin in your bloodstream. They all point to the same problem, insulin stuck to high, silent, fueling, or worsening common skin conditions in millions of people around the world.
Now, if any of these hit home for you or for someone you care about, keep watching because lowering your insulin levels can transform these seven skin conditions in just a matter of weeks or months.
Now, here are the seven skin signs of high insulin, hyperinsulinemia, [snorts] insulin resistance. Number one, keratosis pilaris. This is rough, bumpy patches of skin, usually on the upper arms, on the thighs, on the cheeks, on the buttocks. Many call it chicken skin and blame it on dry skin or atopy, but when it's stubborn and widespread, especially in young people or in slender people, it's very, very frequently a sign of high insulin levels that are chronic. It often clears dramatically as you drop your insulin by eating a proper human diet. Now, if this [snorts] sounds like you, demand the labs that I talk about at the end of this video.
Number two is skin tags. Some people have skin tags on their eyelids, either the upper lid or the lower lid. Some people have them under their arm. Some people in their groin. They can be 1 mm or they can be 15 mm. They can be one or two, or there can be multiple, very large, dangly skin tags. I once saw a lady in the clinic, her eyelids looked like a chandelier. They hang hung down in her vision and she could barely even see because of the skin tags. We were able to take them off, but if I'd knew then what I know now, I could have told her how to fix her diet, what labs to check for, that she could have reversed those skin tags on her own without me having to pull out the trusty scalpel.
Skin sign number three is acanthosis nigricans, which is dark, velvety patches of skin. It could be on your neck, it could be in the armpits, it can be in the groin. Some people say it looks like my skin is always dirty and they'll scrub it and wash it and use various skin cleansers. It has nothing to do with your skin being dirty. It has to be with your insulin chronically being an overproduction of this melanin in the skin and that is acanthosis nigricans.
Skin sign number four is hidradenitis suppurativa. This is painful, recurring boils. You can actually have this on your palms, but most commonly it's in your armpits, it's in your groin. You have to go to the doctor and get these lanced. You have to take rounds of antibiotics, but dermatologists and other skin specialists very often overlook the fact that there's a very tight connection to high insulin levels and hidradenitis suppurativa. If you'll look down in the show notes, I'm going to put links to research studies for all of these skin conditions, so that if you doubt what I'm saying in this video or if your doctor doubts it, you can just print out a copy of the research and show them.
Sign number five explains why so many young adults fight severe acne despite being thin and fit. Skin sign number five, acne. Now, we're talking about moderate to severe acne. If you're a teenager or in your 20s or 30s, you're going to have an occasional pimple. That means you're alive and human and you're not old, okay? What I'm talking about is moderate to severe acne. This is highly linked with chronic hyperinsulinemia. If it's more than occasional pimples, it is hyperinsulinemia until proven otherwise, even if you're fit, even if you're slim, even if you're young, you can still have this insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia causing acne either on your face, on your chest, or on your back.
Skin sign number six is rosacea. You may have seen people with a bright red patch here and their nose is really bright and bumpy. This is rosacea. Most people who have rosacea initially see their primary care doctor, then later they'll see dermatology. What they don't realize and what their doctor probably doesn't know is that their rosacea is intimately linked to chronically high levels of insulin. I actually had rosacea a few years back. I had stage one. It wasn't very severe. I used to have to put hydrocortisone on my face once or twice a week to keep the rosacea calmed down so people wouldn't be asking me about it when I was seeing them in the clinic. After I adopted a diet that lowered my chronically elevated levels of insulin, my rosacea is now in complete remission and I don't have to use any medication on it at all, ever. And you can do the same thing if you have rosacea or any of these other seven skin signs.
Skin sign number seven, this is going to be the controversial one, is eczema and psoriasis. Now, I'm not saying that psoriasis is caused by hyperinsulinemia. Obviously, there's a genetic, inherited predisposition for psoriasis. What I am saying is that if you have moderate to severe psoriasis, plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, it is at least in some part made worse by chronically elevated levels of insulin. So, that's why you want to get the labs checked that I'm about to tell you about.
Now, when it comes to eczema, the vast majority of cases of eczema, whether it's from a in a very young child or it's in an adult with just chronic eczema, it's caused by ingesting dairy or it's caused by ingesting grains or it's just caused by ingesting too many carbohydrates, which keeps your insulin level chronically elevated. It's always some combination of those when it comes to eczema. Even in very young children, even if they're young enough to still be able to tolerate dairy, it's the grains and it's the chronic hyperinsulinemia. Once you clear up and clean up their diet, the eczema gets substantially better, if not goes completely away.
Now, for the three labs that I've been teasing you about this entire video, you need to ask your doctor for these labs or some combination of these labs, so that you know how your blood sugar's doing. Is your blood sugar chronically high? Why is that important? Well, because if your blood sugar's chronically high, guess what? Your insulin's going to be chronically high, as well, trying to manage the chronically high glucose. So, test number one is a hemoglobin A1C. You want to get this checked. This gives you roughly a 3-month average of what your blood sugar's been doing in the immediate past. So, if your A1C's even a little bit elevated, then the next one of the next two tests is going to be mandatory for you to know whether you're you have chronic hyperinsulinemia or not.
The next test is a fasting insulin or a serum insulin. You want to fast for at least 12 to 14 hours before you have this test checked. Many doctors, strangely, will bulk at this test, saying things like, "I don't know what that is. I don't know why you would want that. I wouldn't even know how to interpret the results of that." Do not let this dissuade you. Keep diplomatically, gently, lovingly asking your doctor, "Pretty, please, check my serum insulin or fasting insulin level because this is going to unlock all seven of these skin conditions."
And then the final test is if you are currently a type two or a type one diabetic and you're injecting insulin, you can't check a fasting insulin or serum serum insulin. You're going to get a falsely elevated number. So, you have to ask for a C-peptide, the letter C-peptide. Ask for a C-peptide and even if you're injecting insulin, this will still tell you how much insulin your pancreas is producing and if it's having to produce too much because you're eating too many carbohydrates.
So, when you get your lab results back, if your insulin is above 10, that's too high for you to be optimally healthy and it's also high enough that it's going to increase your risk of having one of these seven skin signs of high insulin. You want it eat a diet that's going to lower your insulin level down as close to 10 as you can get it, under 10 if possible, around five is ideal.
So, if your fasting insulin level is above 10, you're going to do what? How are you going to change your diet? You're going to cut the amount of carbohydrates that you eat on a daily basis. Now, you're going to cut completely out the ultra-processed, sugar-added, ground-up, processed wheat, rice, oats, and corn carbohydrates. All the breakfast cereals, all the bread, all the pastries, all that junk. That's got to go if you want these seven skin signs of high high insulin to go away. You've got to get rid of those completely. But, for many of us, even the more healthy carbs that that come in fruit and berries and fruit juice and fruit juice smoothies, especially, that's got to go.
If you cut the carbs enough to in order to get your fasting insulin level under 10, you're going to notice that these seven skin conditions that we've talked about, really eight if you count eczema and psoriasis as two different conditions, they're going to get noticeably better, sometimes markedly better, sometimes go away completely. And that's a really good thing. We have hundreds of people in our PhD community who used to have severe cases of one of these skin conditions, and after cutting the carbs down low enough so that they're either either eating a ketogenic diet or a therapeutic ketogenic diet, a carnivore diet, or a carnivore diet, they were able to put the skin condition into complete remission. Hundreds of people in our PhD community have done this, and you can do this, too. All of these skin conditions get less severe, in some cases drastically less severe, if you cut the carbohydrates and keep them cut consistently long enough to get your fasting insulin to be 10 or less. Somewhere between 5 and 10 is ideal for most people.
Now, if this video really connected the dots for you, and you're like, "Man, this sounds important, because look at all the research links Dr. Berry linked down in the show notes below. I think he's onto something here." If you'd like to quit fiddling around on YouTube and join a community of people whose one and only mission in life is to optimize their metabolic health, including skin conditions caused by metabolic disease, then you can should consider joining the PhD community. There's a link in the show notes, and we've got thousands of people from all over the world reversing chronic metabolic disease and improving the quality of their skin each and every day. Once you join us,