You Won’t Reverse Insulin Resistance Until You Fix THIS | Dr. Sten Ekberg

High blood glucose is one part of the problem. High insulin levels is a bigger part of the problem. High glucose causes swelling, micro-vessel damage, blindness, but high insulin clogs up the cell and causes all of the downstream effects from metabolic syndrome, inflammation, dementia, cardiovascular disease. So, insulin is the thing to watch.

Carbs are a drug. Why are all the comfort foods carbs? Because it changes how we feel. It changes how we feel, it's a drug. Diet is 80% of the solution, but now we live in such a complicated world and there's more and more factors that complicate it. For optimal health, we want to do all of them for a period of time. And that's where a lot of people miss out. Oh, I'm just going to do this one. It's like, no. Your body can't operate if you're violating one of these. I tell people it's a low-carb diet, it's a moderate protein diet, the fat is just the rest. The reason the keto diet works it's because you're lowering insulin, you're reducing the addictive foods that make you overeat. Cuz this is all about hunger.

What would you say is the biggest lie people still believe when it comes to metabolic health? I think the biggest and most dangerous lie is that fat is dangerous. And the fact that there are still low-fat products out there promoted as healthy. I I think it's that simple because fat is the fundamental fuel. It's It's the one the body stores as a reserve. And throughout history I believe that fat has always been the majority of our calories. And it's not until the recent recent time, recent uh era that we have made fat a bad thing and people start avoiding it. And I think that's that's a big part for the the degeneration in health that we've seen in the last 50 years.

All right. Well, let's really break this apart. What makes a good fat versus a bad one? If we eat it the way nature made it, it is almost invariably. I'm sure there would someone can find an exception somewhere, but if nature made it, then it's a good fat. And if we mess with it, then it becomes a bad fat. It's really that simple. When we harshly process the seed oils, when we hydrogenate the the oils and turn them into margarine, now they become frankenfoods, basically. So, anything that any animal fat that we eat directly with the animal meat or fish is excellent. And any fat that is minimally processed, like butter, cream, if we tolerate dairy, uh olive oil, which you can cold press. You just put a little squeeze on it and the oil comes out. Those are healthy oils. But, when we have to start applying high heat and high pressure, and then we ruin the oils and they stink and taste horrible, and we have to deodorize them and degum them and send them through all these different processes to remove all the the rancid flavors that they introduced in the processing, now now it's a frankenfood. We might as well eat eat plastic, basically.

Okay, talk more to the specifics of what those are, the seed oils. What types of oil? So, they they call them vegetable oils and it's most of the stuff that you find in the supermarkets, but there's basically soybean oil, which is the the best seller in in the US, which is a legume. Uh then there is canola, which is a seed, and then there is corn oil, which is a grain. So none of those are vegetables. They're they're plants, but they're not vegetables. But they put the vegetable label on there cuz now people think that this is something healthy. Cuz we've we've shifted the bias onto plants to something magical. It's like you you can do no wrong. Um but those are the foods. And And like corn only has a few percent of oil in it. So you got to use all sorts of tricks to get the oil out of there. And for one thing, they use solvents even, like acetone, and traces of that acetone remain in the final product.

Somebody that says, "Okay, this is good to know, but I've been consuming them for years. What are they doing to the body that's so harmful?" They're just setting them up for a a It's it's just a piece of the slow degeneration. And And that's the that's the problem with all the things that we're talking about. For most people, these things don't kill us fast enough. Right? If they knocked us out like an Ebola virus, people would pay attention. If they knocked us out like cyanide, we'd pay attention. But these things take 20, 30, 40 years. And therefore, we have a hard time connecting them. Right? But it's all the little toxins and the little overfeeding and the chemicals that become a piece in the puzzle for the the the metabolic poor health, the the low-grade chronic inflammation that drives all degenerative disease.

I've heard talk of these oils when they're in the body getting incorporated and staying there for years. Is that true? Yes. And if so, is there a way to speed up the process of getting rid of them? That's a good question. I don't know. It's more of as far as I understand it, it's mostly about uh competition. Like you're you're making new cell membranes all the time. And these cell membranes are it's really the brain, if you think about it, because they decide that the brain has cells with cell membranes and every organ, every cell in the body has a lipid bilayer cell membrane. And this is the most critical structure in the body because it decides what goes in and what stays out. So, we very, very selectively allow things in. Just because we eat them doesn't mean that they're in the body. They're in a tube and we very selectively agree to bring them across. And then in the cells, the process is even even more sensitive than than that when we're talking about signaling molecules and individual amino acids and all these different nutrients. And the cell is what allows for that selection, the proper selection of what comes across and what doesn't. And we need a good, healthy mix of fatty acids in that cell membrane. So, we need cholesterol and we need primarily the most important ones are uh the DHA and the EPA. And we we need a mix of of other ones as well, but basically the DHA and the EPA, those are very long, very distorted fatty acids. So, the the DHA is unsaturated in six places, and that makes it very crooked, very squiggly, and that that pushes the molecules apart, and it provides flexibility and elasticity. The cell membrane becomes flowing, all right? And then the contrast to that is cholesterol and saturated fatty acids that we need to provide stability. So, that there's a balance between stability and and flexibility for that cell membrane to get the right signaling properties. But, when we eat So, when we eat fats from nature, we get a a good balance, especially if we eat fish on a regular basis. But, when we start incorporating trans fats and hydrogenated fats and man-made fats and and damaged fats, now we're incorporating all that damage into the cell membrane, and we're altering that that natural balance.

Okay, so you brought up EPA DHA. You brought up fish. Do you feel like to get enough of the EPA and DHA, we can do that through diet, or do we need supplements? It depends on if you like fish. Uh for people who don't eat fish, I would strongly suggest that you eat a a significant amount of fish oil supplements on a regular basis. If you really like fish, then you don't need the supplements because they take they they make the supplements from the same stuff that's that's in the fish. They just extract it from fish, but I would say if you eat a fatty fish three to four times a week, or if you really love to to snack on sardines and things like that, then then you're perfectly fine for most people. But then we also there's always individuality. We always process things differently. And the healthier you are overall, the the less help you need, so to speak. Uh and the worse your diet is, the more toxic you are, then that raises your requirements of of anything that that can help you.

When it comes to omega-3s, do you find testing is valuable? There's the omega-3 index by OmegaQuant. I like to test. I don't think it's necessarily critical for most people if you do all those things. Like if you love fish and and you're taking supplements, then you're you're probably fine, but I would still recommend a test. And we do one called called BrainSpan, and it's a pretty comprehensive test. It measures all of the the the ratios and the presence. There's It's probably similar to the ones you measured, but what you can see there is again, everyone's different, and if you have a lot of challenges to your health, if you have a lot of oxidative stress, and other things going on, then you may still not get enough. So by taking a test, now you can see what your status is. And they have shown, I I don't remember the exact details, but they did a study where they gave people with with a poor status, they supplemented them heavily for like 3 months or something and their memory and cognition improved by 30%. So, that is pretty significant and and that's that's the reason that we're talking about these fatty acids overall in in brain health because it will slow down the degeneration of the brain. Uh that's one of the most important places where we need these fatty acids. So, if we have a lack of it, that's where it's going to show up long term. And because one of the greatest concerns people have is is dementia and cognition as they get older, memory loss or even completely losing who they are.

For somebody only periodically having fatty fish right now, they'd like to include a supplement. What do they look for in a good supplement? There's algal oils, fish oils, krill oil, and then even within those different qualities. Yeah. And then what supplement dosage could they start at? I don't think there's any advantage to algae versus fish. Uh krill has a little bit of antioxidants in it, but it's also many times more expensive. And I think people need to be where they get somewhere around between 2 and 3,000 mg of the EPA and the DHA. Okay? Not not 2,000 mg of fish oil because only a percentage of that may be the EPA and the DHA. So, 2,000 to 3,000 mg of EPA and DHA. For most people, most fish oil is sold with a 2 to 1 ratio of EPA to DHA. And the EPA seems to be a little better at cardioprotective um properties. So, it tends to reduce inflammation a little bit more. The DHA tends to help brain and cognition a little bit more because it's the most critical aspect of of the membrane that was the cell membrane that we just talked about. So, a 2:1 is going to do well for most people, and that's how most supplements are sold. But, if you're especially concerned about brain health or memory or one of those things, then you probably want to up the the DHA a little bit.

One of the things you hear about when it comes to fish oil supplements is the rancidity. Is that something you've come across? And how do we avoid it if so? There's no total way to avoid it, but I would recommend to buy reputable brands. And if buy things that you kind of know have a high turnover, that you know they're not going to sit on the shelf forever. And then another good way actually that people don't realize how much temperature affects these things. So, if you stick them in the freezer, then and you can actually put uh cod liver oil. I haven't tried I I keep cod liver oil if I use it in in the fridge, but you could probably even keep it in the freezer because there's so much DHA in it that it doesn't freeze. What was the other thing you asked? Just to know whether or not there's a problem with quality and rancidity. Yeah. Yeah, so that that's really the thing. Store it Store it cold. Uh for as one example, if you grind up flaxseed, then it's going to get ran start getting rancid within hours. And within a week it's pretty nasty. But if you grind it up and stick it in the freezer, it's still good 6 months later. And the And the same thing with fish, if you keep it out in the open, it starts thinking in in a day, it's pretty nasty. Whereas if you have it in the freezer, then it pretty much stays put.

What about toxicity of fish? You often hear the oceans are toxic. You can't consume seafood like we used to. Yeah. >> When it comes to supplements or eating whole food fish and other seafood, how do we look for non-contaminated? It's absolutely a concern, and I've even done videos with that where I I kind of ranked them. So, what you want to do is you want to eat small fish, like sardines and young fish. And both sardines and mackerel and salmon are quite safe in in this regard. Whereas one of my favorites, which is orange roughy, is not a fish that you want to eat. Uh for two reasons, it's not a fatty fish. It's It's a white very very tender fish. But the problem also is that even those even though orange roughy is a relatively small fish, it grows incredibly slow. Those fish are usually like 50 to 70 years old by the time you you pull them out of the ocean, and they have a lot of time to accumulate waste. So, that's That's why sardines are really like the ideal one, because they're they're harvested very very young and they're also of a species that doesn't accumulate much. Some of the worst ones are large and old and predatory fish like swordfish. Those those have extremely high levels. As far as supplements, I think they're very safe because supplements are very very tightly regulated and tested. As long as you stick with something that's a reputable brand that that you know it tested then and a lot of those oils are are typically what's called molecularly distilled so that they they only separate the the the good part.

Any concern when it comes to smaller fish, the fact that they come in cans? BPA, other things that might be leaching into them? I think we got to focus on the big stuff. I mean I've I have alerted people to the BPA issues and I think we all need to be aware of those issues. But and and for some people who are extremely sensitive and to anything toxic, they just react to everything and their and their body is a mess then maybe you want to be that granular. I think for most people you try to do 90% right. And then you you try to come up with a lifestyle that that's sustainable. Right? If you make it too hard then you're not going to be able to follow through. But but yes. Everything matters. It it's like toxins are are one of the main things. Uh We we did a lot of work with toxins in my office when I was there. And I think it's super important. And the biggest problem we have in in regulation of toxins is that they test them one at a time. Right? So, they do a study on mice and they they give them this one toxin and they build it up to a dose called lethal dose one le- LD1, which means at this dose 1% of the the animals died. Right? And then they treat it as if well, what if you gave them two different toxins at the same time? Are we going to get 2% of mice die? No, because we already lowered their resistance. We already challenged them. So, when you add a second part, almost 100% of the animals die. Right? Cuz it's a strongly cumulative effect. And we right now we have somewhere like 5 to 10,000 chemicals harmful chemicals in our air, food, and water at any given time. So, yes, we need to be smart about it. We need to drink filtered water. We need to avoid spraying our yards with with all these chemicals. We need to minimize it and and just understand that that more isn't better, right? It's it's harming us to a degree. But then we also can't be like totally totally paranoid about it because then then that affects our our emotional state and we become afraid of of doing just about anything. So, it's like learn what you can and try to find a place where where you do 90% right.

You mentioned how previously in practice toxins were a big focus. You've talked about water and lawns. What other big areas to not get overwhelmed, but focus on the big ones, are toxins causing a problem with people these days? I think most of it is probably air and food and water. But, then also people it's so funny you see commercials for cleaning products. People today used to be the only thing that could clean something was actually water that would leave a surface clean. And now people think that if you don't smear a chemical on a surface, it's not clean. Right, we we think that that the chemicals actually clean something. They don't. They dissolve dirt and grease, but then water needs needs to clean the surface to be safe for us, to be clean for us. And again, I don't think that there's a single area. I just think that we need to be more aware of these things.

In the case where water's not enough, somebody cleaning at home, what can they add to that to help the cleaning value? I don't use a lot of cleaning products. Like, most of the time I would just use a drop of dishwashing detergent and then finish up with with water afterwards. So, I'm not an expert on on cleaning items. I just wondered vinegar's one of the things you hear. Is that something you've had success with? Yeah, I mean I I use it occasionally. I'm I'm not, like I said, I I don't use a lot of cleaning products, but for people who do, you would do well to kind of research the the low sensitive, the hypoallergenic, and and all that stuff cuz we we don't need a million different cleaning products. It's It's like the the basic stuff does pretty well.

Okay, you mentioned water and filtering that. Somebody right now drinking tap water hasn't made an investment in this area. What should they look for and do? So, the two biggest thing in tap water is chlorine and fluoride. And both of those are are toxins. And especially they are thyroid toxins. So, people with a known thyroid problem should really watch for that. The The trouble is chlorine is pretty easy. Just about any carbon filter will remove 98, 99% of it. Fluoride is very difficult to get out once it's added. And it's really sad that they put that in in tap water. Um yeah, that's that's another story. But for people who are sensitive, it's very difficult to to get out of to get it out of the water. So, for people who are super sensitive, I would I would first of all drink either bottled water or something from from a carbon filter. And even better would probably be to get a reverse osmosis filter because that removes both of them completely. The The argument you hear against that is that now the water is basically dead. It's almost like distilled water. And it might be missing some minerals, and it doesn't have much flavor. So, but I would still, if you're sensitive and you don't really have an option to stay away from from tap water, then I would get a filter, uh either carbon or reverse osmosis, and then you can add back some some minerals. Uh and and a lot of them you're going to get, like if you have a sea salt or a pink salt or something, uh and you just add a little pinch, you're going to basically put back everything that that was taken out.

Okay, another area you talked about when it comes to toxins, food. Organic is the obvious direction we could turn to to lower that burden. Yeah. But is that enough? Well, it's a good first step. The problem is organic isn't necessarily toxin-free. It's just certified that they didn't add anything on purpose in the last 3 years. But you don't know what was in the soil before that. You don't know what blows in from neighboring crops. And and there's also the fact that there's regulation where a company that wants to stay in business can still source non-organic products in a reasonable amount and include in their organic product if it's too hard to source, if it's if it's a challenge, if it risks them going out of business or not meeting quotas or production lines. You can actually include and it's pretty much up to your your judgment, you can use other things. So, I'm all for organic. I I think it's ridiculous that not everything is organic cuz our ancestors, it's only the last 100 years that that we've had all these issues. I mean by default everything in nature is wild caught fish and grass-fed beef and and so forth. So it's only modern man that that messes with it. But it's still it's a great first step. It gets you in the right direction. And it's it's probably vastly better than the alternative. Now, I'll be very honest. If I think it also depends on on the type of food that you're buying. And and how it's like what's the quality of this particular batch? I buy most of my stuff organic, but if I go to the store and there's a poor little wilted head of organic lettuce next to a fresh juicy uh head of of romaine, I'm not going to buy the the the organic one. Now, you also have to keep in mind which products they use the most pesticides on. And there you you go and you just Google the most recent um green 15 and dirty dozen. Right? And if it's something like berries and I can't find organic, then I'm not going to buy it because that's where they typically use the most pesticides. Uh but other things like avocado and most green vegetables, they don't use a whole lot of pesticides. So there I will buy the organic if it looks good. And if it's reasonably priced, like if even though I know I can afford it, it just irks me to pay like six times more for for something. So, then I might not buy it or or I'll buy the other one. But it organic is still it's still a it's a great place to start and I think it's a good standard that we need to move toward, absolutely.

Are you growing any of your own food? Not yet, but I I would love to. Okay. >> I would need some help first. I'm a little too busy. There you go.

Last area of insult you mentioned is air when it comes to toxins. Yeah. >> What do we do to protect our lungs? That's the hard part cuz you you got to breathe. Um for one thing you can actually the indoor air is usually like 10 times worse than the outdoor air because there's off-gassing and there's dust and there's crap in the indoor air. So, it's actually a good thing to open up and and let the wind blow through when you have a chance. The other thing is that you you can use uh filters. If you know if you're in a place where you can't keep your windows open or you you know it's pretty bad or you're in a city or something, then it wouldn't be a bad idea at all to look into filters and you can use a regular uh box fan and put a uh active carbon filter in it. And then there's these different ionizers and and ozonators and things like that.

Okay, we opened up talking about fats, got into seed oils. Conventional nutrition advice is to consume them and they're heart healthy. For people now that understand what you've been talking about here and the fact that we want to avoid these, likely they're going to consume more saturated fat, which again conventionally we're told isn't good for us. So, let's take it from the other end, saturated fats and why that fear is actually something we shouldn't be worried about. Well, we shouldn't be worried about it because it's it's a misconception from the very beginning. It was based on completely flawed data. Um I know you talked on your show about the the Ancel Keys seven-country study, which is just totally absurd cuz they started with 22 countries, and then they said, "Well, these seven fit the premise that we're trying to to prove. So, let's just keep these seven in the study and get rid of the other ones." That's not a study. That That's That's outright falsification, and yet it it was never caught. And and then we have this as humans, we have this intuitive sense. We We don't intuitively understand biochemistry. We We don't intuitively understand that glucose can turn into fats, but it can't go the other way around. We We don't know those things. But when we when we pinch fat on ourselves, and we know that that fat looks like the fat on the cow, we we jump to conclusions, and we understand we would it seems like it would be very easy for us to eat that fat, and it would end up on our body. So, I I don't think that our I don't think it's any more sophisticated than that that we ended up with really, really bad guidelines. And And when they early on, when they started analyzing these plaques, they found cholesterol in them. So, they said, "Oh, well, then cholesterol must be bad because it's making these plaques." But, this was also around the time where margarine and sugar was going through the roof, which we now know are are horrible. They are They are the drivers of of insulin resistance and fatty liver and cell toxicity. So, anything that we do at the same time that we eat those three things is going to look bad. And interestingly, I mentioned this in a video recently that they I I forget the time frame, but from 1970 to 2009 or something like that, now they're finding more omega-6 fatty acids, in other words, seed oils in the fatty plaques than than ever before. So, it's like the plaques are caused by insulin resistance and low-grade inflammation and oxidation, and whatever you eat at the same time is going to be incorporated in the plaques. They're not the cause of it necessarily. Um it except for of course the the seed oils with the omega-6s. Now, we know that they're inflammatory, so they contribute to this.

Let's talk more about insulin resistance. Take it right from the top. This is something that is basic these days, affecting a lot of people without them knowing. Yeah. Walk me into the average person eating an average diet and how that disease process manifests over 15 to 20 years, sometimes without people even knowing it. When you Google insulin resistance, it's just going to state like the end stage of the process. They're going to say insulin resistance is when your body's cells don't respond properly to insulin. So, in from my point of view, we want to ask why is that? Because the body is is infinitely smart. Why would it just randomly stop responding to insulin? And And we have to understand that everything about the body is it it's infinitely intelligent. It's trying to maintain homeostasis. It's trying to respond and adapt to every change in our environment. And And that's the magic word is adaptation. Insulin resistance is an adaptation. It's not a disease. It's not a condition. It's a state of adaptation. So, if you if you play guitar a lot, you're going to grow calluses on your fingertips. That's an adaptation. The body is protecting itself. It's knowing, "Hey, this guy does a lot of that. Let's try to protect ourselves." If you exercise at high altitude or if you move to 15,000 ft above sea level, you're going to upregulate your red blood cells tremendously. That's an adaptation cuz there's less oxygen, so let's increase our ability to carry oxygen. And And insulin resistance is the same way. We are trying to adapt to the avalanche of carbohydrates. So, our ancestors didn't have that. We didn't have sugar. We didn't have processed starch. And our genome is unchanged for 250,000 years. The The difference between genetically, the difference between humans on the planet today is about uh or the the similarity is 99.9% You can go to any two people on the planet and our genome is 99.9% the same. Which is the exact same number as we find from people 250,000 years ago when Homo sapiens first came on the scene. So we are no more different between ourselves in this day and age than we were from 250,000 years ago. And those people didn't have sugar. They didn't have white flour, didn't have processed foods or over processed anything. They probably had a foundation of meat and fish because those were the most calorie dense. They helped us survive when when food was scarce. And then they probably ate more plant food in the summer. If you lived in a tropical region, you probably ate a lot of fruit. But nowhere ever did you get 300 g of processed carbohydrate? Which is going to skyrocket your blood sugar. So the cells they need fuel. They're asking for fuel. Fuel drives every process of a cell. So first time you come a knocking on the door of the cell and you say, "Hey, would you like some glucose?" It says, "Yeah, that'd be great. Let me have some." And then if it takes till next day before you ask again, the cell is going to say, "Oh yeah, please. I I just used it up. Let me have some." But if you come knocking every 5 minutes and you say, "Hey, here's some glucose." and then you knock 5 minutes later, the cell says, "No, no, I'm fine. I already got some." Okay? It's going to start resisting the action of insulin. It's like a door-salesman. If you're really lonely, you might appreciate some company, so you say, "Oh, come on in. Come on in." And if he doesn't come back for a year, now you're cool. But if he comes back 5 minutes later and says, "Would you be interested?" You're going to develop a resistance to salesman. Right? So, the cell is just trying to protect itself from too much fuel, because it it can't use the fuel. It It takes in glucose, and then the excess gets turned into fat, but there's a point where it says, "No, I've got the fat I need stored. I've got the glucose that I need to run." Now, it's going to start resisting, so now insulin doesn't work. But it's only because we basically force-fed that that poor cell.

When when the cell starts resisting and we still have high blood glucose, now we need to raise insulin. So, there's a message to the pancreas to increase insulin so we can lower blood sugar. Right? Cuz high blood sugar is dangerous. Really low blood sugar or really high blood sugar will put you in a coma. Right? The brain depends on on a very steady, not too high level of glucose. So, high glucose is basically an emergency, and that's why the body is so quick at at pitching out more insulin to bring it down. If humans could tolerate a blood glucose in the thousands, we wouldn't need insulin. Then, we'd just let let it rise and and and wait, but we can't do that. We have to bring it down. And and that's that's part of another misconception where people say that carbohydrates is the preferred fuel because we burn it first or because we we burn it mostly. No, it's the fuel that is dangerous in excess that we have to bring the blood glucose down. We have to get it out of the bloodstream, and that's why we burn it first. And then we burn it mostly because that mostly what people eat.

Okay, let's keep this story going. So far our cells become overwhelmed. Blood glucose starts to go up. Insulin goes up to protect. Somebody who's brand new to this might be saying, "Okay, well, where's the problem here?" Take that story and continue. Yeah, yeah, the problem is that insulin is basically high levels of insulin forced adapted by excess carbohydrates is now force-feeding the cell. All right, so the cell becomes overfed and congested. And this is essentially all there is to metabolic disease. Like, that's what it is. It's overfeeding and it's congestion. It It's really that simple. So, once we get to that point, now insulin has to be kept at at ever-increasing levels until we become diabetic and now they introduce Metformin or or they they inject you with exogenous insulin. And as soon as they do now, that now we force-feed that cell even more. And that cell becomes more and more unhealthy and congested. It can't perform its functions anymore. It's like I've often used the analogy of a pantry. That our our fat stores the body stores fat on purpose and it's like a pantry. You put things in there so that you can go there later and retrieve some food. That's the purpose. But with high insulin, it's like that pantry is a one-way door. You can only put things in, you can never take things out. So now all the food in there, all the stuff in there gets old and rancid and and decomposes. That the quality and the freshness goes down. And so it is with the cell. That's why there's so much benefit to fasting and autophagy because it's a way of cleaning out the pantry. And we were designed for for short cycles of of energy storage. It's like we we hunt something down, we we find some honey, we we gorge ourselves, and we gain 3 lb. Well, that's because we wouldn't necessarily find food for the next 3 days. So we put some stuff in and then we take some stuff out. And then we had seasonal swings as well that there's more plant food in the summer there's more more food availability overall in the summer and those plants, it's fine if we eat some some tubers and some carbohydrates because we're just trying to pack on enough fat. We're trying to become a little bit insulin resistant so we can pack on energy reserves to survive the winter. And those who were extremely insulin sensitive, they were not maybe not able to pack on so much fat, so they perished in the winter. Whereas those with some degree of insulin resistance, or a higher tendency toward it, packed on more fat and were more likely to to survive. So, that's kind of the whole purpose that we we need to remember.

And part of the problem here is as an adaptation, the body keeps bringing the insulin up, chronically keeps it up to keep that blood glucose down and protect the body. Yeah. And if people are only getting their blood glucose measured, they can miss this. And like I opened up saying, this can happen silently in the background for 10, 15, 20 years. Yeah. And meanwhile, your insulin is sky high the whole time and you're not knowing it. So, talk about when somebody has that high insulin, the damage that can happen throughout the body. So, we we know that high blood glucose is one part of the problem. High insulin levels is a bigger part of the problem. Cuz high glucose, it causes swelling, it causes micro vessel damage, it's what causes blindness and kidney damage, for example. But high insulin is what clogs up the cell and causes all of the downstream effects from metabolic syndrome, low-grade inflammation, um dementia, cardiovascular disease, and and it's all connected, high blood pressure. So, we we know this is like 90% of degenerative disease has this common mechanism. So, insulin is the thing to watch. And just like you said though, the problem is they're not watching it. You have to beg your your medical doctor and threaten to try to get it done and it's a cheap test but they just refuse because they've been trained to focus only on blood glucose. And I've talked about this in in many many videos how let's say that you start getting into the age where you might become a little bit insulin resistant. That's different for different people. Let's call it 30 cuz when you were 20 you were invincible, you could do whatever. And then you get into your 30s and let's just put some numbers on it. So a healthy blood glucose, let's call it 85 and a healthy insulin level, let's call it three. So that's where we want to be. That's very metabolically healthy, very insulin sensitive. But then you keep eating or you start eating, you stop exercising, you start eating more, you get busy so you eat three meals a day at the at the drive-thru cuz it's convenient and it saves time. So then a year let's say three years later, now you go to the doctor and they do your blood work again and they only measure blood glucose and the glucose only went from 85 to 88. Right? So the doctor says, "Ooh, you're fantastic. That's sensational. That's as good as it gets." But if they had mentioned insulin, they would have see that it doubled. Hypothetically, okay? So what's happening now is that you're twice as insulin resistant as you were even though your glucose is the same. And if you had taken that insulin test and you understand what we're talking about, you understand if you act right now there's really no damage done and it's very easy to reverse the trend. All you have to do is start eating real food and keep watching that insulin. But that's not what people do cuz the doctor says, "Oh, you're in such great shape. I perfect markers." So another few years go by and they measure your insulin again and now it's 92. And it's still in the so-called perfect zone because they don't really even notice before you get to 100. There's no flag on on your blood test. But again, with that 92 glucose, your insulin now might be 10 or 12. So you've gotten three, four times more insulin resistant. You're really kind of starting the trend. And this is where most people are. Like 80, 90% of the population, even with perfect blood glucose numbers, this is where they are on the slippery slope because we don't measure the stuff that matters. And just like you said, we it's going on in the background, seemingly in the background cuz we don't measure the stuff that matters. So it might be 15, 20 years before that glucose or that A1C is in a pre-diabetic or or diabetic level. So we're basically by measuring shallow stuff. I'm not I'm not saying we we should absolutely measure glucose and A1C, but the one that really matters that can tell us what's going on behind the scenes is is the insulin. And we could catch this stuff 20 years earlier before we have all the blood pressure and the diabetes and the obesity.

To get really specific with people that want to have this tested, the insulin, would it be either the craft test or fasting insulin? It needs to be fasting insulin. What What was the other one you said? The Craft test, where they're taking multiple measurements over time. Oh, oh, oh. Those are good, but it's like you do less before you do more, right? And ins- a fasting insulin test is going to be enough for 95% of people cuz it's going to give you a number, you know where you are. Now, for some people, the situation's a little bit more complicated, or they might be a little bit more advanced, and now you want more data. So, that's where you go and take those tests. But, those are those are more time-consuming, they're more invasive, they make you drink like 100 g of glucose, make you feel like crap, shock your system, especially if you're not used to to glucose. If you're not used to carbohydrates, your body just totally freaks out on a test like that cuz it hasn't seen that in in years. It's like, "What is this stuff?" So, you always start with the simplest, cheapest test that gives you the most information, and then you go further if you need more information.

Somebody at home right now, they're going to go have the insulin tested, but they want to get a good idea right away whether or not they're in this camp of insulin resistance. Most people these days are, but what are the early signs somebody can look for at home right now to know where they're at? Yeah. Well, the first and easiest is a big waistline. If you're gaining weight, insulin did that, right? Cuz you're It's a storage hormone. You can't really put on weight with without it. A a type 1 diabetic cannot put on weight. They can eat 100,000 calories, they can pump oil or glucose or they can't pump oil into their blood, that wouldn't be good, but you get the idea. There is no way for them to get any sort of fuel into the cell with without insulin. So, insulin is is the storage hormone. So, if you're gaining weight, that that's your first clue. Uh then there are there's a myriad of of other signs. Basically, anything that modern people experience, like afternoon fatigue, poor sleep, poor stress tolerance, uh anything pretty much boils down to this this low-grade chronic inflammation. And basically, wherever you look, whatever condition that you study, there's there's a link back to this.

To me, there is some good news when it comes to this, a couple pieces. One being it is such a common denominator for so much chronic disease. >> Yes. It's not like we need to go out hunting for the root cause of cancer and heart disease and then try and moderate our diet to be preventative in all these different realms. And two, there is a lot of hope here. For people that are in the earlier stages, potentially even later, we can make the changes we're going to talk about today to reverse this. Absolutely. And that's kind of the whole idea of an adaptation. It's not a condition. There's not There could be some tissue or organ damage, but for the most part, it's it's reversible. But the biggest part of an adaptation is you pushed your body there. So, if you stop pushing, it's going to come back to to the beautiful middle ground where where it likes to be. Now, for 80% of people, I would say, a diet is 80% of the solution. But, now we live in such a complicated world and and there's more and more factors that complicate it. Think any health care practitioner in the last 20 years have seen more complicated cases than ever before. There's like there's very few straightforward things that that walk through the door anymore. And it it has to do Chiropractors, for for 100 years, we've talked about chemical, structural, and emotional aspects of health. And chemical is the biochemistry. That's That's the food and the toxins. The The good food is on the positive side. The toxins are on the negative side. The The food provides resources and the toxins interfere with them. And for a lot of people, that's that's the biggest part. But, we still have to think of these three almost as equal. Because for some peop- We We all need to address all of them. And for some people, different aspects could be the most important. Uh so, then we have the the structural, which is your posture and your movement. And we need to realize that proper posture allows for the proper balance of muscles and the proper balance of signals in the body. The the brain Okay, we're getting on a on a ri- >> [laughter] >> little side track here, but it's all good. Um the purpose of the brain is to control movement. All right? Thinking and planning and be- being human, that's an epiphenomenon. That just kind of happened in addition to that, but the purpose of the brain is movement. So, when you move, you fulfill the purpose of your brain. Any animal on the planet, it moves in order to find food. Okay? Things that don't move don't need brains. They have found other ways of being stationary and getting their nutrition. They're called roots. Okay? So, that that is the purpose of of the brain, but it works both ways that because the brain controls the muscles and the body parts to go and get food, the muscles and body parts signal back to the brain, and that that signaling is called afferentation, incoming information. That is 90% of the signals, 90% of the juice that keeps the brain alive. All right? That is the biggest purpose for exercise. It's not to burn calories, it's not this or that. The single biggest reason for exercise is to stimulate the brain. Cuz it's primary job is to process signals, and most of those signals relate to movement. And by moving, we are providing that juice that keeps the brain alive. So, So, think of it as as a muscle, right? A muscle cell can have a certain volume. And think of the biceps, the whole muscle. If you work it out, then that muscle goes from this to this. It's hypertrophy. You're you're enabling the metabolic machinery. You're upregulating metabolic pathways in that muscle, so it can do more work next time. Right? We get a stronger muscle. If you stop working out, then that muscle atrophies because the body says, "Why should I put precious resources to that muscle if you're not using it anymore?" Right? Same thing though with brain, but we don't realize it cuz we can't see the brain. We can see the biceps wither away. We can't see the the brain unless we have some imaging 30 years later. But the brain cells work exactly the same way. When

When you don't use them, they atrophy. When you use them, they hypertrophy. They grow bigger. They grow juicier. They upregulate their ability to perform work. The ability to produce energy and process information. So, this goes to our that's why exercise is so critical for emotional state, for focus, because we're training our brain to signal better. And most of the brain does in terms of focus is to turn off distractions and to stay on task, so to speak.

So, that was a long story. But that's the purpose of the brain. And if we have poor posture, now the muscles and the joints aren't working optimally, so they're not sending optimal signals. And the brain is starting to get a distorted picture. And worst of all is if we never move, if we're a couch potato, and then we just cut back on those signals dramatically.

Also, our ancestors, they didn't have chairs, they didn't have desks, they didn't have computers. If they ever sat down, it was on a rock or a log. So, the human body, when we stand up, we have three curves to the spine. We have a cervical curve, we have a thoracic and a lordotic curve. When we sit down, we alter all those three. We flatten out our lumbars, we flatten our thoracics, and with a head sticking out, we get what we call a military neck. And in doing that, not only are we changing the posture, but one of the most important muscles is the hip flexor. And with 8 hours or more, probably 14 hours for people with driving in the car and sitting in a chair at the computer, and wherever they're sitting, you're constantly chronically shortening that muscle, which is one of the biggest reasons for back pain. I would almost guarantee that our ancestors did not have back pain because it's virtually impossible unless you have a modern lifestyle.

So, that's where posture and movement becomes such a critical portion of our overall health and our brain signaling. I know someone in your podcast talked about depression. I forget the context. That something was like proven to, oh, ketogenic diet is a treatment for depression. Like as you're giving it the fuel that it works better on. Well, exercise is also proven to be a treatment for depression. Because movement fires up the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe can inhibit depressive thoughts. It can inhibit, better inhibit things you don't want to think about. Plus, it just makes everything in the brain work better.

So, that's why sedentary life and poor posture and trauma, physical trauma, like if you have an accident, that's not a good thing. It's not just because it hurts, it's because after the trauma, you probably have adapted a new movement pattern. And that's why it would be a good idea to see a physical therapist or a chiropractor or someone who understands that, that can restore that full original pattern because that pattern is part of the signals that shape the brain. So, that's the chemical and the structural.

And then we have the emotional, which is an abundance of stress in our society today. Our ancestors also had stress, but that was big stuff, like somebody attacked them. They had to run after in a hunt. So, they usually had really big pieces of stress that they had to respond to physically. So, when you had the stress, you make cortisol to raise blood sugar for the purpose of moving physically. And you move, now you're burning up that blood sugar and you're putting that cortisol to use and you get back to neutral. And if that stress is short-lived, now you can just sit down and lick your wounds and recover. So, that's how stress is supposed to work.

But today, we don't have, we're not getting chased by bears or saber-tooth tigers or we're not hunting for our food. We don't have to run or move anywhere to go get our food. And our stresses are different. They're bills, they're deadlines, they're news about the war overseas. But it affects us the same way as the bear chasing us, but to a lesser degree. It's just a magnitude difference. We're still firing off that fight-flight response. We're still firing off the cortisol and the stress hormones. We're still putting our healing on the back burner.

So, the stress response is called sympathetic. The healing response, the para- is parasympathetic, okay? So, the parasympathetic runs all of your digestion, your stomach juices, all your enzymes. It runs your cell-based immune systems, your ability to fight off a cold or a flu or a bacterial infection, that's all parasympathetic. Your reproductive function is parasympathetic. Your healing is parasympathetic. Your tissue repair and DNA repair, all of those things are parasympathetic.

So, you only have so much resources in the body. The resources in the body is blood. You have 5 L, let's call it on average. And it carries all the resources. So, if you have a fight-flight response, that's going to demand more resources, and there's going to be less left over for the parasympathetic. So, anytime you have a stress response, you're putting everything else on the back burner. Because when the bear is chasing you, you've got to survive this moment. Because your digestion, if you have, let's say you ate a steak with some lettuce, and then you get chased by the bear, your body is not going to worry about your digestion until you're safe from the bear, right? So, the stress response always takes first priority. And it doesn't matter if it's a bear chasing you, or if someone's just flipping you off in the car, or if you're watching the news and you get tense, it still increases your sympathetic response. And now, what's happening is you're shutting down your stomach juices and your digestive enzymes and your cell-based immunity, and your reproductive function, and on and on it goes.

So, that's why we have to understand how critical stress is. Now, the good news is that it's super simple. If you just take five slow deep breaths, you've reversed it. Right? You've broken the pattern. Because that's all it is. You're watching the news, you get in a tense state, and you're going to stay there pretty much until you go to sleep or something fun happens. Right? But for some people, that could take hours, and they just carry that tension and that anxiety with them. But, if you break the pattern on purpose, if you just not even close your eyes if you can, but if you're in traffic, then just take some slow breaths, center yourself, and you have broken the patterns. Your hormones, your immune systems, it all resets in a minute if you do something to change it, but if you don't, it could go on all day. But, we have to understand how these things affect us.

So, we've got the chemical, the structural, and the emotional. And for optimal health, we want to do all of them at the same time for a period of time. And that's where a lot of people miss out. They'll say, "Oh, I'm just going to do this one or I'll do this one for a month, and then I'll do this one." It's like, "No." Your body can't operate if you're violating one of these. It can't operate optimally. It's amazing at adapting and coping, but if you want to function optimally, you do all of them at the same time for a period of time.

Okay. I want to stick on the emotional piece. All right. This is one I don't talk about as much on the show. You simplified it there, which I really love. Five deep breaths. Is that in through the nose, out through the mouth? I would say it's in and out of the nose. That's our natural breath. And I know there's a thousand different techniques and ideas and philosophies about breath, and I'm sure that they're all. The biggest thing that they all do is they interrupt your pattern. Right? That's the most, simplest, most important thing that you can do because humans, we tend to dwell on things. We tend to hook on to something and just go over and over and over. I should have said this. I shouldn't have said that. He shouldn't have done that. And the biggest thing you can do for yourself is just to interrupt the pattern. Like slap yourself in the face. Punch your fists. Throw your arms out. Do something. But one of the most powerful things is the breath. And it doesn't really matter how you do it, but the one that's been researched the most, and I'm not getting paid for this, but there's a company called HeartMath that has studied this for 40-50 years on the profound physiological effects. And what they're saying is the basic breath is basically 5 seconds in and 5 seconds or 5 plus 1 seconds out. Right? And that's all it is. And it's not a forced breath. It's not a full breath. It's a calm breath that's a little fuller than a shallow, but it's not like you're trying to work at it or anything like that.

And here's just to tie it into what you were talking about. This is the first time I saw this, it's like it clicked for me and it's like amazing you can change this stuff. There's something called heart rate variability. That's a big deal right now and there's all these different apps measuring it. But here's the core of that. When you breathe in your heart speeds up. The only way your heart can speed up is to fire a little bit of sympathetic function. Sympathetic increase. Not much. It's minuscule, but it's enough to raise your heart beats three, four, five beats. And then you breathe out and you engage parasympathetic and your heart slows down. Okay? That's what heart rate variability is. And if you have a heart rate monitor and you exaggerate your breaths, you can see this happening real-time. If your heart rate is 60, it'll go down to 55 and up to 65 and it'll go back and forth. So, that's what heart rate variability is, but here's the key. The breath is a conscious way that you can affect an autonomous function, right? Your stress response, the sympathetic, the parasympathetic, you have no influence. You have no influence over your heart rate or your blood pressure or your digestive function. You can't tell yourself, "Hey, make some more digestive enzymes. Lower my blood pressure, darn it." But, the one thing that you have control over that is tied into all those systems is the breath. Because when you breathe in, you fire sympathetic. When you breathe out, you fire parasympathetic. And most people have a sympathetic dominance, meaning they fire that most. It's a little bit of excess of sympathetic most of the time. And they don't get enough parasympathetic. But, what you get when you do this, when you center yourself and you breathe in for five and out for slightly longer, you're allowing that long, that feels exaggerated, but it's a much longer period of parasympathetic activation than most people ever get. And that's why breaths work so beautifully and most people could lower their blood pressure 20 points in 5 minutes, if it's high.

Okay, so we have this breathing technique. Love it, simple. You were mentioning putting your arms up in the air, smacking your face. I don't know if you're joking about those. Semi-joke. But what other tactics do we have along with the breath to hack into the system and to regulate emotions? There's lots of ways to hack into it. So a lot of biohackers, they talk about ice baths and things like that. And I'm a little too wimpy to do that, at least without a sauna first. So I don't do it much. Actually, ice bath after a sauna is wonderful. But what you're doing there is an extreme pattern interrupt and an extreme sympathetic activation. And once you get out of that ice bath, you get a compensatory parasympathetic activation. It's like the calm after the storm. So those are very beneficial. And it's going right into what you're talking about with the cold shower. If you sit down and you start the timer and you just take a deep breath and you hold your breath, you're stressing your body, you're challenging your body. That's a sympathetic activation. And once you're allowed to breathe again, it feels wonderful and you get a compensatory parasympathetic. So there's lots of little ways like that you can sort of biohack your system. But that's the mechanism by which almost everything works that they're talking about, if it's a physical thing. And then I would say the breathing is the simplest and the easiest foundation. But then I'm also a huge fan of meditation because you can get to deeper levels. You can get to where that parasympathetic activation is more complete because you silence the noise. You silence the conversation. You train yourself to get to that place where you're blissful just by being and existing. And then beyond that, there's lots of tools. This HeartMath company I mentioned, they have a little gadget that you can that measures your heart rate and they tie that to your breath and you get a score. And there's lots and lots of tools like that that can help you sort of push you a little bit in the right direction. Either with like biofeedback or with entraining. And I think there's probably hundreds of tools like that out now and they're probably all providing some benefit.

Okay, so that's emotional. You also mentioned structural. Posture and movement. Yeah. I want to come back to the movement piece there and understand what types of movement and how much to provide that ideal stimulus to the brain. Yeah. So, going back to our ancestors, they didn't go to the gym. They lived their life in the gym. They were always moving. There has been estimates. We talk about 10,000 steps is a fantastic great number to get to. They probably got between 20 and 30,000 most days. Just in doing what they do to forage and hunt and pick things and firewood and water and all that stuff. So movement is so natural to us and the most, I don't think anyone needs to go to the gym. All right? But I think gyms are a great idea if you have to be at a job for 8 hours, which most people do, then you need to be a little more intense. So it's like you're overcompensating for your inactivity. So I think gyms are great. And while you're in there, just try to get as much variety in movement as you can. And you want to add some weight-bearing exercise and some resistance training.

So what I would say for most people, it's like if you have a game you enjoy like badminton or tennis that makes you basketball that makes you move and evaluate things, you're creating complex patterns. It's like reaction response at a fast rate. You have to move in many different ways and you're wiring up your brain in a very complex way. That's healthy. Metabolically, I think most people, again, this is not for people who do a competitive sport or as a goal for performance of some kind, but for most people for metabolic health, all you have to do is a lot of walking. Ideally, I mean, if you have time, put in 90 minutes, 2 hours a day. Break it up. Do 30 minutes through at different times throughout the day. And you get that movement in. You get those steps in. Then I think it's excellent if you can add something to that that's a little more complex. Because walking is awesome. It's the most foundational pattern in the human body, the cross crawl pattern. There's so much of our brain that's wired around that. But it's also good if we can do something a little more complicated where we have to change things up. Maybe walk in the woods. Walk on an uneven trail where you have to compensate and adapt a little bit. Because if it's just walking on pavement, it becomes very predictable for the brain. And then it doesn't have to adapt. It just kind of locks into a pattern and keeps doing that a few thousand times. The more we can change things up, the more the brain is challenged and forced to adapt, and the healthier and stronger and more capable it becomes.

And then the other thing that people should do, to the extent that they can, is some high-intensity training. High-intensity interval training. That's the equivalent of our ancestors being chased or chasing something. And you think about kids and dogs, they're not just going to walk or jog for the next 45 minutes. They're going to stand there. They're going to walk a little bit. They're going to rush. They're going to run for something because it's fun. Right? That's what they do. Then they get tired. Then they stop. Right? That's interval training. So, that's kind of what's most in addition to walking to get places, rushing short periods is also very natural and very healthy. So, do some kind of high-intensity interval training. The easiest way to do, if you can, is to run up a hill. That's very demanding. It uses every muscle in the body. You're increasing your altitude, so you're performing a lot of physical work. Your heart rate goes up dramatically, very quickly. But, you don't need to do much of it. So, a lot of times I hear people say, "Oh, I do high-intensity interval training at my gym." And it goes on for 40 minutes. Like, "No, don't do that." High intensity is a rush. It's like you're being chased by a bear. That doesn't happen for 45 minutes. It's until you can run in behind something to safety. 30 seconds is all you can keep up with before the bear gets you. Or if it's some animal that can't climb a tree, you climb a tree, you're safe. And your heart rate goes up to near max in 30 seconds. So, if you do one of those, and of course you want to warm up, because we're not talking about kids here that can necessarily get away with anything. You warm up. You can start walking fast up the hill. And if you're physically fit enough, then you run or you jog, and you increase it up to your comfort level. And then you check your heart rate. And if you warm up, it might be at 100, and then your first rush, it might be 150. So, it's going to change depending on age. The older you get, the lower it gets. And then you rest, you get it down to 120. You do another. Takes maybe a minute. You do another 30-second rush. You get it up to 150. You're done. That's your workout. Because you got your heart rate up to within 3 to 5% of your maximum heart rate. You challenged your body. And in doing this, you increase your human growth hormone, you increase your brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is like miracle growth for the brain, for learning, for making new synapses and adapting. But that's all it takes. You don't have to do. You don't want to do this every day. And you don't want to do it for 20, 30 minutes. You want to do it just long enough to challenge the body, give it a message, "Hey, I just pushed you. I'm going to do it again, and you'd better get good at this so you can handle it next time." That's the message you're sending the body. It doesn't look for you to break it down, to pulverize it. You just want to challenge it so it gets a message to get better.

Okay, so that's our structural. We went over emotional. The last piece of that triad is chemical. Mhm. So, is that just diet and then coming back to the toxins we talked about early on, avoiding those best we can? Yes. Yeah, we kind of talked about avoiding toxins. Just learn about it, do what you can, filter your water, be smart. Then the good food is primarily again what our ancestors ate and as little destroyed as possible before we buy it. So, all the packaged food, all the processed food, it's basically destroyed already because they took, they broke it down and they put it on a shelf and they processed it not for our benefit, not to become a better food, but to taste better, taste more addictive, and to be able to sit on the shelf for 2 years. Because the biggest problem with real food is that it spoils. It interacts with oxygen and bacteria because it has nutrients, it has value. That's why it reacts and spoils. And that's why it's hard to keep fresh veggies in the store and they get expensive because they have to throw half of it away and then you buy it and you throw half of it away. So, that's why it's so easy with processed foods. Because it's there, it's in the package, it keeps for the next couple of years, I don't have to worry about it, there's no spoilage and that's part of why it gets so cheap. So, that's the stuff that we want to avoid because once it keeps forever it means that it really has very little nutritional value for you. Okay? It has calories. So, if you're starving it will provide you some energy, but it won't build your body in the long term. It won't give your body the resources that it needs to function.

So, that's why we want to go back again to what our ancestors ate and we want to eat meat, fish, chicken, eggs, anything that could possibly exist at their time. And leafy greens, non-starchy vegetables, some amount of fruits and berries, especially seasonally. I don't think you want to go totally paranoid about the seasonality. I think plant food can have some benefit throughout the year, but we still kind of want to understand that for our ancestors it wasn't like 365 days a year that they had access to this. And then I think they had some nuts and seeds and probably some tubers. And that's basically what we should eat. And as little spoiled as possible.

Then I also think, so if we look at what our ancestors ate, that's basically what a paleo diet is by principle. So, what I think that is, I don't see that as a law. I don't see that as a rule, an absolute. I think what it says is if you make this food your foundation then that's the one that's most probable to serve you. The most likely to give you the least problems. Okay? And the more that you stray from that, the more likely that you'll have reactions or deficiencies. So, for example, I don't think that dairy is terrible unless you have a sensitivity to it. But I also, the biggest reason people have sensitivities and react is because it's not a whole food anymore. It's pasteurized. Again, we said if man hasn't destroyed it, it's probably good. Well, man has destroyed milk because we pasteurized it. We kill off the enzymes, we kill off the bacteria, we denature the proteins, we homogenize the fat. It's a completely different food than raw milk. Which of course now we can only consume, we can only purchase as pet food. But whole raw milk is basically a health food. And pasteurized milk is very questionable. Some people can tolerate it. Like I'll have an occasional cappuccino because homogenized milk will foam and raw milk won't. So I'll have that vice once in a while and I don't react to it. But if you do, then it's not for you. And I think other things like beans and potatoes that are more recent innovations, I don't think that they're horrible. I think you have to weigh them in based on where you are metabolically. I think if you're type 2 diabetic and you're trying to start a campaign therapeutic process to lower it, then you don't want to eat potatoes every day or at all. So I think a lot of those foods will sort of depend on where you are on the metabolic spectrum. And I would say the most foods that are sort of newer than our Paleolithic food, our ancestors' foods, they're not evil or dangerous just because our ancestors didn't have them, but the probability that they're going to cause some sort of reaction increases from there. So, then you just have to kind of figure out where how do you respond to them and what do they do to you?

Okay, you touched on the metabolic health piece. That's where I want to come back to. Somebody who's in that category right now of being insulin resistant, which is around nine out of 10 North Americans. Yeah. How different does that plate look for them if they're committed to reversing what we've been talking about? So, again, I'll give some numbers and I want people to understand these are not absolutes. This is a hypothetical example and your numbers could vary double or half from those. But, I think someone with type 2 diabetes that is trying to reverse it, they basically need to go keto most of the time. Okay, you don't need to be keto 365 days. I think there's a value to cycling because it shakes things up. It helps it adapt if we cycle a little bit. But, I think they need to be in keto, whatever that means for you. But, for most people, it's between 30 and 50 grams, no more than 30 or 50 grams of net carbs, meaning total carbohydrates minus the fiber. But, it doesn't. If you eat in that level, it doesn't mean that you're on a ketogenic diet if you're not making ketones, right? So, I think blood glucose meters and keto meters are very, very helpful. I don't think that you should use them every single day, but you should get one and use it long enough that you can figure out how your body responds. Okay? Then you can take a break for a month or until you try something new. But, it teaches you a lot. And if you eat 30 grams of carbohydrates, net carbs, and you prick your finger, and your keto level is .2, it's not really working for you, right? Someone else might eat 70 grams of net carbs and produce ketones if they're very active or a larger person. So, that's the first thing. I think they need to be very low carb, and they need to make sure that they're producing some ketones because otherwise they're not in ketosis even if their diet indicates that.

Then, I think if you're insulin sensitive, if your blood glucose is in fasting blood glucose is in the 80s, and your insulin is between two and five, then it's going to depend on your age and how active you are. But, I think you can in a healthy way eat probably up to 100 grams of net carbs. And if that doesn't change your numbers long term, then it's not too much carbs for you at least at that age. Right? So, we want to get away from this idea of absolutes. We just want to understand the principles and then do something and make sure we get the results. And if the results aren't coming, then we get more information like we prick our finger to see, am I really in ketosis? Or we get some blood work. Blood work is never a bad idea to get a baseline to understand where you are because some people have been on, and this is especially for females who have extremely stubborn weight loss, that they could have been low carb for years. Their glucose and A1C is ideal. They're glucose of 85 and their A1C is 5.2 and yet their insulin is in the 20s. Right? So, they are controlling their glucose, which is great because they're already limiting their metabolic side effects, but they're still extremely insulin resistant. So, for them, whatever they're doing just really isn't changing the picture much. So, if everyone is different, everyone needs to go to different extremes.

And another thing about keto that's, there's some huge misconceptions. I don't want to think of keto as a high-fat diet for several reasons. First of all, fat is the primary fuel for humans. So, I think anything under 50% fat in your diet by calories is low fat. Okay? So, it's not a high-fat diet, it's a low-carb diet. Because it's not about eating more fat, it's about lowering the insulin. And if you, and a lot of this, this is so ridiculous. A lot of the studies that they've done on high-fat, low-carb diets, they give them 30% carbs and 40%, 45% fat. That's still a high-carb, low-fat diet in terms of making metabolic changes, that's not doing anything. So, of course they're not going to see any results. And then if people try to do keto and they're told it's a high-fat diet and they keep eating what they used to and they just pile on the fat, now you're not lowering the insulin. And that's the key. It's not about eating more fat, it's about eating less stuff that triggers insulin. Right? So, I tell people it's a low-carb diet, it's a moderate protein diet, and then the fat is just the rest. Don't worry about it. It's fat to satiety. You make yourself a chicken salad, you put enough olive oil or whatever on it until you're full. But it's not a high-fat diet, it's low-carb, and then you just fill in the rest of the stuff until you're satiated, because that's the only way that you're going to be able to sustain this. If you feel deprived, you're going to do this for a few weeks or a couple months, and then you're going to fall back to old habits because you're deprived.

You gave that example there, the chicken salad. Can you give an example again of a classic keto plate versus this keto that you're talking about? Just to give people a visual. Not sure what you mean, that classic plate. Like a high-fat keto diet that most people would be talking about when they say keto. You're making a point here saying don't add the additional fat. But it's still keto. Yeah. So I just want to understand the contrast between two different plates, the way you're explaining it versus classic keto. Yeah, the way I'm saying it is just that you focus on the carbs and then the rest will basically take care of itself. The part where people get confused is if they don't understand that it's about the carbs, now they may not cut back on them enough. Because the public perception is that it is a high-fat diet. That's all they know. And yes, it is, but it's only high-fat because the carbs are extremely low and you have to get your fuel somewhere. Right? So it's one replacing the other. And as long as you keep your carbs down to 5% for some people or 10% for others of net calories, net carb calories, the rest is really going to take care of itself. And then when you choose your protein, then if you go ground beef, you don't buy the lean ground beef. You buy at least 15% fat. If you buy a steak, then you buy the one that has some fat in it. You buy the fatty fish. You buy the chicken with the skin, like wings or thighs. Where you get the fat and you don't. And it's not like you have to seek out the fat. Just don't buy into the idea that low-fat is good. Like I'm amazed at how much chicken thighs they're selling. No, sorry. Chicken breast. That's nasty stuff. It is dry and devoid of flavor and it costs more. But the only reason they're selling it is people are so bought in. They're so on board with the low-fat idea. In Greece, they have something that the yogurt in Greece is called Greek yogurt. And it has, they make it basically from half and half. The basic fat level is around 10%. And when you buy and when you make it that way, you don't have to strain it. It gets thick and delicious and creamy without any straining or preparation. In the US, it's always fat-free. Fat-free Greek yogurt. Fat-free. And then they just strain out all the extra liquid and now it's like this paperweight inconsistency, this pudding. It makes no sense. It's like you do it the natural way. You just take the milk, the dairy product, you add the bacteria, and it's done. And if you keep it above like 8% fat, it's going to gel perfectly. It's going to taste wonderful and creamy. I make my own yogurt. I put it between 8 and 10%. Most of the time, but again, people buy into this notion of low fat and you can't even buy high-fat yogurt in the stores. Okay. The best you can do is whole milk, which is already strained, but almost everything that they sell is nonfat.

All right, so we're not avoiding the fat, we're embracing the fat. Yes. It doesn't sound like you're in this camp, but what do you think about adding say a slab of butter to the top of the steak, adding a whole bunch of heavy cream to your cappuccino? Is that something you ever partake in? Yes. Yes, but not because I think, again, low carb is the principle. Moderate protein. I mean, there's some range there we could talk about, but then the rest becomes fat. But when you do what you're trying to say, when you purposely try to make exaggerate the fat, now you're kind of missing the point. I'll add a dab of butter, but I'll make it garlic butter on my steak because it tastes so delicious, not because I want an extra 20 grams of fat on it. And if I add cream to something, it's because it tastes better, not because I'm trying to add 20 grams of fat to it. Because what happens, and this is something else people don't realize, when you lower insulin, your body, you lose, you're reducing the thing that protects your fat stores. So now you have access to those fat stores. But if you eat more fat, if you eat so much fat that it provides more calories than your body needs, there's no reason, there's no incentive for your body to burn its own body fat. It's like, "Hey, why don't I burn this? It's already in the bloodstream." As a matter of fact, it can only burn the thing in the bloodstream. If you eat more fats, then you're going to have fat in the bloodstream, and you can't take fat from your body cells and push it into the bloodstream. That's not going to happen until you need it. Right? So, if you eat more fat than your body has a reason to use, you're not going to burn your body stores. So, the reason the keto diet works is not because you're eating more fat, it's because you're lowering insulin, and even more importantly, you're reducing the addictive foods that make you overeat. Because this is all about hunger. Right? If you eat junk food, if you eat six meals a day with high carbs, your body, you're training your body to always refuel. And you're training your body to be addicted to things because carbs are a drug. Why are all the comfort foods carbs? Because it changes how we feel. Okay? If it changes how we feel, it's a drug. And they know this, and they add chemicals to all these processed foods to accentuate that effect. So, when you eat these processed foods, you overeat. But, when you start eating, when you cut those out completely, and you start eating fat and protein for calories and you keep the carbs low enough that insulin starts dropping, the single biggest benefit, in my opinion, is that you reduce cravings and hunger. That you're allowing your body to come back to that equilibrium, to the rules that it's supposed to play by before you change the rules with modern processed foods. So, and especially if you time restrict it, because there's no reason to eat 16 hours a day. And if you eat two or three meals within an 8-hour period, you cut back the carbs, you focus on moderate protein, you eat the rest fat. Now, you will eat a caloric deficiency. You will have a caloric restriction because your body is going to go back to the innate balance that it knows is healthy. However, this basically only works if you're overweight. Because the body wants to be healthy. It knows what balance is. So, if you're normal weight, you're not going to create a caloric deficit. Your body, you'll just learn to control your hunger. And that's why these low-carb diets work because they restore your normal hunger and signaling patterns, so you can lower insulin, create a caloric deficit, and start pulling fat out of your reserves.

Okay, so moderate protein. I want to come back to this macro. Yeah. Talk about any additional details. How you think about that? So, first of all, the USDA recommendations, I think, are way, way too low. And a lot of the recommendations they have is basically to avoid deficiency diseases. They're not for optimal health. So, I think we need to go a little bit above that. But then there's the thing, again, about insulin. So, fat has the lowest insulin response. Insulin index. So, if for pure fat, you can think of the insulin response as single digits. For protein, you can think about it like in the teens or 20s. And for carbohydrates is from the 50s and up to 100. All right? Just to get because they all trigger insulin, but to vastly different degrees. Carbohydrates are fuel, fat is the better fuel, protein's not supposed to be fuel. It's supposed to be building blocks. It has amino acids for tissues, for bones and muscles and skin and hair and any other tissue. They're built of protein. And there's a turnover. And protein breaks down, we recycle some of it, we lose some of it, and we need to replenish it enough to rebuild tissues. But any excess above what we can incorporate into our tissues has to go somewhere. Okay, we can't store. There are no protein stores. There are no cells that store amino acids. It's stored as bone and muscle, essentially. And if we can't incorporate any more, we have to make it, turn it into something else, and that something else is glucose. It's called gluconeogenesis. All right. When we do glucose, we need to get it out of the bloodstream, so we need insulin. And that's why protein raises insulin. So, basically, the greater your protein need, let's say you're super deficient in protein, then your body is going to suck up almost 100% of that and turn it into tissue. But if you're already have a really good status of protein, and you go eating 100 grams of protein powder or lean protein, most of that is going to turn into glucose. So, the insulin response depends on how badly the body needs protein. So, excess protein is what turns into glucose and triggers insulin. So, that's kind of how we want to think about it.

So, if you're diabetic, again, you're very insulin resistant, and you're trying to change that, now you probably want to be a little stricter than someone who's like either an athlete or someone who's insulin sensitive, because you just know, hey, if I want to burn that fat, then I need to make some ketones. I want to make sure that that fat is actually burning, but if you eat so much protein that you're making a lot of gluconeogenesis, that's going to offset. That's going to decrease your fat burning and your ketones. So, again, I think we don't have to be afraid of protein. I think it's super important and they're finding more and more how important it is to muscle mass and how tightly muscle mass is tied to healthy aging and longevity. The strongest signs that you'll do well in older age and you'll have a high quality of life is how much muscle you have. How strong are your legs? Can you still do a squat? So, for that reason, I think we should rather err on the higher side, so to speak, of protein because it will never become a problem until we seek out extremely lean meat. If we only eat protein powder and rabbit, then yes, we're going to eat too much protein. Because the body is not, it's going to get toxic with nitrogen because it can't balance out the processes of processing and getting rid of it. But other than that, you don't have to be afraid of it. If you eat, like I said, you eat your meat with fat, you eat the ground beef with fat, you eat the steak with fat, you eat the fatty fish and the chicken and you add some olive oil and some creamy sauces, you're not going to overeat protein. But like a vegan, I think they're probably going to be protein deficient even if they have a sufficient number of grams of protein because the quality isn't there. It's very difficult to, I mean, it's doable, but it takes a lot of planning to combine the plants to get that, but that's another story.

So, the amount of protein, I think the only ones that have to cut back is if you're actively trying to reduce your insulin. If you're trying to make ketones and you have a hard time doing it, then the protein could be the thing that is preventing you. So, then I think it could be worth going down from 20% of calories to 15% of calories or even 12 to see if that changes anything and if you can get things moving. But, once you're in maintenance, I think it's better for us to probably be a little bit higher like 20, 25% of calories from protein.

Okay, I know you got to go soon. Last question for today. Somebody following the principles diet and lifestyle we've been talking about. They're bringing the insulin down or at least they feel like they are. But, they still have stubborn weight they're not losing. Where would you go with them to figure out what's going on? That's a tough question because I do think I think it would be almost impossible for that insulin to come down. They can bring down every other marker. But, if the insulin is still high, then that's probably the main reason why they would still be overweight. And beyond that, I would start. Now, they're going to be a very rare case because most stubborn cases are going to be explained by insulin. I wouldn't say it's probably possible, but it's going to be extremely rare. And now I think you have to start looking at the emotional structural. I want to make sure that you're handling all of these. And if and one more factor would probably be gut health. Because we're finding out more and more that there's a lot of signaling, a lot of metabolic signaling going on. And I would also look at is there another source of inflammation other than insulin resistance? But I don't have a quick answer for that one because that would be that would probably be a case where you would need some guidance, someone who's very good, maybe better than me, who could really dive into a lot of lab work, who could evaluate emotional past trauma, things like that. Because the human body is extremely complex. There's more about it that we don't know than that we do know. And once we get into things like your question where it's that complicated, I think it's maybe more emotional and there's some mechanisms that we understand very poorly. So there may be past trauma counseling or treatment or clearing of those, meditation, but then also as I said, you want to do the chemical structural and emotional at the same time for a period of time.

No, that's great. I was just looking for somebody that feels like they're doing the right stuff but they're not moving the needle and the weight's just not coming down. So you've given some clues, areas they can go inspect and see if that's applicable. Dr. Ekberg, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for your time. We're going to link up your YouTube channel, which is fantastic, your website, your social media, everything in the show notes. Thank you. Thank you. I was thrilled to be on here. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for watching the episode. I got another great one lined up for you right here. Don't miss it. I'll see you over there. Do you want pleasure now or do you want something far better in the future? So, if you want pleasure now, eat the cake. But, if you want a better future, well, you got to work towards that. Let's put a lot more energy into thinking.