Transcription
This is a concept diet called the glass noodle diet, or at least that's what I'm calling it for right now, unless I have a better idea. The point of this diet is optimizing insulin sensitivity. In the video "Keto versus the Potato Hack," I discussed this Kevin Hall paper where humans either went on a very low-fat diet, with about 75% of calories from carbohydrate, very little fat, and moderate protein, versus a low-carb diet. The high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet had impressive results in lowering both glucose from around 91 at baseline down to 85, and insulin around 11.3 at baseline down to 8.3. A lot of people are afraid of consuming carbs, or they're worried about carbohydrates increasing their insulin, but you can see that in the long term, a very high-carb, low-fat diet can make you actually more insulin sensitive.
I also pointed out in that diet, one of the best results I thought, and that diet only went on for two weeks, but branch chain amino acids went from 456 at baseline down to 353 on the low-fat diet. And each individual branching amino acid, that's valine, leucine, and isoleucine, also decreased. And obviously, wrote at the top, your branch chain amino acids equal insulin resistance. And so I like the results of the Kevin Hall diet. I don't like the food in the supplement. They have photos of all the different meals that were served. The food is, in my mind, kind of bland looking and unappetizing. And so I want to ask the question of, can we do better? And what I mean by this is, I really want to drill into the protein composition of the diet. I think this diet made some really good points about the fat versus carbohydrate portion of the diet, but they were not focused on what are the best proteins to consume. We're going to dig into that here, and we're going to focus on palatability. I think one of the most important things of a diet is it has to be a diet that someone wants to eat. If people are going to stay on it long term, you know, and I'm thinking about a diet that I can recommend to family members or friends who are not necessarily going to follow some of the more extreme hack-style diets that you can find online.
As to protein, this paper is actually from 1969, and you can see these are the three branching amino acids, valine, isoleucine, and leucine, in the yellow. And this is lean subjects, and this is obese subjects. And you can see that all of those branch chain amino acids are, in fact, elevated in obese subjects. The levels of these branch chain amino acids correlate very strongly with fasting insulin levels. So there's this very tight correlation between high levels of branch chain amino acids and insulin resistance. Furthermore, another amino acid called glycine is significantly low in obese subjects, and this correlation was not significant, but it is negatively correlated with insulin resistance. So the less glycine you have, the more likely you are to be insulin resistant.
This recent paper also showed that in humans, circulating branch chain amino acid levels are very responsive to lowering dietary branch chain amino acids. So this was a short-term diet. This is the black bars are people who had pretty dramatic branch chain amino acid reduction. It was like a 75% reduction, and you can see that after only three days, they have a pretty dramatic drop in circulating branch chain amino acids. And after seven days, it declines even further. Which sounds great, except nothing so far has proved that branch chain amino acids are actually causal of insulin resistance. It might just be a correlation.
Now, this is a rodent study, but many rodent studies suggest very strongly that high branch chain amino acids are indeed causal of insulin resistance. You can see this is mice on a high-fat diet with the black dots, and the mice in the brown dots, they have restricted dietary branch chain amino acids. And you can see the mice given a high-fat diet with restricted branch chain amino acids stay just as lean, in fact, even perhaps a bit leaner than mice with the white dots, which are on a standard chow diet. So that is a standard low-fat diet that tends to keep lab mice really lean. And you can also see that restricting the branch chain amino acids in a high-fat diet reverses the high glucose and the high insulin of the high-fat diet, reversing the insulin resistance.
Interestingly, there have been a lot of tests in humans with kidney disease about lowering overall protein, and these have happened for a long time. In a lot of these old papers, anecdotally, the authors talk about how one of the side effects of putting patients on a protein-restricted diet is weight loss, and sometimes specifically fat loss. In this study, they say a striking feature during this study was the sense of well-being felt by the patients, and this is with protein restriction. Prior to starting the diet, many had lethargy, nausea, and anorexia. After about two months, most patients felt much better and spontaneously commented on their improved state. We deliberately chose a high calorie intake as we were concerned to minimize the catabolism of protein. So they don't want people using, they don't want people breaking down their protein to do to use as sugar or whatever. And so if you give people a lot of calories, they don't have as much reason to break down protein. It says recent studies suggest the safe minimum level for chronic renal failure patients is 35 kilocalories per kilogram a day. So that would be something like 2700 calories for a 165 lb person, or 2200 calories for a 130 lb person. Yet despite our prescribed high caloric intake, there was no increase, and sometimes a slight fall in body fat. To maintain the level prescribed, it was necessary for our patients to consume calorie-containing supplements. It is possible that these were not always taken in sufficient amounts, but assessment by the dietitians suggested that only one patient consumed less than 30 kilocalories per kilogram per day. Of the rest, nine took consistently in excess of 36 kilocalories per kilogram per day, which are these amounts I have down at the bottom. And so, so the patients on the protein-restricted diets are being forced to take these very high calorie supplements to maintain their body fat.
It seems in recent years we've had some interesting mechanistic data about what might be causing this. This paper found a metabolite of valine called 3-HB. You can see these are just the enzymes and how 3-Hib gets made. What they found was that this is in a, this isn't a mouse model, this is a model of genetic mouse obesity. They had significantly elevated 3-Hib levels. This is in humans. These are humans with type 2 diabetes. They found elevated levels of circulating 3-Hi. In normal humans, the level was about 60. In type 2 diabetes, the level was about 1550. So that's two and a half fold. So that's a two and a half fold increase. They fed the 3-Hib, which is the breakdown product of the branching amino acids, to mice, and it caused glucose intolerance and increased triglycerides. And so this 3-Hib can be used to actually cause insulin resistance in these mice.
This is a very new study showing 3-Hib levels in humans with fatty liver disease. There's a very tight correlation between liver fat levels and 3-Hib, insulin levels, HOMA-IR is a score of insulin resistance, triglycerides, and even down here, BMI, waist circumference are not statistically significant, but they do correlate with high levels of 3-Hib.
Now, this is a second mechanistic paper, and this one is really interesting because it connects the high levels of branch chain amino acids and the low levels of glycine. So what they found was that high levels of branch chain amino acids drive the obesity-associated decline in circulating and muscle glycine levels. And they found that branch chain amino acid-driven glycine depletion restricts formation of acyl glycine adducts for excretion in urine. What they showed is that an acyl glycine adduct just means a glycine with a fat molecule attached to it, and that can be as short as an acetyl group, which is only two carbons long, or it can be as long as a 20-carbon fat. This is in the urine. What they showed was that in these obese Zucker rats, so this is another genetic model of obesity, these rats were not excreting this acetyl glycine in their urine, which is glycine attached to an acetyl group. But if they put them on a branch chain amino acid restricted diet, they would excrete more of this acetyl glycine in their urine.
When they looked in muscle tissues, what they found was that the muscle tissues were lower in all of these short-chain fats. The muscle tissues are low in acetyl groups, low in butyryl groups, low in hexanoyl groups. So when your muscle tissue fills up with these short-chain fats, that suggests that you're not, you're not efficiently burning your fats. They're not, they're not breaking all the way down. When you have high acetyl groups, that's part of reductive stress, or sometimes it's called energy toxicity. But what's happening is these unburned fats are building up in your muscle tissues. And the glycine, if you get rid of the extra branch chain amino acids, you'll have more glycine. The glycine in your muscles gets conjugated to these these acetyl groups, and you simply urinate them out. And the levels of acetyl groups, butyryl groups, hexanoyl groups in your muscle tissues decline, and that allows you to get out of reductive stress, get out of energy toxicity, and actually burn your fuel effectively again.
Now that we're on the topic of glycine, another thing that glycine does is it's used to make creatine. And so you can see it takes glycine and arginine come together, and then you need to get a methyl group from SAM or SAMe. You may have seen sold as a supplement. And so it takes a glycine and arginine and a methyl group to create creatine. And creatine is a super important molecule. It's in your muscle tissues and it serves as an energy reserve for your ATP. So the creatine actually gets phosphorylated, and when you start to do some exercise, you burn some ATP, and the creatine is like a backup source of phosphate groups that can convert the burned ATPs back to ATP again, so that you have this kind of energy buffer. And creatine supplementation is strongly associated with insulin sensitivity in rodent models, although it has not worked out as well in human models.
And here's another way that we use glycine, right? And again, the branch chain amino acids are lower in glycine. And so this is glutathione. This is reduced glutathione. This is what they call the body's master antioxidant. And it's made out of glutamate, which is pretty common, cysteine, and glycine. And glycine is often the limiting factor in the ability to make glutathione. So in this test, they gave older humans, you see this, older adults, a supplement of both glycine and NAC, NAC, which is N-acetylcysteine. And so NAC is a precursor of cysteine. And N-acetylcysteine and glycine can come together to make glutathione. The glycine, of course, can also be used to transport fats out of skeletal muscle and can be used to make creatine. But yet another advantage of the glycine supplementation is the ability to make more glutathione.
And so they looked at older adults versus young adults. And this T-bars is a measure of oxidative stress. And so in the older adults, you can see the T-bars are nearly tenfold what they were in the young adults. After 12 weeks of taking this, they call it Glace because it's, yeah, glycine and N-acetylcysteine, after 12 weeks, this number goes down by nearly half. After 24 weeks, it goes down by almost 75%. So just giving these older humans the precursors to make glutathione, they reduce oxidative stress by 75%. And these are both pretty cheap supplements. And what's also cool in this study is then they took them off the supplements, and 12 weeks later, the oxidative stress returned. And so you can see that this is really being caused by something about the availability of the glycine and the cysteine.
This is a measure of redox balance in the cell. You can see the young adults, their glutathione pool, we would say, is reduced. In older adults, that pool is oxidized. That low number means it's oxidized. And that increased significantly over 24 weeks, and then again, once they stop taking the supplements, it goes right back to the starting point. This is the same study again. Look what happens to plasma glucose. It goes from 5.3 down to 4.8. And when they stop taking the supplements, it goes right back to 5.3. Insulin starts at 47 in the older adults. By 24 weeks, it goes down to 22. So fasting insulin is reduced by more than half. And again, when they stop taking the supplements, it goes back up.
Here's inflammation. You can see the older adults have massively more tissue necrosis factor alpha than the young adults. After 24 weeks, they're almost back down to healthy levels again. When they stop taking the supplements, it goes back up. Okay, that's not all. Fat mass was significantly reduced by the supplements. Waist circumference was reduced by the supplements and went back up when they stopped taking them. Even that's not all. They had better scores in this cognitive assessment test. So mentally, they were doing better. This is grip strength increased. This is their ability to walk a certain distance in six minutes increased. And so if you supplement glycine and cysteine, you're just seeing these huge increases across the board in insulin sensitivity, strength, you know, reductions in fat mass, etc., etc.
So I said in the "Redux Case for Carbs," and you guys can go back and check out if you haven't seen that yet, I did a "Redux Case for Carbs" in 10 minutes. In that video, I say one of the big issues with obese humans is that when they start eating carbohydrates, they don't switch over to burning those carbs very effectively. This is another very similar protocol where they were supplementing cysteine and glycine again. This is an older patients with HIV, and apparently older patients with HIV, it looks like they have mitochondrial dysfunction. And what I liked about this specifically is they looked at the stimulation of carbohydrate oxidation when transitioning from the fasted to the fed state. And before the supplementation, these patients with HIV look like obese humans, but after the supplementation, they become much, much better at transitioning from burning fat in the fasting state to burning carbohydrates in the fed state. And so this to me is an enormously important result.
So that is my spiel about why you want to minimize branch chain amino acids and maximize glycine. And so what do we want to do to optimize insulin sensitivity? I would argue that we should have a starch-based diet that's less than 10% fat. And this is based on that Kevin Hall study, among other things. I think the diet should be palatable, and that's just so that people actually want to eat the diet and stay on it. I think we should minimize branch chain amino acids and maximize glycine. I also think the diet should be protein sufficient if it's going to be a kind of long-term healthy diet, right? We want enough protein, we just don't want too many of these branch chain amino acids.
And so I had done a low-protein diet a while back in the spring. At the time, I was doing a lot of coconut oil. I didn't see huge results from the low-protein diet, but I think I might have been consuming too much fat. And what I noticed when I was doing that is if I was eating grain-based foods, there's some stuff in the literature with rodents where they got the percent of protein down to like 5%, and that's real hard to do if you were doing high carb and you're getting a lot of your calories from grains, because grains are actually, cornmeal itself is already 6% protein. And wheat is even higher. And so it's like, how do you get below, how do you have a balanced diet and get below to get down to 5% protein if you're using grains as the base of your diet, because they're already at 6% protein, or wheat can be 12, 13% protein?
So I put this up. If you have 500 grams of cornmeal in your diet, you are already maxed out. And I'm pulling these numbers. I have the app Chronometer, or Cronometer, I don't know which. It's like a little pocket calculator for nutritional data. What's listed here are essential amino acids for humans that we can't make from other amino acids. And so what I'm trying to do is just kind of hit these targets and not go much over. So if I assume that I'm going to eat 500 grams of cornmeal in a day, for instance, I pick cornmeal because I like corn tortillas, that means I would get 1800 calories from the corn, and I would already be at 100% of my. You can see here's in red is the isoleucine, the leucine, and the valine. I've already hit my branch chain amino acid targets for the day, and I haven't had any protein foods. I haven't had any quote-unquote protein foods, because cornmeal and the grains are already high in branching amino acids.
There's this persistent myth that animal protein is higher in branch chain amino acids than plant-based protein. That is, that is simply a lie. That is not whatsoever true. I'll put some links in the description of this video. I have listings of branch chain amino acids as percent of calories from different foods and branching amino acids as percent of protein in different foods listed at fireinabottle.net. I'll put the links to those in the description so you can pull those files and look at those if you want to. But conversely, if you get the same number of calories, or 500 grams of cassava flour, essentially the same number of calories, you get almost none of the branch chain amino acids, because the tropical, the tropical tubers, for whatever reason, are just simply very low in protein themselves, and they do not bring a lot of protein to the table. And so for that reason, if you're using cassava flour as the base of your diet, you can get your calories from starch in, and you haven't burned through your amino acid budget for the day.
If I'm talking about an optimum diet that's minimizing branch amino acids for insulin sensitivity, I'm going to go with cassava flour versus cornmeal versus rice. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose a protein source that I know is a very high-quality protein source. In my case, I might choose something like 6 ounces of lean pork. I would probably get that pork from firebrandmeats.com, which is a company that I also run, but where we make, but where we make pork that is incredibly low in polyunsaturated fats compared to the other pork on the market. 6 ounces of lean pork essentially provides a balanced protein for the day.
Look what happens if you get the 500 grams of cornmeal, right? So this is giving you your starch basis for the day. And what's happened is this protein is really unbalanced, and specifically it's low in lysine, that I have marked in the blue here. You need balanced amino acids to build protein for your body. So you've got all these other amino acids, but you only have 37% of your lysine requirement. That's like trying to write a novel where you can only use one E in each sentence. And to be clear, that's why so many fields across America are full of soybeans, because what soybeans bring to the table is lysine. Soybeans have a lot of lysine in them. So soybeans are the one crop that we can grow in large-scale field agriculture that fixes this problem in the cereal grains, which is the lack of lysine. And they all have the same problem. It doesn't matter, corn, wheat, rice. And so, so this protein coming in from that grain is essentially unusable for humans. So you're just consuming a whole bunch of branch chain amino acids for no reason, because you can't use this protein because there's not enough lysine in it. And you can see that even the pork, even if you eat the cornmeal with the pork, the pork has enough lysine, but it doesn't have a bunch of extra lysine to balance, to balance this out, right? So, so anytime you're getting a significant percentage of your protein from grains, you're going to have a bunch of extra amino acids that simply can't be used effectively, that have to be broken down.
If you've ever balanced a livestock ration, you know that the problem is always that every grain, the first limiting amino acid is always lysine. What you can do is you can go to any feed store and you can buy a 50 lb bag of lysine for like $100, and you could have a lifetime supply of lysine, and you could add it to your rice or your cornmeal if that's what you want to do. I still prefer to get my protein from a source like pork, just simply for palatability reasons.
And so how much protein do we need? Most sources say somewhere in this range, about three quarters of a gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. For women, this is about 45 grams. For men, this is about 55 grams. The 6 ounces of lean pork provided about 35 grams of protein, and so that leaves us about 20 grams short of our total needs. So what we want to do is we want to have some source of protein that fills in those 20 grams that is not providing a huge amount of branch chain amino acids, right? And so this is gelatin here. The blue line is branch chain amino acids. So the protein in gelatin is about 6 and a half percent branch chain amino acids. The protein in pork is about 16 and a half percent branch chain amino acids. The protein from rice is almost 19% branch chain amino acids. And so you don't want to fill in those last 20 grams of protein with meat, and you don't want to fill in those last 20 grams of protein with grains. The one protein in the world that is very low in branch chain amino acids that you can use to fill in that gap without blowing your BCAA budget is gelatin. And gelatin just so happens to be the single best source of glycine. Gelatin has about four times as much glycine as it does branch chain amino acids, whereas pork has three times as many branch chain amino acids as it has glycine. Rice has four times as many branchin amino acids as it has glycine. And so the obvious thing to do here is to fill in those last 20 grams with gelatin protein.
So that gets us to a pretty simple base diet, right? And and I compared what happens with the base diet if we make this diet out of corn tortillas or if we make it with cassava flour. So we've got 500 grams of cornmeal, we've got our 6 ounces of boneless ham, and what I said is one ounce of gelatin powder. So that's about 28 grams of protein from gelatin. Whether or not that gelatin protein comes from something like commercial beef broth or chicken broth that you buy at the store in a liquid form, or whether it comes from a powdered gelatin supplement, which is essentially pure protein. The corn-based diet provides 16 grams of branch chain amino acids, whereas the cassava-based diet provides 8 grams of branch chain amino acids. So we've slashed our branch chain amino acid consumption in half by going away from grain protein.
This little note down here, the Kevin Hall study that I showed in the beginning, the low-fat diet that by my estimate, they don't actually report this number, is probably about 14.5% branch chain amino acids. And so this diet here is a significant reduction in branch chain amino acids from that Kevin Hall study.
This is NHANES, or I like to think of it as Nanni's, but it doesn't matter. This is, you know, I'm a 48-year-old male. So for me, an average American gets about 100 grams of protein a day, which suggests that an average American, an average American male of my age, is probably getting around 16 grams of branch chain amino acids. So this gives us a really pretty simple diet spec, pretty easy to remember, right? It's based on starch. You have 6 ounces of lean meat, and your goal is to consume about 1 ounce of gelatin. That ounce is 28 grams. And if you want to consume any fruit or non-starchy vegetables, have a salad, that's fine, as long as you're not loading your vegetables up with fat. We want to keep the diet less than 10% of fat calories, and I think moderate sugar, moderate alcohol, if you want to have some wine with dinner, I think is.
And so we just mix these two things and eat them, right? Obviously, I'm kidding. I do actually enjoy cooking with cassava. If you do want to give cassava a try, you can buy it frozen in the bag, and it's already prepped. It's peeled. It's a pain to prep. This is all ready to go. You just boil it. You can make a simple gravy using beef broth, some of that beef gelatin, and a little cornstarch. But really, the star of this show is probably going to be starch noodles. These noodles are called glass or cellophane noodles. They're eaten in China, they're eaten in Japan, Korea, India, really across Asia, Thailand. You can see here they're made from sweet potato starch, and that's why they're translucent. They don't have any protein, and that's why you can see right through them. And so you see the ingredients here, sweet potato starch and water. Total fat is none. Total protein is less than one gram. And total carbohydrates are 89 grams. So this really truly is an almost pure starch-based food. They're delicious. These three, you can see these are all three different thicknesses, so you can play with different textures. I got these all at the Asian store in Ithaca. They had about 15 other varieties I could have chosen from. Even my Podunk little supermarket in Trumansburg, New York, has glass noodles.
As a comparison, I just made this little table. So 1000 calories of glass noodles essentially gives you zero branch chain amino acids. 1000 calories of Gava flour gives you 0.3 grams. Plantains are 0.7. The grains are all high, between 3.7 for white rice up to 4.8 for cornmeal. Potatoes are in the range of grains, and sweet potatoes do a little better at 2.8 grams. If you're worried that these glass noodles are going to blow up your blood glucose, you don't have to worry about that. They're very low on the glycemic index, which is a measure of how quickly that starch is absorbed and made into blood glucose. Cassava flour is another excellent source of starch. It's 46 on the glycemic index.
Clearly, if we picked a canonical recipe for this diet, it would be something like this. Obviously, this is a Korean recipe, kimchi soup with glass noodles. I made some alterations. I would say in this case, leave off the eggs, leave out the sesame oil, leave out the sesame seeds, and brown that ground pork first and pour off the fat. If you'd like, the amount of pork fat in 6 ounces of ground pork will not blow your fat budget for the day, because of course, the glass noodles and broth don't have any. So there's a bunch of different ways you can get bone broth and gelatin and glycine. Most things that are called beef broth or beef stock or chicken stock or chicken broth have about three grams of protein in a cup. And so this is a, this is a quart container. So this whole quart has 12 grams of gelatin protein. This is called bone broth specifically, and if it says bone broth, it's going to have a lot more protein per volume. And so this is only an 8 ounce container and it has 9 grams of protein. So this is would check in at about 36 grams of gelatin protein per quart.
You can also use something like this. This is culinary gelatin from Great Lakes Wellness. What I will sometimes do is I'll just use regular beef stock from the store. I'll put a quart of that in and I'll add a tablespoon of this gelatin to it, and I'll boil the noodles right in there, and then add whatever protein or vegetables or kimchi or chili paste or whatever I want to that. And so of course, you don't have to use lean pork. Obviously, 6 ounces of lean pork is the example that I've been using. That checks in somewhere around 36 grams of protein. So that's our, that's our budget. 6 grams of protein, 4 ounces of ground beef is 20. 3 ounces of shrimp is 17, and on and on. You can even use part-skin mozzarella, which might be good on some of the tortillas I'm going to suggest. An ounce of that is 7 grams of protein and 45 calories from fat.
Here's another very easy thing you can do with noodles. Pad Thai sauce. You basically just take these four ingredients, boil them together, toss the noodles in them, tada, you have Pad Thai. These glass noodles are often served in cold salads. This is a fat-free Asian dressing. Make this dressing, toss it on the glass noodles, tada, you have salad. This recipe has three drops of sesame oil. The sesame oil has a very strong flavor. It's an interesting flavor. Probably three drops, I'm guessing, is a gram or two of oil. It won't kill you if you want to use that, or just leave it out if you're not comfortable with it.
Moving on from glass noodles, there's also a whole variety of cassava dishes out there. Now, in this new gluten-free world, this company, you can get these on Amazon. They have a bunch of different noodle shapes. I put this Hunt's tomato sauce on here because tomato sauce sold in a can is always fat-free. They don't add any vegetable oil to it. But if you buy pasta sauce that comes in a bottle, there's always a bunch of added oil, oil, sometimes quite a bit, like four or five grams per serving. So this is a pretty obvious idea. You take a little bit of your ground meat that's part of your protein budget, you brown that up, add a little bit of this tomato sauce and cassava pen, and you've got a nice little bowl there.
There are also some gluten-free pancake mixes based on cassava flour. This is a cool trick. So when you make pancakes, you're often adding eggs, which you might want not want to do if you're limiting your protein. What you can do is, this is called a gelatin egg. You essentially, instead of using an egg in your recipe, you mix up water and gelatin, and you add that to the mix instead. So you can just substitute the gelatin egg for the eggs in any recipe. If you go to this article, they'll tell you how to do it. And I would just replace the milk in this recipe with water and leave the oil out. Cassava flour-based pancake, you can see there's only one gram of protein. This is just another cassava-based pancake recipe. This one, you can see that actually added collagen. Gelatin is a form of collagen that is produced in slow cooking of tendons and ligaments and pork skin. Collagen is also a protein that comes from connective tissues. It's also full of glycine. It's essentially the same thing, but it doesn't gel in the same way.
You can also just buy cassava flour and make these tortillas. It's very easy. I made a couple alterations to this recipe. I'm not interested in using the psyllium husks. And essentially, you just mix the cassava flour, make your gelatin egg with the water, and that will replace what they're getting out of the psyllium husks. Roll them into balls, and if you've got a tortilla press, you can flatten them out pretty quick, or sometimes I'll just roll them out with a rolling pin. If you want to buy cassava flour, the Otto's brand seems to be the most highly recommended. I was using Wegmans' brand and it was fine, and then I got a new batch from Wegmans the other day, and it had a very strong kind of disagreeable flavor, and that's what a lot of the people will report from cassava flour. The Otto's brand is supposed to be very consistent, very high quality. They have it on Amazon. Also, do not mistake tapioca flour for cassava flour. Tapioca comes from cassava, but they are not the same. I was, the first time I tried to make cassava flour tortillas, I found out the hard way that tapioca makes a very rubbery tortilla.
Quick kitchen suggestion. If you get one of these newfangled ceramic coated pans or pots or frying pans, this is a crepe pan. You can make pancakes without adding any oil to the pan first. These are just a couple other ideas of cassava flour mixes on the market. If you enjoy cooking and if you enjoy baking and you want to explore more culinary angles. Fun fact, you can make green plantains into tortillas as well. Recipe is there at the URL.
So those are kind of the ideas I've been riffing on on how to build this insulin sensitizing, optimizing diet with glass noodles and cassava flour. One of the downsides of this diet is it's not, it's not really very high in B vitamins. So you would probably want to take a B vitamin supplement. This, of course, is not very different from most Americans who are probably getting a lot of their B vitamins from supplemented grain products. But what is different is if you choose your own B vitamin supplement, you can get the best forms of all of the B vitamins. For instance, pyridoxal 5-phosphate is the active form of vitamin B6. You don't get that in fortified white flour. The best forms of folate and vitamin B12 are the methylated versions. So if you buy a supplement, make sure you're getting methyltetrahydrofolate and methylcobalamin. Make sure that B vitamin supplement has biotin in it, and make sure it doesn't go too crazy on the niacin, as niacinamide is good, it's a great supplement, but niacinamide at too high concentrations can inhibit some of the enzymes. So I would say try to keep this number below 100. I put the Life Extension up here because it's pretty cheap and it hits all of my benchmarks. This comes as two vegetarian capsules, which you might want to split and take one in the morning and perhaps one with the evening meal, because you can only absorb so much vitamin B12 at once, and you may not want to hit yourself with too much niacinamide all at once.
All right, this is NAC. This is N-acetylcysteine. In those studies that I showed you where there was great results from supplementing glycine, which of course you're going to get from the gelatin, and N-acetylcysteine, they were taking a kind of massive amount of. This was the amount of gelatin, by the way, they were taking, which is about 7 grams, I think, which is you'll be getting about that much if you eat the tablespoon of gelatin. And from the other protein, the N-acetylcysteine was about 9,000 milligrams in that supplementing study. So that would be about 15 capsules of N-acetylcysteine. I'm not necessarily recommending that you take that much. My guess is you will get good results at a far lower dose, but that is what they did in the study. Assuming that my math is correct, and I think that it is, you know, I sell at fireinabottle.net shop, 60% the brown and poria extract. This is great for your microbiome. Help this helps you combat the nefarious hydrocarbon receptor. It's great help with your bile acid metabolism. This is one of those kind of magical compounds that nobody seems to understand exactly how it works, but every time that it's tested, it really does work and it really gets the job done. And if you buy some poria extract at fireinabottle.net shop, it really helps me run this channel.
Additionally, I will suggest the same things that I always am suggesting, which is to consume oxidants, including RAA, which is alpha-lipoic acid. I sell disodium succinate on fireinabottle.net. Pyruvate is another one that will help you oxidize the cytosol. You should probably supplement with some fat-soluble vitamins, including vitamin D3 and vitamin K2. These D3 K2 supplements are very popular, easy to find. And lastly, of course, sea steroid ethanolamide is a supplement that helps with IC acid signaling and fat signaling. This is probably my favorite supplement, but I'm underselling it a bit right now because I'm out of supply. So we will have this back in stock soon at fireinabottle.net.
Okay, so that Kevin Hall study showed that a very low-fat, very high-starch diet is a good step on the way to an insulin sensitizing diet. This meshes with thousands of years of Chinese rice farmers, for instance, or Taiwanese rice farmers maintaining excellent glucose control and the vast majority of them remaining lean and insulin sensitive on that kind of diet. If you want to truly optimize this type of diet, in my opinion, you will want to avoid grain protein. And the reason you want to do that is that grain protein gives you a bunch of branch chain amino acids in a very unbalanced fashion that you simply can't use to make protein due to the lack of lysine. Once you've hit your basic protein requirements for your essential amino acids, fill out your protein budget for the day with gelatin. That's going to give you the glycine that you need to help remove unburned fats from your skeletal muscle, that you're going to need to build creatine, that you're going to need to build glutathione. And those effects of glycine together are going to help you get your insulin sensitivity back.
Thanks a lot for watching, guys. Next week, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the experiment that I'm going to do with this diet, some of the markers I'm going to be testing. We can think in a little more depth about some of the supplements.