The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Insulin & Glucose Doctor: This Will Strip Fat Faster Than Anything! The Fastest Way To Alzheimer’s! The Link Between Sugar & Cancer! Dr Benjamin Bikman
Thu, 06 Feb 2025
88% of adults have metabolic disease, but what’s really making us sick? Dr Benjamin Bikman reveals the hidden dangers of insulin and how to take control of your health Dr Benjamin Bikman is a metabolic scientist and Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology. He is the host of ‘The Metabolic Classroom’ podcast and author of books such as, ‘Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease―and How to Fight It’. In this conversation, Dr Benjamin and Steven discuss topics such as, the link between insulin and infertility, how to lose weight without counting calories, how ketosis can boost brain function, and the negative effects of Ozempic on bone density. 00:00 Intro 02:19 My Mission to Help with Chronic Diseases 05:05 What Is Insulin Resistance? 13:53 What Causes Insulin Resistance? 21:01 Can Insulin Resistance Become Chronic? 25:22 The Importance of Fat Cells Shrinking or Expanding 34:53 What's the Evolutionary Basis of Insulin Resistance? 42:17 The Role of Insulin During Pregnancy 43:39 What Is Gestational Diabetes? 45:05 Does It Impact the Future Baby? 45:59 Women's Cancer Is Increasing While Men's Remains the Same 50:33 Ads 51:29 Alzheimer's and Dementia Are on the Rise 01:05:34 Ethnicities and Their Different Fat Distributions 01:10:03 What to Do to Extend Our Lives 01:19:31 Cholesterol: The Molecule of Life 01:22:15 Smoking Causes Insulin Resistance 01:23:52 Does Smoking Make Us Fat? 01:29:04 Ads 01:31:04 Ketosis and Insulin Sensitivity 01:39:16 Ketone Shots 01:41:12 Steven's Keto Journey 01:47:40 How to Keep Your Muscles on a Keto Diet 01:55:25 Are There Downsides to the Ketogenic Diet? 01:57:17 Is Keto Bad for Your Gut Microbiome? 02:07:05 Are Sweeteners Okay in a Keto Diet? 02:11:04 Is Salt Bad for Us? 02:19:22 The Importance of Exercise to Maintain Healthy Insulin Levels 02:22:03 Calorie Restriction 02:23:51 Why Don't We Just Take Ozempic? 02:26:19 The Side Effects of Ozempic 02:34:56 Why Liposuction Doesn't Work Long-Term 02:39:34 Who Believed In You When No One Else Did? Follow Dr Benjamin: Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/uSaQIc3LJQb You can purchase Dr Benjamin’s book, ‘How Not to Get Sick: A Cookbook and Guide to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance, Lose Weight, and Fight Chronic Disease’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/bcuFsHbMJQb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Fiverr - https://fiverr.com/diary and use code DIARY for 10% off your first order PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off WHOOP - JOIN.WHOOP.COM/CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is insulin resistance and why is it important?
And even the most common forms of infertility, erectile dysfunction and PCOS, insulin resistance is a heavy contributor. Now, 88% of adults in the US have some degree of insulin resistance. And people hear this and think America is just fat and metabolically sick. But we're not actually the worst country when it comes to this. And part of it is because of how different ethnicities store fat.
And I'll come back to that. But there's two roads to insulin resistance. So there's the fast lane. And I could make you insulin resistant in six hours with either of these common three things. But if I removed them, your resistance would go away just as quickly. Now, the slow lane, that's a problem.
And there's certain lifestyle habits and problems with our diets that are massively contributing to slow insulin resistance. Now, thankfully, this can be resolved through four pillars, which are very simple. We'll get into that. But why don't we just sack all this off and just take a Zenpec? Well, because people may not know about the negative side effects.
For example, 40% of the weight that people are losing on these drugs is coming from... Holy...
I have been forced into a bet with my team. We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever. Thanks to all of you. And we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes. So they said to me, Steve, for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days, can $1 be given to our celebration fund?
for the entire team and I've agreed to the bet. So if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at Diary of a CEO, all you've got to do is hit the subscribe button. So actually this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an awful... What is the mission that you're on?
My mission is to help people appreciate that much of chronic disease, we look at them as these siloed individual distinct disorders with totally distinct origins, and yet much of them share a common core. It's as if they're branches growing from the same tree.
And the conventional clinical care will look at these branches and give someone a prescription for a medication, which is only going to prune the branch back a little bit, never actually solving the problem. It can just grow right back.
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Chapter 2: How does insulin resistance relate to chronic diseases?
And so we can look at most of these chronic diseases that are killing us globally and then say, OK, there are, in fact, some simple lifestyle changes that can be implemented that will help reduce the risk of not only one or two, but all of the top killers from things like Alzheimer's disease to heart disease to type 2 diabetes to liver failure or fatty liver disease.
all of them share a common metabolic core. That's my mission.
And what is that common metabolic core?
Yeah, it's a little-known problem called insulin resistance. In fact, when I first started... this topic, I stumbled on one paper that documented how when fat tissue is growing, it increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. That was this concept in the early 2000s that was really getting a lot of attention. Diabesity, this kind of dual epidemic of wherever we see obesity, we see more type 2 diabetes.
And this manuscript outlined something that was to me a revelation at the time. It was so fascinating where when fat tissue is growing, it starts releasing pro-inflammatory proteins. That inflammation caused a problem called insulin resistance. And then that got me into this realm of understanding that other tissues of the body, as they become insulin resistant,
then you start to spread the chronic disease. And essentially coming to the conclusion that something like hypertension, high blood pressure, which is the most common cardiovascular problem and the main contributor to heart disease, Well, insulin resistance is the main cause of hypertension. They call Alzheimer's disease type 3 diabetes, or more accurately, insulin resistance of the brain.
Even the most common forms of infertility, in men, it's erectile dysfunction. Well, that's because of insulin resistance of the blood vessels. In women, the most common form of infertility is polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. That's because of the insulin resistance affecting her ovaries and the ability to produce the proper sex hormones.
I guess the really important question here is what is insulin resistance? And can you explain this to me like I'm a 10 year old?
Oh yeah, for sure. Insulin resistance is, it's kind of a, it's a disorder that has two parts. It's like a coin with two sides that as much as we think of, we think of one side just because we hear the word insulin resistance, but there's another part to it that I need to, that is very important. So insulin,
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Chapter 3: What are the effects of insulin resistance during pregnancy?
Chapter 4: How does insulin resistance affect weight loss?
Muscle and fat tissue need insulin to come and bring the sugar in via taxi. However, other tissues, and the brain a little bit as well, other tissues will still respond to insulin, but they don't need insulin to tell it what to do with the sugar. It just takes it in. But even on those, like the liver, for example,
If the liver sees sugar driving by in the taxi, it just opens the doors and lets it in. It doesn't need insulin to come and tell it to let the sugar in. However, even at the liver, and every other cell has a similar degree of this, the liver doesn't know what to do with it.
So this is back to something I'd mentioned earlier where insulin's thematic effect at the entire body is to tell the body what to do with energy in all of its forms as these kind of caloric rich molecules, what to do with lactate, what to do with ketones, what to do with fats or glucose, what to do with amino acids. So insulin will tell the body what to do with all of those things.
But again, its most famous effect is to control blood sugar. And that's not wrong because its most powerful activator is blood sugar. So with all of that in mind, insulin resistance is two problems wrapped into one. The one problem is the most obvious one, which is that insulin isn't working as well as it used to. So back to the analogy of the taxis dropping off sugar.
If the muscle tissue has become insulin resistant, insulin is coming and trying to pull the sugar-loaded taxi into the muscle, but the muscle's not listening.
So say that again. So the insulin's coming past with the glucose inside it.
Well, not technically. Yeah, but just to sort of go with your metaphor. But maybe to use another one, insulin comes and knocks on the doors. It's like the bouncer at the door. It's coming and knocking on the door of the muscle saying, hey, muscle, I've got some sugar that wants to come in. And normally the muscle will say, oh yeah, sure, okay, open it up the doors and let the sugar come in.
When the muscle is insulin resistant, the bouncer's knocking. Maybe there's even, I'm almost getting ahead of myself, but one bouncer, maybe two or three bouncers pounding on the doors of the muscle cell, but the muscle cell's not listening. It's become deaf. That's the insulin resistance of what we call insulin resistance, where some of insulin's effects are
like helping lower blood sugar, it's not working very well anymore. And the muscle is just an obvious example because there's so much of it. You know, it is the biggest tissue on the average individual. Someone who's very obese perhaps now has more fat tissue. But even people who are overweight, most of us is muscle. So that's a good tissue to look at. So part of insulin resistance is...
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Chapter 5: What is the connection between insulin resistance and Alzheimer's?
Chapter 6: What lifestyle changes can improve insulin sensitivity?
Insulin, first of all, is a hormone that we make from the pancreas, a long kind of gland tucked underneath the stomach. And the pancreas is a very busy organ. It makes a lot of different hormones. It makes hormones that come into the blood. It also makes enzymes that go into the intestines to help digest food. But among the hormones that are being released into the blood is insulin.
Now, in the person with type 1 diabetes, their immune system has destroyed their beta cells, so they don't make insulin anymore. That's why for a person with type 1 diabetes, insulin is a life-saving therapy. You're giving them what they're not making anymore. But for everybody else, we have beta cells, and they're releasing insulin when they need to. Now, usually the main stimulus is
The main reason the beta cell is releasing the insulin is because blood glucose levels go up.
So I eat sugar.
You eat sugar or not even something as obvious as sugar, but bread or crackers. White rice. Chips. Oh, yes, yes. So basically anything that falls into the family of a carbohydrate. So if the earth grows it, that's a carbohydrate. If it's a plant, it's a carbohydrate. Maybe that's a better way of describing it.
And so it's going to have starches and sugars, which all kind of falls into this family of carbohydrate. Depending on how much starch or sugars that it has, then that will result in a bigger or smaller blood glucose or blood sugar response. But then if blood sugar is too high for too long, that becomes very harmful to the body. So insulin comes in and helps lower the blood glucose.
And then having done its job, insulin comes back down.
So insulin comes out like a taxi and transports all the glucose in my blood to various places around the body to store them? Perfect.
Perfect. It's like a taxi. Yeah, that's right. Look, it's a shuttle. It's a taxi saying, hey, glucose, come on in. I'm dropping you off at the muscle. So mostly, just as an interesting tangent of insulin before I finish answering insulin resistance, insulin will open the doors for blood sugar to come in and drive the taxi in, mostly at the muscle and the fat.
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Chapter 7: How does ethnicity influence fat distribution and insulin sensitivity?
Chapter 8: What are the risks associated with high cholesterol levels?
Even the most common forms of infertility, in men, it's erectile dysfunction. Well, that's because of insulin resistance of the blood vessels. In women, the most common form of infertility is polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. That's because of the insulin resistance affecting her ovaries and the ability to produce the proper sex hormones.
I guess the really important question here is what is insulin resistance? And can you explain this to me like I'm a 10 year old?
Oh yeah, for sure. Insulin resistance is, it's kind of a, it's a disorder that has two parts. It's like a coin with two sides that as much as we think of, we think of one side just because we hear the word insulin resistance, but there's another part to it that I need to, that is very important. So insulin,
Insulin, first of all, is a hormone that we make from the pancreas, a long kind of gland tucked underneath the stomach. And the pancreas is a very busy organ. It makes a lot of different hormones. It makes hormones that come into the blood. It also makes enzymes that go into the intestines to help digest food. But among the hormones that are being released into the blood is insulin.
Now, in the person with type 1 diabetes, their immune system has destroyed their beta cells, so they don't make insulin anymore. That's why for a person with type 1 diabetes, insulin is a life-saving therapy. You're giving them what they're not making anymore. But for everybody else, we have beta cells, and they're releasing insulin when they need to. Now, usually the main stimulus is
The main reason the beta cell is releasing the insulin is because blood glucose levels go up.
So I eat sugar.
You eat sugar or not even something as obvious as sugar, but bread or crackers. White rice. Chips. Oh, yes, yes. So basically anything that falls into the family of a carbohydrate. So if the earth grows it, that's a carbohydrate. If it's a plant, it's a carbohydrate. Maybe that's a better way of describing it.
And so it's going to have starches and sugars, which all kind of falls into this family of carbohydrate. Depending on how much starch or sugars that it has, then that will result in a bigger or smaller blood glucose or blood sugar response. But then if blood sugar is too high for too long, that becomes very harmful to the body. So insulin comes in and helps lower the blood glucose.
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