OVERWEIGHT, INSULIN RESISTANCE

Ketosis, Cold Therapy, Allulose

Dr Ben Bikman: The SURPRISING Scientific Way To Burn Belly Fat FAST

GLUCOSE V. FRUCTOSE. Belly fat is visceral fat, which is the more dangerous fat. There was a human study where drinks were loaded with either glucose or fructose. Both groups of people gained fat, but the glucose drinkers stored more subcutaneous fat (beneath the skin), while the fructose drinkers stored more visceral fat. Similarly, alcohol consumption will promote visceral fat. And the thing that those two molecules have in common, fructose and alcohol, is that they're both metabolized by the liver. And when we put undue metabolic burden on the liver, it begins producing visceral fat in the abdomen.

INSULIN EXCESS. Insulin is unique among its class of peptide hormones, because it affects literally every single cell of the body. Cells have insulin receptors, where insulin tells the cell to take in and store energy and grow. Insulin wants to promote growth. In order to grow, a cell needs to be building up molecules within itself, types of fats or types of proteins. All of this is turned on, no matter what cell the insulin comes to. An absence of insulin is a death sentence. You must have insulin to survive. However, in our society we have too much. Insulin is elevated chronically in most people, and thus there is this incessant signal to grow, grow, grow. And that is not healthy. We have a reduction in longevity, which is likely why with virtually every study that has ever explored the metabolic markers of the longest lived humans, one of the most consistent findings is that they either have low fasting glucose levels or if they have measured it, they're very insulin sensitive. Because you need to have insulin low so that the body can be undergoing the rejuvenation process to take a break from growing in order to clean house, which is a process called autophagy. That's the general overview of what insulin does and when it goes too far, and the emphasis is on the going too far. That is the singular reason why I felt compelled to write my book, Why We Get Sick. I just thought there was not enough overall knowledge of chronically elevated insulin and how it contributes to disease.

INSULIN + CALORIES. Even the growth of the fat cell itself must have had a preceding event and that brings us back to insulin. Insulin is the signal that promotes the growth of fat cells. It is totally impossible for a fat cell to grow unless insulin is elevated. To flip that around, if insulin is low, let alone absent, it is impossible for a fat cell to stay big. It must shrink, no matter how many calories that person is eating. Insulin is the essential signal that tells a fat cell to grow. But it cannot sustain that growth on its own. There must be sufficient fuel to provide the structure for that growth. So insulin signals the growth, but then calories fuel that growth. And so to understand why a fat cell or fat mass is growing, there must be, first, the signal which is insulin telling the fat cells to grow. And, second, there must be sufficient energy available to fuel that growth. So both signals are needed. If you only have insulin and an insufficiency of calories, the person actually dies from hypoglycemia and the lack of ketones; they literally go unconscious and die. In contrast, if you only have the calories but no insulin, then you have the untreated type 1 diabetics. They can't stop burning energy and they run out; they starve and die from cytosis, or just ultimate starvation. So you can't have growth effect without both of them together. One alone is insufficient.

INSULIN RESISTANCE & DISEASE. Let's circle back to insulin resistance and how that leads to belly fat. People are gonna be thinking they don't have insulin resistance, because their blood glucose is OK. Focusing on glucose control is not the entire story. Insulin resistance is also referred to as pre-diabetes and if we include that synonym for insulin resistance, it helps put things in perspective. Insulin resistance is the ultimate measure of metabolic health by my estimation. Commonly, clinicians are looking at glucose, waiting for the glucose to start climbing. But years, or even decades before the glucose ever moves, insulin has been fighting a silent war. This is insulin resistance. In its original pre-diabetes state, which is how it starts and continues for years, even decades, insulin is elevated but glucose is normal. So the insulin has to work harder and harder and harder in order to keep the glucose in a normal range. This is the state also that's contributing so heavily to disease. This is the state that's causing infertility and migraines, cognitive decline, fatty liver disease and heart disease, hypertension. It's not the hyperglycemia that's contributing to those diseases; it's the hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance. So that's why it's so important to shift the paradigm away from the current glucose-centric view of metabolic health to a more encompassing insulin-centric view, where we acknowledge that, if we want to detect metabolic decay in its earliest stages, then we have to forget the glucose; we have to include insulin in our paradigm and then that becomes the earliest signal warning us of the problem. But that is so important, because it changes the way we view all of the diseases that I just mentioned. A woman may be opening her medicine cabinet every morning and she takes a blood pressure medication. She may take a blood thinner. She may take a medication for her PCOS. All of those problems, elevated blood pressure, elevated clot risk, elevated menstrual dysfunction, and ovulatory challenges with PCOS, there is one cause that is common across all of them, namely the insulin resistance.

WARNING SIGNS. Insulin resistance is not treated based on any medications. It's changed by lifestyle. So how do you test for the insulin resistance? What is the warning sign? If someone has consistently elevated blood pressure, then it's very likely they have insulin resistance. Something as simple as sleep deprivation can contribute to a short-term hypertension, but that's not insulin resistance. Only if it's long-term consistently elevated should you be warned that it's probably insulin resistance. Also the skin is a window to the metabolic soul. You need to look no further than the collar. There are two distinct skin disorders that just happen to occur around the neckline. It will look and feel darker or like it's crinkled tissue. And look around the back of the neck. In that same area, a person can begin to develop little skin tags, not the same as a mole or mound of skin. Each of those is a very strong indicator of insulin resistance. The good news is, whether it's the skin problems or the PCOS or the blood pressure, etcetera, as you begin to correct your insulin resistance, all of those things go away. The main way to target belly fat is to look at insulin resistance.

WHITE V. BROWN FAT. What is the difference between white fat and brown fat? White fat that is the prototypical low metabolic rate fat. It has a very, very low metabolism, almost so low, you can barely detect it. However, brown fat, of which we have relatively little as human adults, is almost the opposite. It has a metabolic rate that rivals muscle tissue. It is easily 10 times higher than the metabolic rate of the white fat cells. It literally looks dark reddish brown from its high amount of mitochondria. The mitochondria are different from normal mitochondria, because they express a protein called uncoupling-protein-one, or UCP-1. Uncoupling means the mitochondria energy isn't coupled to movement or work. Instead, it's only creating heat. Because of the uncoupling protein, it's burning a lot of glucose and fats just to create heat. And this becomes something we can take advantage of.

INCREASE METABOLISM. How can we turn our brown fat on to increase its metabolic rate and help us be more insulin sensitive? Well, we can expose ourselves to cold. Cold therapy is the most effective way to turn on our brown fat. Most people would never do that. But they could still take advantage of turning on brown fat by increasing ketones. So we published multiple reports finding that ketones are also capable of activating brown fat. Ketones can even make white fat behave more like brown fat. Cold therapy can do that too. So just as a brief primer on the metabolism of ketones, we make ketones when we are burning a lot of fat. And we can only burn a lot of fat when insulin is low. The human body is a metabolic hybrid at any moment, relying on one of two fuels primarily. At any moment, the body is sugar/glucose burning, or it's fat burning to varying degrees, and insulin is the primary signal that determines which one is dominant. If insulin is elevated, the body is sugar burning. If insulin is low, the body is fat burning. If insulin stays low for upwards of 12 plus hours in the liver, the liver cells are burning more fat than it actually needs for its own energy. This produces ketones from all of the fat burning, and the ketones are released into the blood and are taken by cells as fuel for their mitochondria. Ketones reduce inflammation and they stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis, i.e. synthesis of new mitochondria. Even in fat tissue the increase in the metabolic rate is a direct effect of ketones. If you're making ketones, you're burning fat and it's likely you are losing fat. When insulin is low, the metabolic rate can be several 100 calories higher per day (burning more fat) than it is if insulin is elevated.

ALLULOSE SWEETENER. There's a rare sugar that you can get from things like figs. What's unique about it is that it's essentially fructose's good twin. It's called allulose. It competes with fructose. It gets absorbed into the bloodstream or it goes further in the digestive tract and has a substantial effect on the hormone GLP1. In fact, Allulose increases GLP1 more than anything else. GLP1 causes a sense of fullness. So people taking allulose feel fuller longer, have a greater sense of satiety, their cravings are down. But also it rapidly lowers uric acid that helps with fat burning and insulin sensitivity. Other sweeteners besides allulose can't do that. Allulose is improving things like cognition. Alzheimer's disease appears to be a deficit of brain energy. The brain is essentially going hungry. And anything we can do to correct that hunger, including stimulating more powerhouses like the mitochondria, are going to generally be helpful. I just take one or two allulose chocolate bars and it smashes my cravings. I've never had an easier time.

EXERCISE BENEFIT. Let's also touch lastly on exercise related to belly fat. Adrenaline, i.e. epinephrine, helps burn visceral adipose, i.e. belly fat. Exercise increases epinephrine very immediately and in a sustained way. So does cold therapy. The best exercise is one you will do. Resistance exercise helps and you can increase resistance by adding a 10 LB weight while walking or running or climbing a hill. Increase the weight gradually. Inserting some pushups or squats or pull-ups, anything to fatigue the muscles, is going to improve the exercise. For more info, see insuliniq.com.