The New Paradigm Of Insulin Resistance – Top Nutrition Researcher Alex Leaf, M.S.

Ari: Okay, there is one intermediary linking those things that you just described here that I want to make sure we explain. One could make the case reasonably, I think I would make this case, as much as I like this way of conceptualizing the real causes “of insulin resistance”, I think we could make the case that what if we just keep going more upstream of even this. We say, you were just tracking something upstream of this fat cell dysfunction and the insulin resistance is the accumulation of fat in the liver and visceral adipose tissue. What causes that? Well, upstream of that is too much fat in the subcutaneous fat stores. Now, we need to ask, well, what causes that? What are the root causes of why we are accumulating too much subcutaneous fat stores? I want you to answer this by also stating the context that this problem is a modern human problem that doesn’t exist in all those hunter-gatherer tribes that we were discussing before. If we’re talking about real root causes, we need to understand the root causes of the structural dysfunction too and why that is only present uniquely in modern humans living the modern Western lifestyle as opposed to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the hunter-gatherer tribes who still exist today, who have been studied by researchers?

Alex: I’ll go two more upstream causes. The cause of overfilled fat cells is simply that you’re eating more energy than your body is able to use up chronically over time. The reason why you’re eating too much, I would argue, and I think, Ari, you would agree, is that the modern Western diet is just a potpourri of hyper-palatable, super calorie-dense, completely unnatural foods that are literally engineered by people whose entire jobs is to make them taste good to make us eat as much as possible. This problem doesn’t exist in any indigenous tribes because, one, they have to work for their diet, and two, their diet is composed exclusively of natural foods that we evolved eating, that our bodies are adapted to using.

Ari: By the way, quick side note, this also loops back into our previous discussion around natural versus man-made stuff and the potential for adverse effects between those two being considerably different. That’s a quick side note.

Alex: Yes. On that too, not every processed food is bad and harmful. You really have to approach it with some common sense. You could find a nice jar of spirulina powder that’s ultra-processed but–

Ari: Or whey protein or collagen [unintelligible 01:18:35]

Alex: Yes. Those are all, I would argue, very healthy things to include in the diet. We’re talking about the foods that I think would come to mind for everyone just when they hear the word ultra-processed junk food. This is the stuff that lines the supermarket shelves, the stuff that is rich in fats, processed, heavily processed and refined carbohydrates, salt, flavorings, everything that makes us want to eat it and literally, tricks our biology into consuming more of it. Because from an evolutionary standpoint, all of these aspects of the food are what our biology is tuned towards for survival. When you’re trying to survive out in the jungle or on the savannah, you want to eat calorie-dense foods that are rich in carbohydrates like sugar. Honey is a big one around equatorial tribes. They love honey. They will gorge on honey when they find it.

Ari: [unintelligible 01:19:49] It’s also true in my personal household. I have two little children that also gorge on honey. I’m not going to lie, I may also do that from time to time.

Alex: Yes, it’s an ingrained survival mechanism. The gorging thing is actually a great pivot point too, because overeating is not inherently bad. Our bodies are designed to deal with periods of overeating and they’re designed to deal with periods of not eating at all. People don’t get unhealthy because maybe they binge over a weekend every now and then. People get unhealthy because they regularly consume really, really crappy foods that cause them to unconsciously overeat over a span of weeks, months, years, decades.

Ari: I want to add one thing. Again, context along with hunter-gatherers, our human ancestors, are, you could say, our natural living counterparts. If we look even more broadly to other animal species, none of these other animal species that we might observe, whether it’s a zebra, a deer, a tiger, whatever, a squirrel, or a raccoon, or anything like that, none of these species have obesity epidemics. You don’t see them walking around with huge amounts of fat stores, unless maybe they’re preparing for hibernation, which is also an intelligent thing in hibernating animals. They’re not starving to death, assuming they’re in an environment that has food available to them. They know how to regulate their level of body fat within a healthy range.

It turns out, and humans do too in a proper human environment like the one that we evolved in. All hunter-gatherer tribes, when we look at them, they know how to regulate their body fat stores in a healthy way. This is not a conscious thing. It’s not that they went and read diet books and learned about calories and that they go into their apps on their phones and count their calories every day and track their calorie expenditure. This is all done as a natural non-conscious product of bioregulatory processes.

We have a body fat set point system that has been designed into us over millions of years. Prior to even the species of Homo sapiens, this system evolved. This system involves a feedback loop between a certain area of the brain and the hypothalamus that is involved in– well, this is called the body fat set point regulatory system. It is in sync with our body fat stores which produce a hormone called leptin. That’s the primary thing that is involved in this regulation.

The more body fat stores you have, the more leptin that’s in your circulation that feeds back into the system in the brain, which is designed to sense, okay, do I have lots of energy in storage on my body or do I have very little? Do we need to, if I have very little, then I need to go out and seek out food and find food to store more energy in my body fat stores to make sure I have it available in case I’ve got to go without food for a period of time? If I do have lots of leptin in circulation indicating sufficient body fat stores, then I don’t need to feel so motivated to go pursue more food. That’s how the system is designed to regulate.

The problem is the modern environment and the modern diet, as Alex explained, of hyper-palatable food that has been literally engineered for us to find pleasurable, takes us out of what’s called homeostatic eating, which is this body fat regulatory system operating correctly as it does in pretty much all animal species, where you eat food, you feel non-consciously motivated to eat an amount of food that is roughly in proportion to how much energy you’re burning and in need of on a daily basis or on a weekly basis.

You’re consuming the amount that is essentially equivalent to how much you’re burning off, so your body weight and body fat levels stay stable over time. That’s homeostatic eating in homeostasis with what your body actually needs. The modern environment and diet pulls us out of homeostatic eating into what’s called hedonic eating, eating more for pleasure because, again, we have literally foods that are designed to be pleasurable by PhD food engineers. It succeeds, especially over time, in overriding our body fat regulatory system and causing us to eat more and more hedonically and not homeostatically, and to the point where many people literally over years and decades quite literally forget they’re totally out of tune with the homeostatic signals. They don’t even know how to regulate homeostatic eating anymore. I’ve seen people, when they’re losing weight after they’ve become obese over several decades and then they’re trying to lose weight. I’ve seen people who, in that state, they start to feel a sensation in their belly that their belly is burning and they’re questioning whether they should go to the hospital or not because they think they’re afraid something’s wrong. Then you have to explain to them, no, that’s what hunger feels like. That’s what actual physiological hunger feels like, not hedonic hunger, like I desire food because I’m excited to eat that, because I know how good it tastes and how much pleasure it gives me.

Homeostatic, real physiological hunger is like, oh my gosh, my body actually, my stomach’s burning because I actually need fuel because I’m running so low on fuel stores. There are many people in our society who haven’t felt that sensation in decades, maybe since they were a kid. This is how the modern environment overrides this body fat set point system that’s been designed into us and pulls us out of homeostatic eating. The one last point that I want to make here is we have a paradigm of health of medicine that, as we’ve said, conceptualizes problems through a biochemistry lens, and it has the illusion of being scientifically sophisticated.

If someone is presenting you a paradigm of insulin resistance and diabetes where they say, well, here’s the biochemistry of the GLUT4 insulin receptor and there’s this mechanism and that mechanism and this biochemical and the AMPK and insulin levels are this and hemoglobin A1C is this and look at all your blood markers and look at this marker and that marker and let’s do gene testing to see which gene variants are associated with insulin resistance and let’s do microbiome testing to see which microbiome profile is associated with insulin resistance and genes and blah blah blah and this biochemical and that biochemical, it can seem enormously cutting-edge and scientifically sophisticated.

If someone is presenting that paradigm to you where they’re presenting those things as the causes of insulin resistance, “the causes”, and they’re not presenting what Alex just explained about all these things that are upstream of that with regards to the physical structural dysfunction and then what are the root causes of that physical structural dysfunction, which are the modern diet and the modern way of life and the modern environment, and if they don’t have that context of understanding those things as the root causes, it reminds me of the quote, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” You can present this way of understanding this problem that sounds to the uneducated persons enormously scientifically sophisticated, but it’s actually a bunch of BS if it isn’t grounded in the context that you just presented.