Insulin, Brown Fat & Ketones w/ Benjamin Bikman, PhD

when someone starts talking about body fat and the fact that you can pinch or jiggle or the fat to me might have viscerally in that visceral space the visceral fat that's all white fat and then we have throughout our thoracic cavity we have little Depot's of brown fat all human adult's have various amounts of this and then this brown fat is what's creating the heat and using the glucose especially to create just a creepy so insulin doesn't like wasting energy insulin wants the body to store it and so it's gonna make brown fat shut off it's gonna come to the brown fat bind to insulin receptors and tell the brown fat slow down uncoupling start acting more like white fat so slow everything down and sure enough we found that when you have brown fat cells that are exposed to insulin their metabolic rate will go down by about half now in contrast we have all the subcutaneous fat that I mentioned the jiggly fat that's right beneath our skin that has the kick that capacity to act like brown fat this process known as Beijing where it doesn't actually become brown fat but it acts like it [Music] hey friends Mike with high intensity health thanks for tuning back in to another video I'm very excited today to be here with dr. Ben Beckman today we're gonna talk all about brown adipose tissue and ketosis and insulin and how insulin promotes weight gain and fat tissue formation and so forth so then it's really awesome to be with you thanks Mike I'm thrilled to be here with you too so there's a lot of different angles that we can start with this but I think the first kind of what got you into this research you know with your background and personal interests and exercises yeah talk about how insulin is really kind of a harbinger and causes waking you know yeah it does so I was I was an exercise enthusiast for years my first two degrees or exercise physiology I was interested in how the body responds to exercise that meant I was fascinated by calories or obsessed or fixated on the idea that when I was talking with clients when I was a personal trainer during my first graduate degree it was always you gotta eat less exercise more and I just saw this was not working or it would work and then it would fail it would work and then it would fail and then it was during my PhD where I began to really appreciate that insulin is the key to metabolic function as insulin goes so too does body fat and that was research I continued through my PhD my postdoctoral fellowship and now that I have my own lab the focus has stayed on insulin and the relevance of insulin in normal metabolic health right and so insulin when it becomes to how to balance right when individuals are having a lot of carbohydrates in their diets or that's right it really expands it causes a dip Oh Genesis it's a key one thing you've talked about in a presentation with Jeffery Gerber and so forth in Colorado was in order to grow fat cells in the lab from their stem cells you need insulin which i think is Right really fast now yeah you can't yes we have these progenitor cells in a little dish and then we have to spike in insulin at certain doses over a certain period of time in order for them to just become fat cells and you'd mentioned the process at Apogee nosis and that is that process where you're taking progenitor cells and turning them into adipocytes but within the adipocyte and what insulin is doing in any adult human it's initiating a process called lippo genesis which is the creation or the expansion of the lipid droplet this big bulge of fat within the fat cell and you look at a fat cell under a microscope you can't see the mitochondria you can't see the nucleus or all the other parts of the cell because they're shoved up against the sides because the fat droplet the main body the fat body within the fat cell is encompassing the entirety of the girth of the cell and so insulin is both making new fat cells at Apogee noses and creating the fat in the fat cell lipid Genesis and you have to have any any scientist any biochemist would nod their heads and say yes insulin is absolutely required and yet despite that being well established in any textbook when we try to talk about the relevance of insulin human obesity all of a sudden there's some disconnected all of a sudden people say it's not relevant yeah it is why do you think there is that disconnect is it politically motivated or oh boy that's a great question yeah so it's certainly our obsession with calories calorie number where we want to look at the human body as a perfectly closed thermodynamic system and it is all energy in energy out if there's any mismatch then the system is gaining or losing that's the in it's tempting to want to think that right it makes sense and you could mathematically write it all out but we are more complicated than that we are not a simple you know sink with water coming in and water coming out we have to account for hormones so is it politically driven boy it's it's tempting to speculate that there are ulterior motives in sort of culture where there are people with a lot of money who don't want us to focus on what the calorie is doing and rather focus on number of calories right very interesting stuff so to kind of summarize insulin does two really bad things right it causes your stem cells which we all have some stems oh yeah yeah so so if we're having a very high carbohydrate diet we're inactive or miss managing our stress not getting sleep all these factors that yes all about insulin resistance basically our stem cells are being preferentially making more adipocytes yeah that's insulin mediated that's right problem number one problem number two is the fat cells that are being made are storing more lipid droplets within the cell so it's really coming enlarged yep and then they release more diplomatic kinds leptin all this fat and all that's right yes the whole stuff yeah that's right so in the initial weight gain in a human we'll be entirely through lipogenesis so if we all just started gaining weight right now because reading bagels and Donuts and whatever what-have-you Sodapop our fat cells are just gonna get big then once we get to around a hundred and fifty percent of what is ideal whatever that may be for our bodies then we start making new fat cells so it's not a process the body wants to do because it's expensive to make new cells so you just work with what you've got and so if we have if insulins telling the body store energy it's going to do that in the fat cell the fat cells that we already have will get big and so the the flip of that is as someone starts to lose weight they're not cutting their fat cell number they're just taking all their fat cells and they're shrinking them as the fat within the fat cells starting to be shared by the body used by the muscles or whatever interesting so we can't actually lose the fat so I was once they've been created we're gonna get smaller yeah it's gonna be more often than not making them smaller interesting or we can convert them a little hint to what we're gonna talk about later from the white adipose tissue to the base of Beijing of them yeah that's right we make them start we make them act differently interesting all right I definitely want to get there but great we I would love to address some of your earlier research on ceramides and lipids I think this is a topic that kind of gets confusing because if you look at like athletes and their muscle and has a lot of intracellular like lipid deposition within the muscle yeah and then we look at biopsy of a type 2 diabetic muscle there's fat in the muscle too and one's insulin resistant one's insulation so how do we parse this mental that's a great question so you'd mentioned ceramides and sphingolipids that is one class of the many types of fat that we have in our bodies in every cell and then you are talking about athletes and diabetics having a lot of interim io cellular lipid that's a fad called a glycerol lipid triglycerides okay so there are two different types of lipid and it's all in the same family of fat but what you were talking about is something known as the athletes paradox where early researchers were trying to implicate triglycerides which is the typical storage form of fat in the body as a cause of insulin resistance and they're saying triglycerides are what's causing the insulin resistance because we have a type 2 diabetic we pull a muscle biopsy from the leg and lo and behold there's a lot more triglyceride in that muscle than in a normal insulin sensitive person however the paradox a row when a group I think at University of Pittsburgh found that in muscle of elite endurance athletes they had just as much fat as the type two diabetics did in their muscle and yet they are exquisitely insulin sensitive and that sort of led to this crumbling down of the idea that glyceryl lipids triglycerides in particular are not relevant to insulin resistance and in fact it is likely different lipids like this finga lipids ceramide in particular mm-hmm which is one of you know many and we need ceramide every cell has to have it the cell is designed to have it for a reason if you try to get rid of ceramide out of any cells like we've tried to do in mice experiments it they cannot live it's lethal so we have to have it just like we have to have insulin we just want to keep it in a nice range interesting so if I heard you correctly so the obese individuals if you biopsy their muscle it's more the ceramides and those inflammatory yes not so much at triglycerides no that's right differences inert it really is just a way for the body to say I have a lot of energy to store I'm gonna store it and that isn't it of itself is not harmful that's benign but other lipids like this finger lipids ceramide that which can be accumulated as a result of inflammation if I were to induce any sort of inflammatory State you know I take you into the lab i infuse some mild levels of inflammatory protein like TNF alpha or something weaker then after a few hours track the initiation of ceramides in various cells including in muscle which is the most insulin sensitive tissue by mass so when muscle becomes insulin resistant essentially the body is insulin resistant because it's just so much of us right it really helps with that glucose disposal and all that exactly it's the biggest glucose sink right so that's why you like lifting weights we're talking offline that's your yeah yeah that is one of the reasons I'm an I'm an advocate of exercise I always say we eat smart to be lean and we exercise to be fit or just healthy and yeah minute for minute if you're gonna pick your your your exercise aerobic or a resistance boy you go with resistance and there's studies to show that on the low end of training when people are training or for multi you know many hours per week on the low end of that if it's a lot 10 hours per week there's not much difference but the people who are training only two or three hours per week resistance training works better improving insulin sensitivity than endurance training probably because you're expanding your muscle mass and as you're doing it you just have your more insulin sensitive because you're pulling in your glucose more readily at any moment of the day yeah that's a wonderful wonderful tip so going back to insulin in the ceramides in the sphingolipids little yeah we hear about you mentioned lipogenesis or de novo lipogenesis yeah are some of these toxic again in the right context are healthy too not sure and balance does insulin drive I've read some research on that is it you mentioned inflammation but is insulin a factor there too yeah it is yeah so I just had mentioned that inflammation is an inducer of ceramide biosynthesis and the ceramide starts to over accumulate in the cell and create an insulin resistance state you can have no inflammation and just have hyperinsulinemia so we published that about a year or two ago that just insulin itself in higher than fasting higher than normal levels is going to induce the activate it's going to activate the process whereby the cell starts to build up ceramide and thus create insulin resistance and so it's this seeming paradox that too much insulin causes insulin resistance but it is a fundamental feature of just biology you take any cell can you give it too much of something the cell will start to resist that stimulus it'll say there's too much and why do we rotate our antibiotics it's because the bacteria becomes resistant to this one antibiotic you could seize it all the time it's an alcoholic needs more alcohol because they become resistant to that that one glass of wine now they need to or why you need to if you continue to lift weight anymore and more weight to cause that same stimulus that's right you have to confuse the muscle and again say you can't adaptation as the kiss of death right very interesting so if we were to reverse to improve insulin sensitivity and so forth and reverse this deposition of these toxic lipids yeah is it just a function of more adaptation more stimulus more exercise yeah so exercise is helpful no doubt but it is all about the food we eat you have to in it's so powerful you know within 24 hours someone can so fundamentally alter their hormone profile in particular insulin that that they've immediately started shifting from a storage phase to a you whose phase and that's really well established you know if insulin in the in if they're fasting insulin is above around like seven or eight animals which mind you most adults are above that you're almost constantly constantly in a state of storing even if you're sleeping if you're fasting insulin is above around eight you're gonna be storing fat and then if you're fasting insulin is below then you're using it you're mobilizing fat just because fat is the key and then same thing with ceramides insulin resistance it's all linked to are you controlling your insulin by watching your macronutrients that is the key you can't get around it you can if you're exercising like gangbusters but you're eating a high starchy insulin spiking diet no you're gonna be losing losing and you're gonna be gaining weight right and that's yeah sometimes we see on TV right a lot of these athletes that are professional eating McDonald's and subway and this and it's just amazing that after they retired from their career they kind of put on some weight you know so yeah I think the stimulus exercise is essential is it important but food kind of like you mentioned trumps all that so does going back to the toxic lipids and how they induce insulin resistance is really a bread from your papers kind of causing mitochondrial damage yeah so so let's just to be just to be fair I don't want to say damage okay I'll say that it's all it's it's disrupting or altering and I just I want to be on a be a diplomatic scientist here so yeah so we found that when we induce ceramide accumulation and the muscles that was forcing a state of mitochondrial fission which is normal so we normally look at the mitochondria as just this brown little kind of kidney bean-shaped but that's actually not really fair more often than not they are reticular they're bound stringy things in fact my toes the origin of the word mitochondria means thread and that's suggestive of this fact that when you look at mitochondria when you stain them in a Cell you see these strings and that's and that's normal they should go from that fusion state where they're little strings to a fission state and then the cell will split how the cell normally divides then for the cell to start growing again and working well the mitochondria fuse again create that big long reticular stringy structure what we found is that when we had ceramide accumulating in the muscle cells in particular that induced it forced fission it was forcing the mitochondria apart in that sustained forced state of mitochondrial fission resulted in increased oxidative stress reduced production of ATP which is the key function of the metic Andreea in part to produce ATP which we need for any cell to work including muscles to contract and relax so overall the metabolic profile changed largely because of ceramides effects on mitochondrial physiology or mitochondrial dynamics interesting so that cell just couldn't create its own energy at that point yeah wasn't doing it as well that's right we were sort of mucking up the gears in the nice intricate medic Andreea machinery interesting and so another aspect of your research that you've been sitting within the context of mitochondrial function is brown adipose tissue and this uncoupling protein I think that's really we hear about this uncoupling protein and all that but let's kind of define that and that will help us better understand the function of yeah an outpost issue yeah so you'll let me know if I start to go a little too deep you just bring me back so we talk about a mitochondria as being coupled or uncoupled based on how well the the mitochondria are moving protons and then creating a PP because of this this shift of chemicals the shift of charges the protons moving around changing the charge in the mitochondria and then we produce ATP because of that the more efficiently that's working the more coupled the mitochondria is and that's good in the in a case of like a muscle we don't want a muscle to be wasting energy we want it to just only only pull in the fat and the glucose that it needs to create ATP and then we use that ATP to contract the muscle and maintain normal muscle cell function when a mitochondria is more uncoupled then it's pulling in fat and glucose to create heat it's no longer providing any functional work for the cell and so we wouldn't want that happening at the muscle because now the muscles can't contract as well but if it's something like the fat tissue which is just hanging out anyway then all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense where that fat which is normally only storing the energy it has the ability to flip a switch kind of in brown fat this is happening where it now can pull in fat or glucose and just create heat so it's wasting energy and in that sense it's actually really inefficient but it's wonderfully effective at providing a beneficial metabolic environment a so-called metabolic advantage where you can be if you don't have to count every little calorie because you have a bit your engine is kind of humming it's motoring along at a slightly higher rpm and so your metabolic rate is in fact higher than normal just because we're creating a little more heat mm-hmm and all humans have some brown fat we have a lot of it when we're little which is you know any parent could do this experiment you take your little newborn and little child out of the bathtub they don't shiver because they have a lot of brown fat in their body and it is just humming along producing a lot of heat but as we grow up we start to lose that brown fat and then if we need to create heat we shiver and then that that slight inefficiency of all those chemical reactions and the muscles creates enough heat that we warm up and we all have brown fat and we can activate it and we can make white fat act more like brown fat which is something invention yeah I think that's that this whole idea of like inducing brown adipose yeah the Beijing I think you know for a long time I've been phone that research animal since 2009 or so it was all animal models your reticle now we're seeing more and more human clinical studies coming out that's right but I think your your work has helped us to better understand that not only like periodic cold stressors can help but the metabolic milieu influences the differentiation or the conversion which is awesome so let's talk about insulin and brown fat yeah so insulin so the two fat types we have white fat and brown fat white fat certainly predominates so when someone starts talking about body fat and the fat that you can pinch or jiggle or the fact that we might have viscerally in that visceral space the visceral fat that's all white fat and then we have throughout our thoracic cavity we have little Depot's of brown fat any human all human adult's have various amounts of this and then this brown fat is what's creating the the heat and using the glucose especially to create just to create heat so insulin doesn't like wasting energy insulin wants the body to store and so it's gonna make brown fat shut off its gonna come to the brown fat bind to insulin receptors and tell the brown fat slowdown uncoupling start acting more like white fat so slow everything down and sure enough we found that when you have brown fat cells that are exposed to insulin their metabolic rate will go down by about half now in contrast we have all the subcutaneous fat that I mentioned the jiggly fat that's right beneath our skin that has the Kip the capacity to act like brown fat this process known as Beijing where it doesn't actually become brown fat but it acts like it and and that means that its mitochondria it can not only make more mitochondria which is why brown fat is actually brown because of this sheer amount of mitochondria in it but it's makes more mitochondria and and in the mitochondria are more uncoupled insulin this I want to do that but ketones will do that so when ketones come to white fat it starts to make white fat act more like brown fat in other words it tells the white fat I don't need you to be storing right now I want you to start wasting and so the mitochondria in the white fat becomes begins to be uncoupled that's very fascinating but it seems to me that in a state of if we think about like ketosis from a teleological evolutionary perspective of fasting or periodic bouts of like no food right 100 AD there are days how why would the ketones induce like this almost wasting it yeah I love that you ask that as a scientist one of the fun things is to try to pretend to be a philosopher and as a scientist we can only ever answer the question how how is it happening and we can always get those answers I know how a ketone is causing uncoupling we know that chemical pathway we've been discovering that here why that's I can only speculate so in the sense of wasting energy it doesn't there's no sense if you're in a state where you're deficient you're you're fasting and the fact that ketones are causing this mitochondrial uncoupling it defies reason the counter the way I can see some semblance of logic or wisdom behind that system working that way is that often in human history it probably would have been happening in the cold time it's harder to find food to eat when it's cold you know in winter and so in that sense some the counter to why waste energy if you don't have the energy to waste there's no good answer to that but perhaps the flip side is you're gonna stay warm and it's actually gonna let you survive because you are slightly more uncoupled and your engine is humming along at a slightly higher rate that's the that's the only way I have to explain it and I've tried to find a good rationale for it because the body would act will act rationally it's gonna act to protect itself that has to be what it is it's that if there was a famine it was likely happening in a colder time you know where this nature is just less abundant you're gonna have a harder time finding something to eat whether it be animal or plant Wow that is such you've really confirmed or helped to solidify in my mind this idea of like there's a lot of people are into this whole ketogenic thing yeah doing it all the time year round but when if we try to think back to eating seasonally eating what's available like we're filming this in August you know we have a lot of berries and fruit and yeah carbs so it makes sense then that ketogenic would be more cyclical seasonal aspect and now with this new link between brown adipose tissue conversion or the quote unquote Beijing it makes a lot a lot of sense so I'm glad that you helped to wrap because a lot of it researchers that I've talked to in clinicians have remarked about that that it to be the healthy way to kind of go about this would be more of a seasonal consumption yeah and they mind you even our other sort of omnivore siblings and aunt animals that are omnivorous many of them will hibernate like a bear what's interesting it's it's quite telling that a bear as it is approaching hibernation and of course it's eating whatever it can eat including a lot of plant sources for food it also becomes insulin resistant during those first those final few months of being alert if body just it shifts and becomes insulin resistant which means it's insulin is higher which means it's storing fat much more readily the moment it starts to wake up what happens brown fat becomes active and that actually is part of what raises the body temperature to bring them back to alertness and this is much more obvious in smaller hibernating omnivores where were their bodies we'll start to kick in - and you can see on these little heat signature cameras brown fat becomes active and that starts to wake them up and keep them alive in winter where the brown fat is what's humming their engine along keeping them warm and keep them from freezing Wow very fast so we might sort of be that might be analogous where it's not maybe an accident that the starchy foods are in season in the fall we get ready for winter and we uncouple throughout the winter to stay warm now of course we've circumvented that in our culture creating or because we're always in temperature controlled environments you could make the argument that we don't need to start storing that fat which would mean we don't need to eat those starches but if all of a sudden no more heating was loud you know and in place like Utah where it gets cold in the winter then I would probably more starches in the fall but because I'm gonna be temp work temperature controlled all the time I'll just keep the starches on the side mm-hmm and and kind of induce the brown adipose tissue your year-round right that's right keep in slim very low that's right yeah very fascinating stuff what about inducing coal to mow Genesis a lot of people are into like ice baths and cold showers well that works no question yeah it works it's just not fun you know I remember living in Russia we didn't have hot water for four months and it wasn't fun but I bet my brand my brown fat was probably going along like gangbusters so that no question the the well-established human method in humans to activate brown fat is to is constant cold exposure now someone listening might think well then I'm just gonna go outside in the winter but they're all bundled up you know but this is actual genuine you're sitting in a cold environment in you're shivering for an hour I mean that is not fun but cold bath ice baths genuine cold exposure yep that'll do it there yes so also can just stay in ketosis right now is there a millimolar level of blood beta-hydroxybutyrate that you found is kind of key to help with this Beijing yeah that's a great question we don't know in humans yet and we can't use rodents as an acceptable model because inducing ketosis in a rodent is so different from humans they just do not respond the same way and despite me using rodents in research I am a loud spoken advocate of us being aware of the fact that while a provides an interesting metabolic model that we can make some connections to humans rodent using a rodent model to try to gauge human nutrition is not at all active for example or accurate you can give a rat a 90% fat diet and they will barely be in ketosis I mean their ketone levels they might not even be in ketosis it's such a small blip but you put a human on a 90% fat diet they're in ketosis I mean they're gonna be around 2 million dollar-plus so the actual level of ketone you have to be in we don't know yet that's that's a study we're just starting trying to look at ok so this is mostly in animals and just to kind of summarize again for people listening it was mostly within the subcutaneous fat is right ok yep so the visceral fat even in the animal I mean the animal models the visceral fat like the fat around the kidneys would not shift it would not start acting like brown fat it was only the subcutaneous fat now little rodents don't have a lot of subcutaneous fat humans have a lot most humans will store most of their fat in a subcutaneous Depot whether it's on the belly the the hips or the backs of the arms what-have-you it's mostly subcutaneous so when you look at the potential relevance in a human of making that subcutaneous fat which is their biggest amount of fat act like brown fat there's a lot of it's tempting to speculate that it really may become quite a substantial benefit metabolically speaking right that's that's my next question we hear a lot about our resting metabolic rate yeah and you shared a lot of research at breckenridge which was awesome that video is available on youtube I'll put the link below that folks want to watch that but you know we hear people say like oh I have a sluggish metabolism yeah and you know in one of the graphs you should was like an inverse correlation higher insulin lower your basal metabolic rate does brown adipose tissue contribute to one's overall metabolic rate absolutely yeah so some of the most seminal I almost feel like I have to mention this because these scientists were just so incredible Benedict and Joslin Joslin they named the Diabetes Center in Boston after him but Joslin and Benedict were key at our understanding of how insulin regulates metabolic function they found that in an untreated type 1 diabetic so they're under dosing their insulin or no insulin at all their metabolic rate would be really high and then give them insulin which they need to live of course to bring their ketones in check and their glucose and check their metabolic rate would start to come down and so we've seen this in humans you infuse insulin into a human and metabolic rate will start to just shut down and that's because insulin doesn't want to waste energy it wants to store it and so the relevance of all of this in a human is we can alter our metabolic rate to the tune of around two to three hundred calories per day just by being in ketosis or not and that is just doing nothing and we've made that difference in metabolic rate however many people misunderstand a metabolic rate and they want to look at metabolic rate as just the end-all for their metabolic function you'll be talking to someone who's very unhealthy body weight they're obese and they'll say oh my metabolism is really slow no if you have a guy who's 250 pounds my body size 510 250 pounds his metabolic rates gonna be 20% or so higher than mine just because more body means higher metabolic rate and this is this this 250 pound version of me if he loses a hundred pounds it gets to 150 this metabolic rate will go down and and so there's this idea that we people are obsessed with metabolic rate and I think it's part of our obsession with calorie counting but in the end the nice news is someone doesn't have have to have an indirect calorimeter where they're breathing in and out and measuring their metabolic rate we don't have to do that you don't have to have a metabolic rate calculator if you know you're controlling your insulin done now the easiest way to know you're controlling your insulin is what are my ketones that's that anyone can use that we don't have a home at home method of measuring insulin may it happen someday it hasn't yet we do have at-home methods and measuring ketones which is going to be if ketones are up that means insulin is low and that's why I personally am an advocate of ketones or ketosis simply because insulin will be low and if insulin is low then metabolically speaking you're gonna be alright interesting so a lot of people get excited about ketosis for the ketones and all the signaling properties that they garner but it sounds like from your perspective you're really excited about just keeping insulin more low that's yeah so I came at it from that perspective I consider myself an insulin guy I'm an insulin scientist and so when I was first learning about even even learning what a ketogenic diet was I didn't care about the ketogenic diet expect of it I cared that I know that if insulin is load the livers turning fat into ketones that's fine and dandy you know yippee I just cared that insulin was low and that meant the gonads were working better the blood vessels in the heart was working better the brain nerves were working better deliver all of these there's evidence to show that in a low carb an insulin controlled state the body gets better and that is largely a function of low insulin the fork insulin being in control and like you said the fact that ketones are also elevated in that state as in my progression as becoming familiar with ketones and now studying them actively in my lab and as evidence that I genuinely appreciate them it really came just because ketones in themselves in and of themselves are benefits it's the icing on the low-carb cake the low carb icing I'm a low carb cake where the benefit of insulin is really controlling metabolic function ketosis is just making it that much better it's a side benefit it is yeah and it's a wonderful benefit especially in states where there's genuine like neurological disruption like people with seizures and dementia oi in that case you want to be in ketosis because it is in fact improving your life demonstrably for the average person who just wants to lose weight certainly being ketosis because you know your insulin is in control but it's you don't really care as much about the ketones per se because you don't have an overall you know unhealthy state that depends on it but where you have dementia or cognitive disruption ketones we know ketones help the brain work better if you wean the brain off of glucose so again like you said it's just a benefit awesome beautifully said I think that's a really fascinating point because so many people get hung up on two things I do a lot of online like coaching for individuals they get hung up on watching my macros be my calories and what should my ketones be yeah you know and so I think you know you just help two people understand you know that it's you know if you're in ketosis your body has a little bit more fledge factor and says that's exactly right you know it's that metabolic advantage I think that's a beautiful concept so that we're not constantly kind of tracking things and worrying about that but one thing that kind of comes up so there's some some people on the internet that are saying well we don't always want insulin low insulin participates in various healthy factors like increasing glutathione and things like that so what was your argument or kind of point yeah yeah yeah so we absolutely need insulin no question even our conversation earlier about mitochondrial function you have to have insulin for normal mitochondrial function so I wouldn't try to dissuade someone of thinking that you at all I mean if you don't have it you will die I mean type 1 diabetes was a death sentence once upon a time and now it's not because they can treat with insulin so my counter is you you you have to have insulin in control which means you are gonna have bumps no question you eat any mixed macronutrient meal even if it's pure meat that protein in that fat you're gonna get an insulin pump and it's natural it helps the body work and in a way it helps the body know what to do with the energy that it eats however too much is a bad thing and so you'd mention just for example glutathione it's telling that while insulin can regulate glutathione so to do ketones ketones increase glutathione and how glutathione peroxidase work better and so and someone may say well I need insulin to get anabolic I want my muscles to get big and he didn't stand for that yep insulin helps but if you're eating a ketogenic diet or low carb and you don't have those big insulin swings that a carb adapted athlete does you don't have to worry too much because you have other anabolic signals like growth hormone or other individual amino acids that are inducing protecting the muscle and inducing growth and so there are redundancies to make sure that we're doing what insulin would do we have that system there are redundancies to make sure that happens in a state when insulin isn't always going to be high so yes we absolutely have to have it we just want to keep it in control and that does mean there will be bumps and that's good it's healthy so if you're eating healthy real food you're gonna have enough of an insulin variability that it's not super physiologically low no that's where the adaptive response is so it still normal yeah it's not it's not pathologically low despite you know I've been I've been saying that we want to keep insulin low we want to keep it basal we want to keep it normal but in some people their basal might be you know 15 animal I mean that's way too high we want to bring it back down mm-hmm fasting there's been a lot of research emerging about shifted feeding and intermittent fasting is kind of an element to improve ketosis yeah and effect insulin sensitivity is there any research that you found at least in animal models about that as being a therapeutic tool to it cause the beijing of also where we're studying that right now well yeah so I love that you mentioned you mentioned those two things separately the way you brought this out time restricted feeding and intermittent fasting I I actually consider them different things and both of them can certainly be beneficial with intermittent fasting I think it is it's it can absolutely be wonderful and very therapeutic I the scientist in me worries a bit that it might be people aren't being careful with it where they're going a little overboard they're not monitoring ion consumption so intermittent fasting is something that I believe can be healthy but I believe needs a lot of Education with time restricted feeding that's something that anyone can do where you're taking all your meals all your calories in the day and you're simply compressing them to a six hour window nonetheless the effect of that on um uncoupling white fat and mitochondria in my fat making them act more like brown or beijing them we're all let you know oh it's so fascinating a study where we've have them in ketosis will have a pure ketogenic diet group an intermittent fasting group and then a normal control standard American diet group and we'll pull fat biopsies and we'll measured and coupling in humans in humans oh my gosh there's gonna be a break it'll be great yeah because this is like converging all the different you know hot topics that we've learned yeah block research exactly there's very fascinating stuff so what do you personally do and when it comes to like you're you're feeding window it sounds like you're kind of on that timer stretching yeah I am an advocate and so for me I found that breakfast is you know you can either drop off breakfast occasionally or dinner and because I'm a family man and and I consider being a husband father priority number one I don't want to not eat with my family you know we're all sitting and sitting around the table in mom and the babies are eating in Dad's just sitting there watching the meat right it I don't want to do that it's just too awkward so breakfast is the meal for me that is easy to do and so about three times a week or so no I don't have a formula to it I won't eat breakfast and it's just it's a piece I'll usually have an herbal tea and I sometimes will put a small tablespoon of coconut oil in or nothing at all and it just stays a genuine fast no calories but I will drink an herbal tea I just have a lot of yeah routine yeah so that'll be about three days a week where I'll go right through breakfast and then a big lunch big dinner and then maybe the next day I have breakfast but when I do it's not gonna be starchy you know all humans in the mornings have something called the dawn phenomenon we're all a little insulin resistant in the morning and so of all the times a day to eat some starchy bagel don't do it for breakfast mmm a lot of Americans and people throughout the world need to hear that because if you go to Starbucks for helmets or any airport its bagels and orange juice that's not starchy meal of the day we loaded starches on the front end and that's the worst time to do it yeah scary stuff yeah of all the meals of the day the fact that breakfast is the starchy one and we're all a little insulin resistant and that's normal too we're all a little insulin resistant first thing in the morning because cortisol spiking at that late time of night in order to activate mobilize glucose from the liver feed the brain and get the brain ready to start waking up yeah and so but cortisol antagonizes insulin which means are all little insulin resistant the worst time to eat a bowl of cereal a piece of toast a bagel right and wake up yeah yeah yeah it's a shame that so many people make that their morning routine which is a bummer but going back to your morning routine with the herbal tea and the coconut oil you see I think there's a point I would like to expand a little bit on that for people listening now because we hear about people want to know like what what macronutrients will spike insulin and things like that so if you're fat let's talk about how that doesn't really affect insulin and how that's more ketogenic yeah whereas the mixed meal can kind of kick you out of ketosis a little bit in that yeah that's right so yeah pure fat mind you which in the human diet does not happen often will have little to no insulin effect it's just a teeny little blip if anything at all and so yeah fat is the recent low carb high fat is ketogenic is because you're not starving you're getting sufficient calories but because the insulin effectiveness of meals you are eating is so minimal you're staying in ketosis almost all the time but yeah at the moment you start to mix your macros a little bit which isn't bad but you bring in protein protein have a more substantial insulin effect and it may or not may or may not include someone out of ketosis but if it does it's pretty mild and you get back down and do it pretty quickly depending on now with carbohydrates I'm not anti carbohydrate and I wouldn't want someone to even think that but I am an advocate of being smart about it where I mean carbohydrates represents a tremendously broad spectrum of foods where you have you know broccoli on one end which has little very small insulin effect and you have a bagel on the other one which has like the biggest insulin effect on the planet um that's not fair to really lump them into the same macronutrient but we have to because that is the same class of food so the whole sort of magic macro mixed with that will put someone in ketosis that's going to depend on the person where the more insulin sensitive a person is the more they can wiggle with that that carbohydrate family of the macronutrients the more insulin resistant they are the less wiggle room they have because you know the insulin sensitive person eats that bagel let's say half a bagel just to be a little more wise here you know there's a an insulin spike and it comes right back down you know maybe in like 30 or 45 minutes it's gone up five or six times and it's come right back down if your insulin resistant not only are you already probably having a higher fasting insulin level but then you're gonna have a huge spike insulin might go up 10 times and it'll stay elevated for three hours then what happens in three hours even two to three hours you eat again and right when the insulin starts to come down you've bumped it right back up and so you're almost every waking moment of the day you're in this pro fat storage hyperinsulinemic state and you are never gonna be able to lose weight you can exercise and you're still not gonna come out of that because insulin cell in the body to store store stores right right it it trumps everything like we said earlier nothing can beat insulin nothing tell nothing beats insulin glucagon cortisol those are going to be growth hormone those want to be fairly catabolic to most fat depots insulin will win yeah every time you have insulin on one side of the tug-of-war you have glucagon growth hormone epinephrine other hormones on the other trying to put insulin in its place and that's going to be a fair fight insulin alone can match the other ones interesting along those lines I think it's wise to finish off a little bit with exogenous ketones and talking about the kind of seemingly antagonistic environment in one sense so low insulin deliver it gets message to make ketones yep high insulin that message gets suppressed and then so people are Tait having like you know birthday cake or whatever and then kind of trying to offset that with their exception you tone so maybe let's start off with the physiology just quickly and then why maybe that's not such a good idea right so you you nailed it you hit the nail on the head so insulin and ketones are our opposites in the body in so far as insulin is in control and if insulin is subdued ketogenesis is happening we have this inhibited ketogenesis by having low insulin the moment insulin comes up we put the kibosh on that and ketones plummet that's the way it's supposed to be that's human organism physiology exhaustion is ketones I will preface my comments by saying there might be a therapeutic role for exhaustion is ketones in like traumatic brain injury or um cognitive disrupted states like dementia Alzheimer's disease there might be some benefit to that or seizures and stuff like that however it is also unnatural we don't eat ketones I mean there there is that's not something we get in nature we don't eat ketones we make them we make beta-hydroxybutyrate we make acetoacetate we don't eat it but now because people have learned that ketones in and of themselves are beneficial like we discussed people are trying to have that shortcut and say well yeah get into ketosis by drinking this so when we when we drink a ketone it will be turned it'll come to the end of the cell it'll come into the mitochondria and be turned into a molecule called acetyl co a an acetyl co a sits at the intersection of a lot of Dura it can go a lot of different ways when insulin is high it will tell it'll activate an enzyme called acetyl co a carboxylase and it starts taking that to carbon acetyl co a and it starts joining another acetyl co a and another and another and another and it starts to create this long chain of carbons which is a fad and so I speculate this hasn't been published but if you had that sin where someone is eating their birthday cake and thinking Oblates okay because i can just drink my ketones and one finger prick or urine test or breath test oh and I'm still in ketosis you may be in ketosis but you're gonna be turning those ketones into fat in the mitochondria I'm speculating that research hasn't been done but it makes all the biochemical sense in the world if you're drinking a ketone it will be turned into acetyl co eight has to that's how we use ketones for fuel if insulin is high because of the birthday cake or whatever else starch or sugar the person's eating you're gonna turn that glass of ketones into belly fat because insulins there because insulin is dictating what we do with those carbons you wanted to use those carbons as ketones and in break that use the ketone for fuel you're now storing it and you don't store ketones you turn them into fat mmm or you can pee them out but they have to be converted yeah yeah but if the insulin but if insulin is high you won't do that I see hold onto them interesting because the insulin will be thinking wait I have I'm taking in these carbons from the birthday cake and from the ketones I'm not gonna waste any of them right that's a good opportunity to store if that's right I did and they never blame insulin for that thank heavens for it as a species we would have yeah we'd have an effort would have made it if it weren't for insulin so thank heavens we can store fat as an insulin can tell us to do that but in that case someone thinks they're beating their system they're beating the body they're tricking it doesn't not happening no you can't trick that yeah you really helped me to kind of clarify something I mean we think about like we hear ketones and beta-hydroxybutyrate and we think we just kind of burn them but they are converted to acetyl co a and that's where energy really really happens and insulin will help to build more link those together to make more fats that's right that's Lippo Genesis so just started doing in the fat cell Oh insulins activating the PO Genesis that process of turning acetyl co a into a fatty acid that carbon chain that is lippo Genesis and ketones can be fuel for lipid Genesis if insulin tells it to okay so that again normally it never would right insulin should be low in main ketones high and we wouldn't turn ketones into fat but we're mucking up the system by having both elevated insulin and elevated ketones an unnatural state resulting in an unnatural consequence liquid Genesis from ketones right so a better strategy for someone that's listening that may have done that or know someone that does that would be maybe fast after or exercise what would you suggest if they're given either any of those so fasting without a doubt is the most potent quick way to get into ketosis no doubt yeah brilliant all right you know we covered so much this is a lot of fun because this is great but we have three final questions that we asked I guess on the show and a little bit more personal yeah we want to know your morning routine so we know like successful productive people that are really changing the world have a set of like routines and systems and yeah and habits that they do so you mentioned you drink an herbal tea you like to in the morning I do yeah that's just sort of again that is more habit than anything I just found it when I'll wake up usually between 5:00 and 6:00 closer to 5:00 and that kind of depends on my kids mind you as a busy family man I'll wake up around 5:00 I'll make my herbal tea and I'll get some work done when my kids will wake up and I'll read or I'll be working on a manuscript that I'm looking to get published or something like that so something very personally productive and then around 6:30 7:00 my kids will wake up and my wife will come down and I make breakfast breakfast is dad's domain and that's because it's something I really believe is important and so my little kids are gonna get ready for school I want to make sure they have fat and protein in their bellies before they go out the door and so I'll make some good low carb high fat breakfast for the family but it's it's almost always me I want to be home for breakfast with my family and then when the kids go to school I'll usually I'm coming to work then that's my typical morning routine yeah and we talked about as you as an adult sometimes you'll skip breakfast but your kids are growing so then just a quick yeah laughs I know yeah so I may make bacon and eggs for them in the morning and I may say alright this is for me a fasting morning I'll make the bacon and eggs they're eating and I'm sitting around the island in the kitchen talking with them and talking about the day planning out the day and they don't even notice that dad's not eating it's not at all disruptive yeah great that's really awesome let's talk about your favorite exercise if there's one exercise you just couldn't live in out what would it be well yeah you know what I was a late adopter of Olympic lifts as much to my shame but if I had to only pick one it would probably be a deadlift which isn't a lot for one 50 pound you know little spell tea guy like me but a deadlift boy I mean from from heel to head you're gonna get something on a deadlift it's not necessarily my favorite I sort of hate it mm-hmm but if I had to pick one that's the one I'd pick it's you're activating so many different muscles and it's such a practical movement yeah you're just moving something up you're lifting something up working a lot you know all your a lot of pushers and pullers are getting work in that one predominantly pulling leg movement but still you're gonna get so much yeah if I had to pick one that'd be it I would reluctantly pick deadlift yeah some people say squat or overhead press but yeah I left I too have a love-hate relationship man yeah it's awesome but it also you can hurt your back if you're not yes that's right yeah all right your favorite herb nutrient or botanicals so you're stranded on a desert island there's and the only supplements you know vitamin D and Omega threes are covered so just one thing that you can bring it can be a whole food a big kimchi you make curcumin what would you bring with you um one food yeah um liver love it well I would probably pick cow liver if I can magically have it appear not because it's tasty but boy your said but you're gonna get everything you'd need frankly it wouldn't it wouldn't be delicious but I had to pick and deliver how do you cook it at home yeah I fry it mm-hmm garlic my yeah my new it's not popular in the house yeah this think of it in the taste but so I don't live on a desert island I don't eat it very often but if I had to pick just put all the different micronutrients would yeah they're loaded are like mitochondria in the liver absolutely yeah so that now we don't adopt the mitochondria of the meat that we eat but we can get the components of it we can get the building blocks of the medic Andria's we break down that mitochondria from any cell we're eating and every cell has mitochondria except blood cells red blood cells I should say so any tissue you're eating from an animal muscle or anything you're gonna get mitochondria and that's nice because we're getting the building blocks of their mitochondria which we can use to build mitochondria or anything else that's brilliant right so if you were to be in an elevator with a politician or a parliament member from another country and the attorneys had been I know you're studying metabolism you're doing a lot of great research in your lab at BYU what's something that maybe we as politicians and policy makers can influence policy around to help the masses with question what's one thing that just says boom 30 seconds happen I'd say let's shift the focus on carbohydrates and quit emphasizing a high carbohydrate diet if this experiment has failed we the results speak for themselves look at the world as we've we adopted a high carb low fat diet and look where it got us so I would say let's please shift macros keep protein where it is or let it come up as wheat more fat but keep protein where it is bring carbs down bring that up even if just a modest shift where we're bringing our glucose our carb consumption from 60% down to 35 30 % and raised a fat up to around 50% oh boy you can get benefits from that is in fact the most common genuine Mediterranean diet where we're just evening things out a little bit yeah lower carbs higher fat love it beautiful do you as a kind of final question here this does come up a lot in the ketogenic space the worry of gluconeogenesis yeah do you work with protein mm-hmm no so with gluconeogenesis of course that's the process whereby the liver is gonna create glucose when it feels like it needs to which it absolutely needs to when you're low carb high fat it can do that from the carbons from proteins which is an expensive process the body doesn't want to have to do that because it'll take about two units you know almost two grams of protein just to get one gram of glucose that's expensive especially where the proteins coming from muscle and we had to work hard to get it so yep you can get it from protein you can also get it from the glycerol backbone of a triglyceride as we're using our fat and mobilizing fat for energy we have a glycerol a carbon small carbon chain and then we have three fats we pull off the fats to use in the mitochondria we turn that glycerol send it to the liver and the liver will turn it into glucose so yeah if you are if mind you most people do that without any problem overwhelmingly someone goes low carb high fat even ketosis ketogenic and they're fasting glucose is totally normal it's because the liver is so darn good at gluconeogenesis and it will use protein to do that does that mean you have to raise your macros and protein no you own we need to be more mindful of your protein if you're lifting mm-hmm okay great point dr. Ben it's been great to chat with you there were so many basics so many bases here a folk want to connect with you online what's the best resource and yeah a great website insulin IQ right so insulin IQ website is where we occasional blog posts there and we have some resources just to help people adopt a low carb high fat diet but it really is in the context of insulin you control insulin you control metabolic function I am also more recently passionate about sharing research not even just my own but I realized that science is very insular you know the only people who know the research I'm doing other than you amazingly knowing anything about ceramides and meta chondral dynamics really it's just other scientists we're the only ones who read each other's manuscripts but I think it's such a shame because we know there are those of us who are studying metabolic function and we know so much of the origins of obesity and the consequences of healthier not healthy metabolic function so on I regularly go post articles that are just update published getting published all the time real-time on Facebook where just people can find me under Benjamin Bickman or Instagram and Twitter at Ben Bickman PhD perfect I'll put that in the show notes yeah you shared a wide range at first I thought was all your research but you're covering the gamut I just want people to know if something there's a new paper that gets published and every single day I scour the the update any updates relevant to low carb ketosis insulin sensitivity insulin resistance I want people to know yeah that's awesome the updates do use PubMed alerts or news color it's exactly yeah PubMed alerts yeah I like that too it's always nice you wake up and you have all these Sam NCBI you like that's exactly right anyone can do it it's so easy totally the benefit is not everyone will have full access to the article and being affiliated with the university boy I can get any of the details which is just nice just a perk yeah I know some of the journals are being a little bit more less open about what even if you go to the University it's like oh sorry this nature we do and you know Nature Reviews enter crowns you mean Amazon but not yeah it's or whatever yeah so journals will be specific some will be open access which anyone can get and I think that's a wonderful trend and then many of the traditional and unfortunately awesome publications or journals are still closed limited access yeah that's great well you mentioned earlier that it's unfortunate that you know you do all this research spend a lot of time researchers in general yeah yeah not too many people unless the New York Times covers a piece where I doesn't get out there but that's why I started this podcast to help individuals better understand what's going on in the scientific world so perfect I'm grateful for all the work that you're doing well ditto referral for you coming on the show this was a lot of fun thank you Mike I enjoyed it [Music]

Channel: High Intensity Health

Views: 446,910

Rating: 4.9054651 out of 5

Keywords: Brown fat, ketones, ketogenic diet, keto diet, brown adipose tissue

Id: MPL2RYilUms

Length: 55min 18sec (3318 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/sendmeyourarms]

I love the science-y side of all this stuff so thanks for linking this video!! Edit: For people who are daunted by a 55 minute video you can turn the speed up to double by going to the bottom right hand corner of the video, clicking on the gear, and changing speed to 2. You can still understand it because people typically talk at a rate of 100 words per minute but can understand 200 words per minute.

[u/kevie3drinks]

kind of a bummer that there are dozens of commercials in this video.

[u/agokjr]

Thanks for sharing great video.

[u/Kalzedar]

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[u/Grunav72]

Great video lots of good info, thanks for sharing