Insulin Resistance Diet — What To Eat & Why - Real Doctor Reacts

Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about the insulin resistance diet. What to eat and why. Coming right up. Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything. So obviously when we're gonna talk about the insulin resistance diet we're going to talk about the diet that helps reverse insulin resistance not the diet that helps promote it insulin resistance is reaching epidemic proportions so more people than ever are looking for solutions but there's so much conflicting information out there people wonder should I eat a low-carb diet should I eat a low-fat diet should I eat a high carb diet should I eat a high fat diet is saturated fat the cause of insulin resistance a lot of people claim that and by now hundreds of thousands of people have had great results in reversing insulin resistance and losing weight and reversing diabetes with low carb high fat diets and ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting but at the same time there's a large number of videos where people claiming the same benefits from a plant-based low-fat high-carb diet a lot of you out there have seen examples of such seemingly conflicting information and a lot of you have asked for me to comment on it so today we're gonna take a look at a video and try to clear up some of the issues he was living with type 2 diabetes for nine years neglecting his diet not really paying attention to it he came to us he basically said hey I need some help and we showed him this approach and over the course of six months he dropped 30 pounds he stopped using metformin diabetes medication how many of you guys use metformin yep okay he stopped using metformin he also stopped using a statin medication he also stopped using blood pressure medication now he actually says exercise six days per week and he's a happy guy as you can tell. That clip was from a video promoting a plant-based very low-fat high-carb diet and Vijay here got amazing results but if you notice how he said he had been neglecting his diet and type-2 diabetes for nine years he had been neglecting his diet so anytime that you start eating real food instead of junk you're gonna get healthier alright so we're talking about a lot of different variables but the first thing to remember is if you go from eating junk to eating actual food you will get healthier now in my office we use kind of an opposite approach we use a low carb high fat diet and we have results very very similar to that we have people get off their statins their blood pressure medication their metformin their insulin no matter how long they've been diabetics and how long no matter how long they've had metabolic syndrome it goes away when you stop pushing in the wrong things in the body but how is it possible that you can get similar results with seemingly opposite approaches so in order to answer and clarify that dichotomy we're going to try to answer three questions first of all are the approaches really that opposite or do they have some similarities secondly we're gonna ask what are the results that we're getting are they actually getting the same results that we are and thirdly we're gonna get in detail and understand the mechanisms by which you can get this kind of change so that you understand why one approach might work better than another or why both might work so this is one of those videos you really want to look at it the whole way through and stick till the end because if you don't get all the components and you don't see how they all fit together you're not gonna get the full value so the speaker in the video is a guy named Cyrus and he's the one who together with a partner of his Bobby they came up with this particular approach and the reason was that he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 22 years old and then he followed what they told him was a low-carb diet where he was eating a hundred to 150 grams of carbs per day and he was taking his insulin but he didn't feel well he felt like he had no energy and he didn't get better the way he wanted to so he looked into different approaches and because of how he felt he was pretty desperate and he said I'm gonna change totally I'm gonna go plant-based high carb low fat my carbohydrate intake went from about a hundred maybe 150 grams per day all the way up to 600 grams per day within the first month so I started out using between 40 and 45 units per day and over the course of four the first month it dropped all the way down to 25 24 and hovered in that range so here I am today 15 years later from that initial diagnosis of 2002 I've reduced my insulin used by 40% I eat more than 700 grams of carbohydrate on a daily basis and my a1c values which is a 3-month marker of blood glucose your average blood glucose is between five point six and 6.0. So I'm genuinely happy for Cyrus that he has found a way that he feels works for him and I have seen too many examples in too many different circumstances to say that there's only one way to make something work for you but we do have to ask some questions though and one of those is he's getting pretty good results but are they optimal the results are going to be influenced by things such as age activity and level of degeneration so he was very young and he did something about this at a very young age he got it when he was 22 and now he is 15 years later at 37 that's still a very young age that's much much younger than most people who are talking about type 2 diabetes and because he was still very young he had a very low level of degeneration most of his metabolic pathways are still working really well he never had a chance to develop a fatty liver or anything like that then he is very very active you can tell from the picture he were going to show in a second that he is in very very good shape and he says he gives several examples of how people exercise every day and that's a great thing now I don't think that you should have to exercise to control your insulin resistance you need to exercise for the reasons but if you're young and you're active that's going to help tremendously in keeping these values in range and if you are already in your 50s or 60s and you've have degenerated then there might be much harder to get the same results so I'm not saying that I'm not trying to discount anything I'm just saying that we have to be aware of these variables so the question then is are these good values to a1 C that's a three month average of blood glucose and in the medical diabetes world your insulin resistance you're heading toward diabetes if your a1c is over five point seven or anything five six or over which would be five point seven he had reported five point six to 6.0 which is actually pre-diabetic and his partner Bobby said that he was currently at five point nine and he had his highest value had been six point four so that's great they're not diabetic values but they are pre-diabetic values okay and I think even for a type one diabetic you have to inject insulin to control blood sugar if you cut your carbs then you can keep that a one C at a much lower level and you can create much more stable blood sugar which we'll talk a lot more about so there are many many reasons to keep the a1c low but I want to show you a graph here and as you see on that graph the higher your a1c the faster your brain shrinks and the best level to keep your a1c is four point four to five point two so I believe the best range would be somewhere right around five okay you don't really want to get / 5.2 because now you're moving into insulin resistance and you're accelerating brain shrinkage the brain is going to shrink no matter what it's inevitable with age that the brain shrinks however with high glucose and high a1c it shrinks faster and then he goes on to explain a lot important things about insulin resistance that it's not just about diabetes whether it's type 1 or type 2 but it's the driving factor in all degenerative disease so high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease and stroke insulin resistance is the driving factor in all those conditions and I couldn't agree more this is really important stuff to understand in something that's really important to understand is that even though type 1 and type 2 diabetes are opposites in the sense that one is caused by the total lack of insulin while the other is caused by excess insulin if they are mismanaged if you just keep controlling the blood sugar in a type one with insulin then you will still create insulin resistance and the end result in many many cases is cardiovascular disease which is the leading cause of death in diabetes and especially in type 1 diabetes because it is more sensitive it has to be managed more closely because you're completely dependent on injecting that insulin and that's why it's so important to truly understand these underlying mechanisms so that whether it's type 1 or type 2 or pre-diabetes or whatever that we understand how to manage it properly but then we get to the big question if insulin resistance is that big a deal then what causes it insulin resistance is the underlying factor present across all forms of diabetes but a lot of our doctors the medical community doesn't understand this they they weren't trained properly to to get the knowledge and the tools and as a result of that a lot of us are given improper information doctors are great people they're not to blame but the fact of the matter is if you really understand what insulin resistance is then you yourself can treat insulin resistance and reverse it that's what we're looking for today so just like you guys said insulin resistance is caused by the storage of fat in tissues that are not designed to store fat so I by that definition that fat in the tissues makes that's tissues resistant to insulin that's what insulin resistance is and he's primarily talking about liver and muscles and when the liver and muscles are full of fat then insulin doesn't work and the glucose gets stuck in the bloodstream resulting in even higher blood sugar so I'm totally on board with that but now we want to try to figure out how does the fat get into the cell if the fat in the cell is the problem how did it get there and then we have energy depots we have what's called a glycogen molecule where you store carbohydrate or glucose and then you have a lipid Depot or a lipid droplet where you store fatty acids so in this cell we're operating in a person who has insulin resistance who's developed insulin resistance through their diet so what happens is that they're eating a low carbohydrate diet which is a high-fat high-protein diet and as a result of that fatty acids marched their way into the cell so you guys all got here because you were present in the bloodstream to begin with and then you just marched your way right into the cell so up to this point I agreed with him about 99% of everything he said in the video but when he said that the fat in the cell is caused by a low-carb high-fat diet that it's because you eat fat that you get fat in the blood and that fat goes into the cell then he is actually plain wrong he is ignoring hormone mechanisms he's ignoring physiological principles right so let's look at this a little bit more in detail he says that the cell is over stuff that it has too much fat in it because you ate too much fat but the truth of the matter is that anything that you eat in excess gets converted to fat it's not the fat excess it's the excess period because that's what the body has to do that's the mechanism of storing the excess from a feast and saving it for a famine that's just what the body does so we want to think of it as excess anything leads to storage that's the survival mechanism and it's insulin that does that insulin is a good thing it helps us create fat for future use and if you open up any physiology textbook you can read that insulin is a fat storing hormone that insulin promotes the conversion of glucose to fat and it prevents the conversion from fat to glucose it promotes lipogenesis and it prevents lipolysis lipolysis so this is as basic as it yet this is not disputable this is not negotiable it's the way it is any excess will create an insulin response and if we continuously create excess because insulin stores things away and as long as there's plenty of food we're going to eat more then we have the opportunity to overload and we want to think of this as overloading as clogging the cell as congesting the cell and if one more factor is frequent meal this results in a bloated overloaded clogged cell this cell is instantly resistant it has a lot of fat in it it has a lot of saturated fat in it so here's where they go wrong there's thousands of research papers that say we observed this cell it was full of saturated fats and this cell was insulin resistant it resisted the action of insulin it blocked the entry of glucose they're absolutely right there's thousands of papers saying that but there's no paper that as the fat ended up there we have proven the MEK that the mechanism by which the fat ended up in that cell was that the person ate saturated fat and that's the same saturated fat that's in that cell there is no paper that says that it's an assumption it's a correlation so think about it this way this cell is gonna have mostly saturated fats gonna be how about 50% saturated fat and most of the rest of the fat is going to be mono unsaturated and this is the exact same proportions or very very close to beef fat to pure beef tallow now I can see where it's not too far-fetched to think that well if that fat in there has this component and beef tallow has the same component then it must be because we ate the saturated fat from the beef but that's kind of like saying well then the cow must have eaten that fat as well right no the cow ate the grass which is pure carbohydrate it converted that carbohydrate into fat because that is what mammals do we store excess as saturated fat that is the only long-term storage mechanism that we have and because humans are mammals we're gonna store our excess fat as the same saturated and monounsaturated fat that a cow does that's just the most efficient way of storing excess energy the cow stores excess grass we store excess anything so then the next thing to understand is any mechanism any way that we can reduce this that we can undo the excess and the stories in the clogging if we can reduce the inflow if we can start burning off if we can unload and unclogged and decongest it doesn't matter which way we do that then we are gonna create a cleaner cell a thinner cell with less fat that is less insulin resistant because once it has a healthy flow of energy and it burned through its doors it's open to receiving more energy so then the next question is and the only remaining question is how does that happen for you some people can do it with calorie restriction but it's usually doesn't work very long because they go hungry and eventually they start eating again you can do it with low carb high fat because you get very satiated so you start eating fewer meals and fewer calories a smaller amount of food and that works or if you reduce the fat extremely now you have a less nutrient-dense food like what they're promoting in this video so either way that you eat less you can create this benefit the question is which one is going to work best for you and which one is going to be the most sustainable for you on the very bottom we have a curve which shows what happens to your blood glucose after you eat a low-fat low protein meal so you see how your blood glucose Rises and then comes right back down okay that's what's called a normal glucose response or a normal glycemic response to a meal actually that's about as far from a normal glycemic response as you can get alright let me explain so I've just copied that graph what he has on the left side here on the x-axis is the excursion of blood glucose the changes in blood glucose measured in milli molar give you the absolute numbers they just give you how much it changes they put the baseline at zero and they put all the different diets at the same starting point just so you could see how much they changed so I don't know where they started but I'm going to assume that they were somewhere around a hundred maybe they were a hundred 10 maybe there were 90 maybe they were 120 then you would just have to add those numbers to to get into that range but it's all relatively the same now millimoles of blood-glucose 1 milli mole is 18 milligrams of blood sugar change so if you look at the graph he goes from zero and all the diet's quickly increase by an amount of 4 millimoles that means their blood glucose increases by 72 grams right and that's what he calls a normal blossom Achra sponsz so the red line here is a copy of what he is referencing that in 90 minutes your blood glucose increases by 72 points in milligrams but then as soon as it hit the peak it starts going down and within 3 hours you're basically down to where you started and this is the problem that it keeps going down because this these carbohydrates because like he says in the graph it's a very low amount of protein and a very low amount of fat so this food is processed very quickly it raises blood sugar and when it's reached the top it just crashes and when it starts going down it keeps going down and what he calls a normal glycemic response is ends up somewhere around 3 millimoles lower than where they started this poor guy is going to be in the 50s right or if they started at 120 which would be close to diabetic he's still gonna be hypoglycemic relatively speaking because he is used to 120 and now he's going to be in the 70s and this is a huge problem this is an extreme form of reactive hypoglycemia that you get an excess insulin response and then it drives the glucose down very quickly and these people have to eat very very frequently so this was probably a fairly big meal if it's a smaller meal and here they have to refuel after about three hours every three hours throughout if they don't fill up again then they're gonna crash and burn in our four so what he is calling a normal blasts emic response is that from the highest point to the lowest in just a few hours it drops about 120 points okay that's the kind of unstable blood sugar that creates unstable moods unstable energy and disease so what he's calling normal blood sugar responses is that it goes from the highest point to the lowest point it changes over a hundred and twenty milligrams per deciliter in just a few hours now that's the kind of blood sugar swings that results in unstable energy in unstable mood and inconstant hunger and I'm not necessarily saying that he with his diet and lifestyle is this bad off but I'm saying that the statistics the data that he's referencing someone with these values would have that kind of response if you simply increase the amount of protein in that meal okay you go from five grams of protein to 40 grams of protein look what happens your blood glucose response goes up we didn't touch fat we only added protein if you add fat and you take away the protein you get a similar response what happens if you add fat and protein together if you add fat and protein together you get that response now I think it's fascinating how you can look at the same graph and interpret it so completely differently so he says that because the low fat low protein blood sugar goes down the fastest because it crashes he's saying that the combination of high fat high protein provides the highest blood sugar they were all up at the same point but the blood-sugar didn't crash when you ate fat and protein right so first of all I don't know what they fed these people on a high-fat high-protein diet to get the blood sugar to rise by 72 points all right my blood sugar I eat high fat high protein and my blood sugar might go up 10 15 20 maybe 25 points if I have a large meal right my my line would be kind of just hovering right here in the middle I probably would just barely break the hundred point line so again they probably fed them high sugar high protein high fat to get this kind of response but even so what this creates is satiety and your blood sugar is stable this is a good thing stable blood sugar is stable energy stable mood and if you hadn't fed them so much sugar then you would have that stability at a much lower level and then I kind of combined the other curves so if you had both protein and fats you end up with a blue line if you had either protein or fat then you ended up somewhere in the middle so either one is provides satiety both provide more satiety more stability so it's kind of like you have a fire do you want to fuel that fire with gasoline or do you want to put a log on the fire if you put a gasoline on it it creates a short burst of heat and energy and then it crashes whereas if you put a slow burning fuel on you create long term stability so what he calls the highest blood sugar is just the most stable blood sugar and all it means is that you're not going to need to eat as soon again so let's just try to tie it together a little bit and compare these different diets and try to understand these variables so the standard American diet is high in sugar it's high in carbohydrate and it's high in fat especially processed low quality fats tying processed food overall it is very low in nutrients because the food processing destroys most of the live elements it is a calorie dense diet and you eat frequently it is high in inflammatory omega-6s and it is high in the most common allergens such as wheat and processed low-fat dairy this is like a long list of problems because if it's calorie dense but it's still deficient in nutrients it makes you eat frequently and this is why you overeat and that's why you get all this junk you get the congestion but you're constantly undernourished it's like the worst of all the components then we look at the diet that's promoted in this video which is a plant-based diet but it's very very high quality food all right it is it completely eliminates sugar and sugar is the primary cause of insulin resistance because sugar is 50% glucose 50% fructose fructose can only be processed by the liver it can gests the liver it does all these things to the liver and the standard diet has a lot of it their diet does away with processed sugar entirely so that's like a huge huge step forward already it is high in carbs but it's also high in water and fiber which makes the absorption slower it is extremely low in fat it is pretty much zero processed food it's all good quality Whole Foods because of that it is nutrient-dense whole food has nutrients but it is very low in calories all right it has a lot of fiber and water it has a lot of bulk so it's difficult to eat even if you eat a lot of meals throughout the day you don't get all that many calories not as many as you would get from a standard American diet but you they're gonna have to eat frequently because you're not getting the log on the fire you're not getting the satiety from just the carbs so your blood sugar is gonna go up and down its gonna fluctuate a whole lot more and you're gonna have to fill up more frequently they've also eliminated all processed oils because they eliminate all oils period so they're gonna eliminate the plant oils the inflammatory omega-6s and they also avoid most of the common allergens because they don't do any dairy or any bread or any pastries or any desserts or anything like that any no processed foods so the biggest thing that they've done and in that sense they're not so different from a good quality low-carb diet is they've reduced all the junk from a standard diet that's a huge step forward but then if we contrast it to the low carb high fat now these have in common that they're zero sugar basically this one's high carb but this is a very low carb this is low fat this is very high fat those are the main differences if you do it properly if you learn to eat real food which is what you want to do to get healthy in the long run now I do agree with some of the critics that if you just eat junk fat you can still reduce insulin resistance but you're not providing the body healthy nutrients and your chances of being healthy decades down the road are not that great so you want to reduce processed foods that way you increase nutrients you eat whole food now here's the difference also because it's very calorie dense you're eating tons of fat you are eating a lot of density the potential for clogging the cell is great but it is so satisfying and you're not eating any carbs to drive your cravings so you can reduce the frequency it's very very easy on a low carb high fat diet to go down to two meals or even one meal at and you're reducing the omega sixes and you're reducing a lot of the allergens because you're not eating bread you're not eating processed food and you're not eating low-fat dairy you're not eating nonfat dairy typically so whether you have type 1 type 2 gestational diabetes pre-diabetes that's what happens they push you towards this you know high-fat high-protein diet and you become more and more insulin resistant and that's because low-carb diets work they absolutely work but they work in the short term they're not effective long term strategies they're not effective long term solutions because they actually increase your risk for chronic disease but you can't see that in the short term because all you're focused on in the short term is that you get a better a 1 C value you reduce your blood glucose availability meaning you get less swings and you get a much more stable blood glucose which is a good thing you can reduce your total insulin use you can reduce your LDL cholesterol the bad cholesterol and you can lose a ton of weight alright so now I think he's really losing his footing a bit because he says that all these diabetics are being pushed into a low carb diet and it's a high-fat high-protein diet that is causing insulin resistance but then he turns around and says that Oh low-carb high-fat diets they absolutely work and he lists all these benefits and you can't have it both ways alright so he says that in the short term a 1 C goes down your blood glucose variability go down and that's a good thing he says that you can decrease your total insulin use and that your LDL cholesterol goes down plus you can lose a bunch of weight now this is the inconsistency ok insulin resistance is caused by insulin it's caused by a high level of insulin not allowing the glucose entry because of the fat in the cells right he's got most of the model right he's just totally stuck on the fact that it's the fat inside the cell that's causing the problem but the fat in the cell is causing the blood sugar to go up causing the insulin to go up and creating a vicious cycle but if you can have a diet where you get these results if you can lower your a1c if you can lower your total insulin you are reversing your insulin resistance there is no way that you can lower your insulin need and become more insulin resistant at the same time that you lower your blood sugar it is impossible you can't have it both ways either low carb works and you get these benefits or low carb does not do what he says then the fat is not the cause of the insulin resistance because if you can eat a high fat diet and get these benefits then high fat does not cause insulin resistance okay it's completely inconsistent but then he goes on and this is the main concern this is why a lot of people asked me and they get these results they're so happy but there's always someone that has to throw out that scare tactic and say that well you don't know what happens in the long term and here's what they mean by that he says that short term it works great it's fantastic but in the long term you get the opposite and it doesn't explain why you get the opposite he just says that you get these benefits for a short term but in the long term you get higher a1c you get more insulin resistance you get more fatty liver you get more weight gain and on and on and on and here's where they are stuck they look at all these research papers and they see the fat inside the cell they see the insulin

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 216,232

Rating: 4.9366646 out of 5

Keywords: insulin resistance diet, insulin resistance, high carb diet, high carb, insulin resistance diet what to eat and why, low carb diet, low carb, keto, keto diet, ketogenic, keto doctor, doctor keto, keto dr, dr ekberg, dr sten ekberg, wellness for life, real doctor, holistic doctor, weight loss, lose fat, real doctor reacts

Id: H_1WZN1Dnnk

Length: 35min 24sec (2124 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020