Infinite Health with Dr. Arasi Maran
May 13, 2026 · 37 min · 17 segments
Imagine being told your blood sugar is normal, your labs are "fine," and yet, beneath the surface, your body has been struggling for years with a silent metabolic dysfunction. In today's episode of…
Insulin resistance is the disease that becomes diabetes 10 to 20 years later, and it is the actual root cause of most of what I treat in the cath lab.
So when patients ask me what causes the heart attacks, my honest answer is not high cholesterol, it's the metabolic dysfunction driven by insulin resistance with elevated cholesterol as one of its downstream consequences.
The job of the insulin is to take the glucose out of your blood and take it into your cells, primarily your muscle and liver.
That means your pancreas thinks the blood sugars are still rising and pumps out more and more insulin to force the glucose into the cells.
And if this keeps happening for years or even decades, your blood sugar stays normal because, you know, your pancreas is pumping a lot more insulin.
But the price you are paying is a high circulating insulin all the time, and that insulin excess is not benign.
It drives inflammation, it promotes the visceral fat storage, it raises your triglycerides, it lowers your LDL, it elevates your blood pressure, it accelerates atherosclerosis.
Standard medicine waits until your blood glucose rises, by which time your pancreas has given up trying, and then we call it prediabetes or diabetes.
But by the time you get to the prediabetes stage, you've been sick for a decade or two.
So the framing I want to give the listeners to walk away with today is, by the time your blood sugar is high, you have been insulin resistant for years.
Your body has been trying to repair and repair and repair, and that mechanism is now broken down, and-- but you're left with the byproducts of that repair, which is inflammation.
Insulin resistance is the disease that becomes diabetes 10 to 20 years later, and it is the actual root cause of most of what I treat in the cath lab.
So when patients ask me what causes the heart attacks, my honest answer is not high cholesterol, it's the metabolic dysfunction driven by insulin resistance with elevated cholesterol as one of its downstream consequences.
The job of the insulin is to take the glucose out of your blood and take it into your cells, primarily your muscle and liver.
That means your pancreas thinks the blood sugars are still rising and pumps out more and more insulin to force the glucose into the cells.
And if this keeps happening for years or even decades, your blood sugar stays normal because, you know, your pancreas is pumping a lot more insulin.
But the price you are paying is a high circulating insulin all the time, and that insulin excess is not benign.
It drives inflammation, it promotes the visceral fat storage, it raises your triglycerides, it lowers your LDL, it elevates your blood pressure, it accelerates atherosclerosis.
Standard medicine waits until your blood glucose rises, by which time your pancreas has given up trying, and then we call it prediabetes or diabetes.
But by the time you get to the prediabetes stage, you've been sick for a decade or two.
So the framing I want to give the listeners to walk away with today is, by the time your blood sugar is high, you have been insulin resistant for years.
Your body has been trying to repair and repair and repair, and that mechanism is now broken down, and-- but you're left with the byproducts of that repair, which is inflammation.
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