BV #35: What You’ve Been Told About Insulin and Fat Loss Is Wrong

As a research scientist, one of my strongest interests is to understand the nature of obesity.

What is it that signals the body to store fat or burn it? With that in mind, I want to share with you a paper that was published in 1984.

Here's the title.

Now, not only was 1984 a great day for college football, you can look it up, but also a fascinating finding that happened with regards to understanding what insulin does.

Here's the main figure that I want you to focus on.

But you'll see here this dropping line.

What they were measuring was what's happening to metabolic rate in people, in people with type 1 diabetes at the moment they gave them insulin.

Okay, now some brief background.

For over 100 years, we've known that in type 1 diabetes, where there's no insulin, metabolic rate is much higher than it should be.

It's 15 to 20% too high.

This is part of why an untreated diabetic is just so skinny.

They're burning fat.

Their metabolic rate is just too high.

But then as you see, the moment they gave these type 1 diabetics insulin, their metabolic rate started to drop.

okay so maybe we can unpack a little bit why the metabolic rate is super elevated to begin with and what's actually going on there as opposed to again just conflating and simplifying and not actually looking into what is going on in the body Mike, can you jump in here and tell us why the metabolic rate might be elevated and why insulin might not necessarily be the first thing we need to be thinking about in someone who is in a severely diabetic state and wasting away?

Yeah, so this is, again, this is a very interesting take from Dr. Ben Bikman, especially because I don't know if he even just read the full abstract of the paper that he cited, because the paper itself explains why this is happening, and it's not necessarily a good thing, and it's not related to fat burning, which he slips in there.

So essentially, when you don't have adequate amount of insulin present, so you have a type 1 diabetic or a full type 2 diabetic who has overt pancreatic beta cell failure.

So they're not producing insulin anymore.

You're unable to shut down some of the metabolic processes like gluconeogenesis, like fatty acid released from the tissues, lipolysis.

And then you're also, you're, you're, you're going to upregulate this breakdown of protein tissues, proteinous tissues to drive some of this gluconeogenic response.

And that's through some of the catecholamines, the glucagon, and then eventually it could be through the glucocorticoids.

So this increase in metabolic rate that you're seeing is the person moving into an extremely catabolic state because they don't have the anabolic signal of insulin to suppress those systems and turn the body over into an anabolic side.

when they have adequate carbohydrate coming in, or food coming in on a regular basis.

So this is actually a gross pathology.

This is a dangerous metabolic state to be in, and there's long-term ramifications.