Ep.13 – What is Diabetes and Insulin?

Jonathan: Welcome to Living the Smarter Science of Slim, where we provide a scientifically proven lifestyle for long-term health and fast loss by eating more and exercising less, but smarter.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better – I am so ready for that. Hi this is Carrie Brown and Jonathan Bailor and we are living the Smarter Science of Slim. How are you doing Jonathan?

Jonathan: I am doing quite well Carrie. And you Madam?

Carrie: Only quite well?

Jonathan:  I am doing … A jolly good day to you Carrie!

Carrie: There we go. That’s what we like.

Jonathan:  I’m doing like the Brits … is that how the Brits say it?

Carrie: Jolly good ol’ chap.

Jonathan: Well, I’m doing pretty well today Carrie because we are gonna talk about  …. We talked about hormones a bit last week. We talked about how hormones, are really the be all end all when it comes to health and fitness. Controlling our hormones…. And this week I wanted to specifically dive into one hormone in particular, simply because it’s the one we hear the most about. And that is insulin.

Carrie: I am wildly excited to hear about insulin. Diabetes is something that I never quite got my head around, and I’ve never really understood how it worked, and I’ve tried hard to understand it, but nobody’s ever been able to explain it to me.

Jonathan:  Yeah, so understanding diabetes and insulin is critically important Carrie because diabetes is just quickly becoming the most sever epidemic the modern world has ever seen. To put in perspective, how much the incidence of type 2 diabetes has risen. And remember diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, and we’ll explain this in a second, is really just when the body’s usage of insulin breaks down. Think about this growth rate here for a second, Carrie. In the late 1800s, so it was really not that long ago, right, it’s about great great grandparents. About one in every 4,000 people was diabetic. That makes sense. Diabetes is a potentially fatal disease. So, one in every 4,000 people was diabetic. Today, one in every four people is diabetic or pre-diabetic. That is a 100,000 percent increase in one century.

Carrie: Is that worldwide or in the U.S.?

Jonathan:  That is worldwide.

Carrie: Wow. That’s amazing.

Jonathan: So, yeah, and this isn’t just a western problem. Like, if you look at estimated cases of diabetes in 2013… Right now for example, in Southeast Asia, there’s about 47 million diagnosed cases. They are estimating that to go up to 120 million, so actually almost triple. In Europe, it’s right at about 33 million, going up to 48. In the Americas, right now it’s at about 32.5 million cases, estimating that going up to about 68 million. It’s really just all around the world. Carrie, so that’s …..

Carrie: That’s doubling in twenty years.

Jonathan:  It is certainly, and that’s because a lot of things that cause diabetes, eating inSANE foods is only rising, and we’ll get into that today, but let’s dig into diabetes in a second. But before we talk about diabetes, let’s talk about insulin, and by understanding insulin, the specific hormone is so important. So, I want to start with some quick quotes here Carrie that again really solidify the importance of insulin. And remember, insulin is just one of a wide array of hormones but we don’t have the time, and many listeners probably don’t have the interest to understand them all. Let’s just understand the ones we care the most about.

So, Dr. Goldberg in the Journal of the American Medical Association, simply states flatly, “Obesity is impossible in the absence of adequate tissue concentrations of insulin.”

What that means, in essence is, that it does not matter how many calories you eat, if you do not have insulin, you cannot store body fat. It is impossible. Insulin is required to store body fat. And if this sounds too good to be true, go find a type 1 diabetic, because type 1 diabetes is essentially you could eat pasta all day long and you would die of starvation if you didn’t inject yourself with insulin because your body cannot utilize the energy without that insulin. And that is why type 1 Diabetes is so scary. Because people will eat and eat and eat and essentially die of starvation because without the hormone insulin, their body can’t access that energy.

Carrie: That’s um, and I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful to people who are suffering from diabetes, but that gives the rest of us hope.

Jonathan:  Well, it’s funny Carrie because it’s essentially like we…. I haven’t thought through this analogy all the way, so forgive me if it doesn’t work completely, but we essentially want to rev up our metabolic engine to allow us to burn fat. People with type 1 diabetes, it’s kind of like their metabolic engine is redlining and they can’t get it to stop.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: So, too much of anything is bad. And, let’s look at this from the other perspective too Carrie, and then we’ll talk about what insulin actually does metabolically. We talked about in the absence of insulin, we lose weight. In the presence of abundant insulin, we gain weight. So let me just give you some quick studies here Carrie that are pretty fascinating.

So, a study in the Journal of Diabetic Medicine found that giving patients the hormone insulin is associated with weight gain. Just giving them the hormone. So, and not only that, but it’s uniquely, and I’m quoting here, “… an increase in trunk,” a.k.a, belly fat mass. So, giving diabetic patients the hormone insulin, irrespective of quality or quantity of calories consumed, is associated with weight gain, and specifically belly fat gain.

Carrie: Ok.

Jonathan: More studies. In the Journal of Diabetes and Metabolism, reports, and I’m quoting now, “Most studies report an average of 13.2 pounds of weight gain during the first year, following the initiation of insulin therapy.” The Journal went on to conclude that when it comes to taking shots of the hormone insulin, quoting, “weight gain”, excuse me, “weight gain seems mandatory.”

So again, the absence of insulin causes uncontrollable body fat loss, but an abundance of insulin, as these studies are showing, regardless of what we are eating or how we are exercising, causes body fat gain. One more study. In the Journal of Diabetes, a study, aptly titled, “Intensive Insulin Therapy and Weight Gain in Type 1 Diabetes” revealed, that after only two months, quoting now, “body weight increased approximately six pounds with intensive insulin therapy, as a result of increased fat mass.”

So, notice how in any of these studies there is no mention of eating too much or exercising too little. That’s because we’re holding all of that constant and we’re simply adding an abundance of a hormone called insulin, and it causes us to store body fat. So, really important disclaimer here Carrie, this is not to say that the hormone insulin is bad. Remember, it’s not bad. Type 1 diabetics are literally dying to have it. Like they will die because they don’t have it. What happens is too much of any hormone or too little of any hormone is a bad thing. And we want to keep them in balance. We want to keep them regulated. Make sense?

Carrie: Yep. Makes absolute sense.

Jonathan:  Ok, so what does insulin actually do? So, insulin’s job is to get energy into our cells. So, for example Carrie, after we eat lunch, our body digests that food, and then releases insulin to carry those freshly digested calories into our cells. So, think, let’s tie this back to type 1 diabetes and the studies we showed about fat gain. Type 1 diabetics – why would they die of starvation if they didn’t have insulin? Well, again, they eat, but they don’t have – the food needs to go from belly into cell. Insulin is essentially the metabolic key that unlocks the cell and allows the energy to go into it. So, if they don’t have that, the energy is just kind of bumping up against the door, and bumping up against the door, and then essentially will come out in the toilet because nothing else can happen with it.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  All right. Now. Carrie, here’s the interesting point. Since insulin is only activated by our body when we need to get fuel into our cells, our metabolism, and remember our last podcast we talked about hormones are what our body uses to communicate. Well, the hormone insulin communicates to the rest of the body that we have energy on our way to our cells, and therefore don’t need to use any stored energy, a.k.a., we don’t need to burn body fat. Again, why is that? Insulin is only supposed to be triggered, and is only supposed to exist in the bloodstream, when we’ve just eaten. And then once we’ve gotten that energy into our cells, it clears out of our bloodstream and our body is like, ok, there’s no insulin around, if I want energy, which I do cause we always need energy, I need to burn energy. But, when insulin is in the bloodstream, our body is like, I don’t need to burn body fat because our body is not – all it knows is insulin is there, which means it thinks energy is on its way to its cells, which means it thinks we don’t need to burn body fat.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan:  Makes sense. Now that may seem like why did Jonathan just say that three times, but the reason it matters is the hormone insulin, not the calories we ate, blocks burning body fat. Our metabolism does not decide to burn or store body fat based on calories. It makes that decision based on the hormones those calories trigger. Because, remember, let’s go back to type 1 diabetics. They eat a bunch of food, there’s no hormone insulin in the bloodstream, so the body’s like, I better just go burn some fat. I’m not gonna use this other energy that was just eaten because I can’t – because I see no hormone insulin in the bloodstream. So, I might as well burn body fat. Whereas, what we’ll see with people who are insulin resistant, and potentially people who are type 2 diabetic, is they have so much insulin that even when they haven’t eaten food, they’re still circulating insulin in their bloodstream and because of that, even if they “need to burn body fat,” their metabolism sees insulin in the bloodstream and is like, well, I’m not gonna burn body fat because I see insulin in the bloodstream, and therefore, energy must be on its way to the cells. But it’s not. And our body’s confused. Remember, this is that hormonal breakdown we talked about earlier. We’re metabolically disregulated is the technical term. And our body is not working these mechanism, which are supposed to connect point A to point B just aren’t working any more.

Carrie: Our body is an amazing thing – how it all works. It’s just, it’s fascinating to me.

Jonathan:  So, it’s key to keep in mind that insulin is not bad. It’s not bad at all. Too much insulin is bad. Just like too much of anything is bad. The key thing… the thing that is bad, is that 43% of the average American’s diet is made up of food that cause an incredible and unnatural and unhealthy amount of insulin to be released in the bloodstream. And those are inSANE starches and sweets.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan:  They cause all kinds of insulin to flood our bloodstream, and remember, it’s the presence of insulin that causes our body to say, up, don’t need to burn body fat because I think energy is on its way to its cells. Regardless of whether or not energy isn’t on its way to the cell. Think about it this way. If you eat too few calories in a day. So you eat a low calorie diet, but it’s coming predominantly from starches and sweets … Let me back up Carrie, so, say, Jonathan Bailor here talking, I eat 2,000 calories in a day, but I eat SANE foods that don’t really trigger that much insulin. So, silly example, my body releases ten units of insulin because I’m eating SANE calories. Someone who eats 1,200 calories, but are INSANE, could very easily be releasing 20 units of insulin. Like they’re eating less food, but they are triggering way more of the hormone, which says do not burn body fat.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  That is a key… key distinction – and that is the problem. If we just eat less of a typical diet, we still trigger too much insulin to be released. And that’s why we don’t see good results. Now, I don’t want this to be a downer podcast. But Carrie, things actually go from bad to worse if we keep up this chronic overconsumption of low quality calories that trigger excess insulin for too long. And think about it this way. It… just like if we eat…  or, just like if we drink alcohol, right, if we drink alcohol in moderation, we’re fine. However, if we drink a lot of alcohol, eventually we become resistant to it, right. Like if we drink alcohol in moderation, it takes relatively little of it to generate the desired effect. So, we’re good.

Carrie: With me….

Jonathan:  With you?

Carrie: About a teaspoon….

Jonathan:  Carrie, has a low…. So you are not alcohol resistant?

Carrie: No, I really haven’t drunk for 21 years, so, any more, literally a teaspoon, and I’ll be asleep under the table.

Jonathan:  So, that’s actually good, we’ll come back….

Carrie: It’s good for me.

Jonathan:  No, we’ll come back to that analogy in a second Carrie because we can see that a very low dose of alcohol will do its “desired effect.” But, if you chronically consumed alcohol, it would take a higher dose of alcohol to produce that same effect. We all know that same thing happens with caffeine. If you drink one cup of coffee, eventually you’ll need two. And then eventually you need three and yada… yada .. yada. The same thing applies to insulin. If we eat starch and sweets in moderation, like we eat them for treats, rather than being the backbone of our diet, then our body can potentially deal with it and we don’t become resistant. However, just like, again, if we overdo it with alcohol, we become resistant, we need more and more alcohol. If we eat too many starches and sweets, our body has to start producing more and more and more insulin because why? Our tissues are becoming resistant to insulin, so whereas, for example, the first time – this is an oversimplification Carrie, but the first time we ate a plate of spaghetti, we needed to release three units of insulin in order to get that energy into our cells. If we keep doing that, eventually we’ll need four, and then we’ll need five, and then we’ll need six. So, in addition to having the abundance of insulin that starches and sweets trigger by default, we need more and more and more over time because we’re becoming resistant to the impact of insulin.

Carrie: So, it literally is like an addiction, cause that’s how an addiction works.

Jonathan:  Yes, we’re essentially, our body becomes addicted, I guess you could call it to all of this insulin, in a sense we have become resistant to insulin, so if we want to get energy into our cells, our body has to overproduce insulin. And if we keep this up for too long, we… our insulin is created by our pancreas and Type 2 Diabetes is essentially when your pancreas cannot produce enough insulin to get energy into your cells efficiently and you will basically be in the same state as a Type 1 Diabetic, where you cannot get energy into your cells, but not because…. basically because you do not have enough insulin, but the ironic thing Carrie is you actually have a massive amount of insulin. It’s just that the tissue is become so resistant to insulin that even those super high levels of insulin are insufficient, and now you need to inject even more insulin because your pancreas can’t produce enough insulin and your pancreas starts to wear out. And that’s why diabetes can become fatal. Because you pancreas essentially breaks.

Carrie: That’s… the whole thing is just fascinating to me. But it is, it’s like you need more and more to get the same high.

Jonathan:  Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, this is really unfortunate and it’s not uncommon. This is a fatal. This is essentially your metabolism breaking. Like, it just does not work anymore, right. The key function of our body is when we eat food, to get that energy into our cells, and when this happens, it can’t do that anymore. And this really forms the backbone of what I call our hormonal clog, and it really flips the way we think about obesity on its head. Because one other thing to note about our biology here Carrie is that there is one form of tissue, which never becomes resistant to insulin, and that’s actually quite good because it’s like a safety valve. Right, think about if, you know, if all of our tissue basically started ignoring insulin, then what would we do? Like, we’d have all this sugar and energy in our bloodstream that couldn’t go anywhere, and if you have too high a blood sugar, you will die. It’s toxic. So, our body has, and again, it’s an amazing system. It has a safety net built in. No matter how resistant our tissue becomes to insulin, fat tissue never becomes resistant to insulin. So, while the tissue that actually needs energy – our muscles, things like that – our body fat will always say, “Hey insulin, come over here, take that energy and put it in these fat cells.”

So this is, this becomes, very, very interesting when we talk about insulin because while our body fat always being receptive to insulin and always being a safe haven for the calories it’s carrying along with it, it’s good because it keeps insulin resistance from killing us. It’s also unfortunate though, because it really crushes any hopes we have of losing weight until we get this hormonal problem under control. Because what we have here Carrie is, let’s step through this process here, right? We eat inSANE, low quality food, predominantly starches and sweets. This causes our body to produce too much insulin, which causes our non-fat tissue to become resistant. Now calories that we eat are essentially ignored by all of our tissue except fat tissue. So, what does that mean? Well, that means that we build new fat tissue because those calories need to go somewhere. But now Carrie, so we’re building new body fat, but we have all of that insulin still circulating. And remember the presence of insulin blocks burning body fat.

Carrie: Right. So it’s all compounded.

Jonathan:  Exactly. So not only are we building new body fat, but we can’t burn it.

Carrie: We can’t burn it.

Jonathan:  So, we’re really, we’re trapped. We’re getting more and more body fat that we can’t burn. Now this state is actually very fascinating because it’s known as internal starvation. And this is essentially when we’re essentially leaking energy into our fat cells. We eat plenty of food, but we essentially can be starving on the inside because the insulin cannot get energy effectively into any cells other than our fat cells. So, let me give you an example here Carrie.

So, and the reason I want to dig into this is it really flips, and hopefully if I can communicate this clearly enough, it will really flip for our listeners their perception of the cause of obesity on its head a bit.

So let’s talk about Terry. Terry is a fictional character and she is internally starving, meaning that she’s been eating a lot of starches and sweets. Her body’s producing all sorts of insulin. Tissues that need energy cannot effectively get energy via insulin, but her fat tissue will readily accept it. So Terry needs 500 calories of energy. She needs it. She’s also a yo-yo dieter and she’s slowed down her metabolism and burned as much muscle tissue as she can. So she needs some calories. So she eats 500 calories, but instead of those 500 calories getting to the cells that need it, let’s say that only half of them, 250 make it into the cells that need it; while the other 250 are ignored thanks to insulin resistance and then stored as new body fat. So remember, Terry needs 500 calories. She just ate 500 calories, but how many of those calories are available to her? 250.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  So she actually has to eat another 250 calories. But then only 125 get in. And she has to keep going in and cycling this, this process. She essentially Carrie, she, she has to eat 1,000 calories to get 500 calories of energy because her metabolism is essentially leaking calories into her fat cells and she has to compensate by taking in more calories.

Carrie: And meanwhile, all the other 500 calories are going straight to fat.

Jonathan:  Exactly. Now, now, two individuals who are not living the Smarter Science of Slim. Who are not familiar with the science. They’re gonna look at Terry and be like – Terry, you’re overeating. The cause of your obesity is that you’re overeating. But Carrie, Terry is overeating because she’s obese. She’s not obese because she’s overeating.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  That kind of like “bdlbdlbdlbdl.” That kind of like blows your mind up a little bit.

Carrie: Right, right. Do that again. (laughter)

Jonathan:  “Bdlbdlbdlbdl.” But if you think about it, obesity is actually. Now this is crazy, here folks. Obesity is actually a lifesaving response by the body to hormonal imbalance. Because if we didn’t do this. If we didn’t take this insulin and shuttle it into our fat tissue, it would poison us and we would die. So, it is actually the healthiest of all responses to gain body fat when we put these inSANE calories into our body because it’s really the only way for our body to protect itself. And again, this overeating that Terry’s doing is not the cause of her new body fat. It’s a symptom of a deeper problem.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  It’s a symptom that her body cannot utilize energy. It’s a symptom of hormonal clog and her elevated set point.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan:  You see what I’m saying? Like people might need to listen to this podcast twice because it’s a little…..

Carrie: Yeah

Jonathan: Carrie’s thinking…. It’s a little

Carrie: Yeah. It’s kind of

Jonathan:  Carrie, I have a diagram and I’ll put this diagram up on the show notes. So, the diagram may simplify it a little bit. So here’s on one side of the diagram there’s two blocks. First block says – and this is the incorrect model of obesity – it says the cause of obesity is overeating and a symptom is body fat. So again, in the traditional incorrect model, you are gaining body fat, and that is a symptom of the cause of the problem, which is overeating. That is wrong. Or it’s not completely right.

A more correct view of the world is, ok, you’re gaining body fat that is a symptom of overeating. Overeating is a symptom. It’s not a cause. It’s a symptom of a hormonal clog. Now, what is the cause of that hormonal clog? The cause is inSANE, low quality starches and sweets. The cause is not overeating. There’s two more steps we’ve gotta trace back. What’s the cause of overeating? The cause of overeating is a hormonal malfunction. What’s the cause of a hormonal malfunction? The wrong quality of food. Not about quantity. All about quality. I’m getting pumped up Carrie.

Carrie: You’re getting to that red line.

Jonathan:  I’m getting to that red line. You’re gonna have to reel me in pretty soon.

Carrie: You’re gonna start thumping the table like you did the other day.

Jonathan:  So, even the American Heart Association, which is about as much of a champion for the old calorie quantity model as you could imagine, acknowledged this scientific fact about calorie quantity not being the cause of obesity when they remarked. This is a quote now, “One can argue that people become obese because they consume more calories than they expend, but this does not tell us why the imbalance exists, or the best way to correct it.” I’m gonna translate that. People become obese because they overeat, sure, that doesn’t tell us why they’re overeating or how to fix it.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan:  Let me give one more example of this. Think about the opposite of overeating – chronic under-eating – anorexia. So imagine we have an anorexic and they walk into the doctors office and they’re like “Doctor, I’ I’m too … I’m un-healthfully thin. Help me.” And the doctor says, “Uh, eat more food.” Ok, yes, the anorexic is not eating enough food, but to tell them to eat more food is not particularly helpful. Like, they know that. The question is what is the deeper issue causing them to not eat as much food. And generally, it’s some sort of a body dismorphic disorder. It’s a psychological issue. And we need to ….. that’s the cause. That’s the cause. And when that’s fixed, the anorexic will eat the proper amount of food and be healthy naturally. The cause is a deeper psychological issue. When it comes to obesity, the cause is not overeating. The cause is a deeper metabolic issue.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan:  Got it?

Carrie: Yep.

Jonathan:  Alright, cool, so problems are not solved by treating symptoms, and that’s really what the traditional model tells us to do. It tells us to just look at the symptoms. The symptoms are overeating. Eat less. No, that’s silly. That’s not treating the actual problem. The actual problem is hormones. We focus on that by focusing on calorie quality. So Carrie, what are you thinking at this point? Is this making sense? Is this kind of blowing your mind a little bit? What are your thoughts?

Carrie: Both. It’s blowing my mind because it’s so, so different from what we’ve been taught, but it makes so much sense. And I’m now just getting a little bit pissed that it’s taken all of this time to understand this.

Jonathan:  Well, we’re gonna get …

Carrie: And it’s not hard.

Jonathan:  No, it’s not hard. It’s just not what we’ve been taught and it’s, you know, in some ways…  Well, let’s just put it this way, we’re gonna have to…. Carrie, you and I are gonna have to make a deliberate effort to stay positive in the next couple of podcasts because we’re gonna actually go over some data that’s even more disturbing. And that’s…… You might be wondering Carrie, and you kind of are in what you just said. You’re kind of why…. This is so obvious once you know the science. And the science isn’t wavering. It’s very clear. It’s just biology. It’s just … you eat starch, it triggers a lot of insulin. If you have too much insulin, you become insulin resistant. Ok, that makes sense. I get it. So, why haven’t we heard about this? And that’s what we’re gonna cover is the next couple of podcasts is how this quantity-focus and these big myths – you’ve got to manually regulate calories – a calorie is a calorie – and that calories are all that matter, which are all wrong. How that happened in the first place, and it has to do a lot with, you know, politicians playing physicians; bureaucrats acting like biologists; and then big business profiting off of some things, which you know aren’t great. That’s what we’re gonna cover in the next couple of podcasts. But …

Carrie: We may have to do some swapping roles because you may be reeling me in if I start ranting about how wrong this all is and how we’ve been denied health for forty years and so you might, yeah, have to be the reeler.

Jonathan:  Well, I will reel you, but I have to say frankly, I mean Carrie, but we’ll get into this more. Really, we have the power, right? If we start demanding SANE foods and stop purchasing inSANE foods, businesses are gonna produce different foods. And I know we have an uphill battle to fight, but I don’t want us to ever feel powerless, right? Think about smoking one hundred years ago. Everyone was all – oh smoking is good for you. And there were television commercials with doctors saying smoking is harmless. Potentially it’s even good for you. It’s not addictive. But then people became empowered with science, and consumers made change happen. They voted with their dollars and they made change happen. That doesn’t mean that big business is exempt from responsibility, but I want to empower us to make change and I think we can do that. What do you think?

Carrie: I absolutely do believe we can, but I must, just a side note on the smoking thing, it’s remarkable to me that there are people who still smoke.

Jonathan:  Oh, yeah.

Carrie: I just find that fascinating.

Jonathan:  Well,yeah, then again ….

Carrie: And I know that we have a long road ahead of us.

Jonathan:  Yeah

Carrie: Cause we’ve known for a long, long time that smoking is not good and it kills you, and yet there still people that smoke and, so I know that we have a much bigger battle because food is not considered to be the enemy. Food is considered to be something good.

Jonathan:  Yeah, and you can’t not eat. You can not smoke. One more key thing Carrie. And I hope our listeners are clear on this. Just like if you choose to smoke – like that’s fine – that’s your prerogative – it’s freedom of choice. However, there are regulations around second-hand smoke for example. Like your choice to smoke shouldn’t compromise others’ choice to not smoke.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  Other things – it is – everybody who smokes does so knowing what’s going to happen. What would be immoral is for people to smoke and be told that it’s good for them, or to not know that it’s bad for them. So, for individuals listening to this podcast, I mean, my parents for example, who I love dearly, and other members of my family. They still eat starches and sweets more than I would like, ideally, cause I would like them to be healthy and I would like them to live as long as they can. But, they are free people. They do it according to their goals and my goal, and our goal, I think here at the Smarter Science of Slim, is just to make sure that – like smoking – anyone who chooses to smoke – you’re free to and that’s great, but you know what you’re getting yourself into. Here you should know what you’re getting yourself into. What breaks my heart is when I see people doing things that they believe is healthy, and that’s actually killing them. Everyone knows that soda and chips are bad for you, but a lot of people think a lot of things are good for them that aren’t. And think that a lot of things are bad for them that aren’t.

Carrie: And I think that people do know on some level that soda is bad for them, but I don’t think they realize just how bad they are for them.

Jonathan:  That’s a good point. And we’ll cover these things too Carrie. Like a lot of things around high-fructose corn syrup. And we’ll dig into sweeteners and really, like sweeteners used to be thought of as bad because they were thought of as empty calories. So, we’ve all heard don’t eat sugar because it’s an empty calorie, but you know it’s kind of harmless.  That’s not what the researchers are finding today. It’s not just empty calories. It’s not just not healthy – it’s actively hurting you. Just like smoke actively hurts you.

So, just to circle back. I promise to quickly summarize what type 2 diabetes is, talking about insulin, let’s…. and we can do this pretty quickly now that we understand the biology Carrie. So, think about it this way. We talked about insulin resistance – remember what that is. If left untreated, or if we don’t do anything about this problem, insulin resistance turns into type 2 diabetes. To understand what type 2 diabetes is, let’s go back to the example of the clogged sink. We talked about that in early podcasts. Type 2 diabetes is like running water into a clogged sink for so long, that the water overflows all over the place, and the faucet breaks down. Like your floors are starting to rot cause this water’s just standing there and your sink doesn’t even work anymore. Like it can’t produce water. Once so much insulin is produced it is overflowing our bloodstream, while our pancreas, a.k.a. the faucet in this analogy, has essentially lost its ability to produce insulin, we have type 2 diabetes. We have this chronic destruction and now we can’t produce this substance that we need or else we die. And ironically, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are the same problem in a sense that insulin can’t do its job. But it’s funny that type 1, it’s not funny, it’s interesting, or ironic, or …. It’s something that type 1 diabetes is the complete absence of insulin and you treat that by injecting people with more insulin – and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re born with type 1 diabetes. And type 2 diabetes is because there was so much insulin now it doesn’t really work, so now you have to inject yourself with even more. It’s kind of funny how that have very different, yet very similar dynamics.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan:  So type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, both not happy. We can avoid them simply water, fiber, protein rich SANE foods, so that we’re so full that’s its easier for us to avoid inSANE starches and sweets. With that Carrie, next week we’re gonna start talking about how confusion happened in the first place. So, how you feeling?

Carrie: I’m…. I don’t want to be confused anymore. More importantly, I don’t want all our listeners to be confused. I don’t want the world to be confused. I want the world to be where – like you said – they know, if they choose to do it that’s great, but let’s make sure that they know what it is they’re doing so that they’re making an active choice, based on science rather than doing something that they’re not aware is killing them.

Jonathan:  It’s actually funny Carrie, there’s a term in medicine that’s called informed consent. And essentially, if you want to perform a surgery or perform any medical procedure on someone, you have to get informed consent. Meaning it’s not enough…. For example, this is why if you’re a minor, your parent or guardian has to sign off on things. Because the patient has to understand what’s happening and then say “Yes, I’m ok with that.” If you think about the way food works in our culture today, there’s a lack of informed consent. Smoking – informed consent.

Carrie: Right

Jonathan:  With food, we don’t – like yeah, I can consent to eat this bowl of whole grain, sugar-soaked cereal….

Carrie: But you don’t know what’s it’s doing to you.

Jonathan:  Yeah, it’s whole grains, I think it’s good for me. So, I’m consenting to it, but I’m not informed. I personally. I mean that’s illegal in the medical realm, I don’t understand why it’s not illegal here. I wish we could do …I wish we could…. That’s what bothers me. I think we should all be able to give informed consent.

Carrie: I’m with you.

Jonathan:  You’re with me. And actually Carrie, I actually do want to end on a really positive note here. So, if you know anybody, or if you yourself, one in four people, so chances are a lot of our listeners may be facing type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance, which is the type 2 diabetes precursor, there is absolutely hope. There again, we always talk about….. we understand the science so well, why isn’t there a pill that solves this? Why isn’t there something we can take that solves this? There is, and it has no negative side effects. It’s called eating SANE food. In fact, studies show that if we eat more high quality food and we do less, but higher quality, smarter exercise, which we’ll talk about in later podcasts, studies have shown that 80 percent of type 2 diabetics can reduce or completely eliminate their need for medication by following this sort of lifestyle. Eighty percent can reduce or eliminate – cure this disease. And they can also reverse more than a third of a lifetime’s worth of insulin resistance after only a few months of exercising smarter. It’s glorious.

Carrie: That is glorius.

Jonathan:  Woo Hoo!

Carrie: But, you know what, this episode has been particularly geek heavy.

Jonathan:  What are you trying to say Carrie?

Carrie: We need to have more fun next podcast.

Jonathan:  We need to have more fun. I think. I think not having diabetes is pretty fun Carrie.

Carrie: That’s true.

Jonathan:  Alright Carrie. Thank you so much everyone for joining us. Carrie Brown, Jonathan Bailor. We’re eating smarter. We’re exercising smarter. We’re living better. And we’ll see you next week.