There are some pernicious rodent studies from China blaming saturated fat for insulin resistance, but I will show why this is impossible. The real culprits are seed oils, high carb diets causing high blood triglycerides, pollution and aging.
The Warburg effect alludes to the fermentation of sugar by a cell without oxidative phosphorylation as a means of energy production. That is, making energy from glucose without oxygen and also producing cellular byproducts that can allow a cancerous cell to divide rapidly.
Thankfully, in spite of the constant misinformation out there, most energy in the body is produced from fat burning – which you can see in this short clip is the case even during moderate intensity exercise.
Only during intense exercise where the heart rate hits about 130 does your body ever use more carbohydrate than fat metabolism; and when you are inactive, you use an even higher percentage of fat as fuel, and even more when you are in ketosis.
Even if you have a zero fat diet, this will be true. There are only about 8 calories worth of glucose in the blood at a given time, while there are 45-90 calories worth of triglycerides in a typical human blood supply. This triglyceride can be made in the liver from carbohydrate, or it can come from the diet.
Though some level of insulin resistant cells are unavoidable, it is mainly bad dietary choices that lead to insulin resistance. Now, vegans point the finger at dietary saturated fat as the culprit but this ignores some basic biochemical facts. Thankfully, I am hear to clear things up for everyone.
It’s simply impossible for saturated fat to clog up a cell, because it is too big to get through the cell lining when it’s unwanted. So if the cell does not ‘want’ fat to enter, or if the insulin receptor is damaged, not one molecule of saturated fat will ever get in that cell.
Short chain fatty acids like vinegar can get in the cell, but as I’ve talked about in other videos vinegar is shown to reduce insulin resistance, not increase it. So what’s the culprit? Some of the in between molecules that are too small to be blocked fully by the membrane but too big to be burned easily, such as seed oils.
High triglycerides in the blood caused by a high carb diet will cause an osmotic pressure gradient that pushes these fats inside the cell. This is probably part of the reason seed oils have such a dramatic negative impact on health. Thankfully, in a low or moderate carb diet, triglycerides stay low and this does not happen as much.
To burn these invasive fat molecules, the cell actually needs to use glucose. That’s because each fatty acid chain must be attached to glycerol. To break up a triglyceride, the cell has to create more glycerol out of glucose because each triglyceride only has one glycerol; and since it needs to burn three fatty acid chains so it needs to create two more.
The problem is that your cells can only do this so quickly, so if you flood the cell with fat, then the triglycerides get broken up into monoglycerides and diglycerides (DAGs) but there is not enough glycerol to attach to them for further processing and you wind up with all these unused diglycerides. By a sad quirk of fate, these DAGs overactivate Protein C Kinase when they accumulate too thickly, and this causes the insulin receptor to be essentially blocked and made inoperable.
Once this is plugged up, no more glucose can come into the cell no matter how much insulin and glucose is out there; and without the glucose, the fat can’t be broken up to be burned, either. The cell is effectively in a zombie state and can’t produce energy. Like a teenager without a cell phone, it will ultimately either die or go rogue.
So how do we fix this? As I said already, diet and exercise are of limited help. Lots of skinny and fit people still have many cells in this state even if they have a great diet, and they accumulate as we age from pollution and so on. Especially in the brain, which is not so easy to exercise. Thankfully, there are some real solutions.
Fasting is the quickest way. This stimulates autophagy, which removes the protein blocking the insulin receptor so more glucose can arrive. It also causes the release of adiponectin, which causes more rapid fat burning and helps get rid of the diglycerides (DAGs) clogging the cell and reduce inflammation. Vinegar and ohototherapy will also help in a similar manner.
You can fool around with exercise and magic diets all day, but you will only get limited results at the cellular level even if you are skinny and your fitness is excellent. This is especially important in the brain, where triglycerides can’t reach – that makes these cells particularly vulnerable to insulin resistance. Thankfully, these methods can help clear out the insulin resistance and keep you from becoming a sad statistic!
Music courtesy Karl@whitebataudio
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