129-Q&A with Ben Azadi

Have you ever pondered your genetic makeup, or how it's possible to reverse chronic diseases? Join Ben Azadi of the Keto Camp Podcast as we unmask some health misconceptions and reveal the importance of lifestyle changes in tackling the root causes of these ailments. We examine mTOR, a protein linked to nearly every chronic disease, and shed light on a personal journey of overcoming four chronic diseases.

Our discussion takes an interesting turn as we explore the accepted, yet often ineffective, treatments for chronic diseases. We journey back in time to our ancestors, their adaptation to cycles of feasting and fasting, and the crucial balance between mTOR and autophagy. Be prepared to discover the role of mTOR in aging and disease, and how it safeguards cells, particularly when food is scarce. We further discuss how the rise of farming disrupted this natural balance.

In the end, we confront a series of health untruths passed down in medical schools. Emphasizing the significance of hormones and insulin over mere calorie counting, we dissect insulin's role in weight gain and how certain macro-nutrients drive insulin levels. Join us as we explore the potential of certain medications to prolong life, the role of cholesterol in heart attacks, and the true power of lifestyle changes. Together, let's challenge the norm and gain a fresh perspective on health and wellness.

ReverseAgingRevolution Summit June 20-22, 2024 https://robertlufkinmdcom.ontralink.com/t?orid=49&opid=2

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome back to the Health Long Jeopardy Secret Show, and I'm your host, dr Robert Lufkin. In today's episode. We'll be continuing on our theme with our monthly Q&A sessions, and I'm so excited Today we're going to be rebroadcasting a podcast that I did with the great Ben Azadi, who runs the Keto Camp Podcast. Ben is a good friend. We're actually keynoting together in February down in the Miami Biohacking Conference, so swing by if you're in town for that. But we talk about. Ben asked me a number of questions and we have some great discussions, and please check out Ben's other great Keto Camp episodes. He has some amazing guests on the show. Also, let us know how you like this format If you want to continue doing these monthly Q&A sessions in addition to our usual episodes. If you are enjoying this program, please hit that subscribe button or, even better, leave a review. Your support makes it possible for us to create the quality programming that we're continually striving for. Also, let us know if there is a certain topic that you would like to see covered or a particular guest that you would like to hear from. And now please enjoy this conversation with Ben Azadi.

Speaker 1: 1:27

The number one cause of death in worldwide is a heart attack. The heart attack is due to the narrowing of the blood vessels, the accepted treatment today is to go in and do an emergency procedure where you mechanically open up the blood vessels with a stent. Things like stents or even blood pressure medicines can lower the blood pressure, but they don't address the underlying damage to the blood vessels, which continue. The key thing about these lifestyle changes are that they get at the root cause and they actually slow down or can reverse the diseases that modern medicine primarily treats the symptoms for. They may be lifesaving in the moment, but overall we still move along the path to those chronic diseases.

Speaker 1: 2:06

The fascinating thing about MTOR is that it's now linked to basically every single one of the chronic diseases. When we change MTOR around, we actually affect the phenotypes of aging, all the way from hair loss, gray hair, wrinkles, menopause, hearing loss, periodontal disease. All these things actually slow down when we turn MTOR off. Now people eat all the time, which turns MTOR on, and the types of foods they eat also turn MTOR on. What we're seeing today is a situation where MTOR is turned on all the time. There's a credible explanation of why turning on MTOR can drive all these chronic diseases and even driving aging and shortened life expectancy.

Speaker 2: 2:57

Dr Robert Lufkin. Welcome to the show, my friend hey.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Ben brother, it's great to be back and see you again.

Speaker 2: 3:04

Great to see you, brother. I was on your podcast. What was it like a year and a half ago now, I think?

Speaker 1: 3:09

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:10

We had a lot of fun. We went up to a lot of cool things. Ever since we had our conversation. You have a brand new book coming out in 2024, which we're going to take a deep dive into. I was just telling you, robert, I read your book because your team sent it over to me the PDF version of it. I loved it. Speaking my language, I was like, yes, exactly yes. But here's the thing that I have the most respect for you when it comes to your career stand for and why you wrote the book. I actually took an excerpt from the book. It's a very short passage. I'm going to read it. I'm sure you don't mind. It's very short. I want to start right here.

Speaker 2: 3:48

You were 100% in the medical establishment, is what you said. You were all for organized systems. Your background showed that you served as a president of a major international medical societies, lectured worldwide and been paid by universities, drug companies and research institutions. Your credentials were clean. They still are, you say Then, well, you say you were the unofficial spokesperson for the establishment. Then something happened where you developed four diseases. Let's start right there. What happened?

Speaker 1: 4:20

Yeah, I mean I was well into my career at teaching at major medical school. Things were going great. I just had two kids and suddenly I came down with these four chronic diseases which I was very familiar with, and actually my father had gotten those same diseases and he died of them, but he was almost 90 years old when he died. And the problem was I wasn't 90 years old. I had kids that weren't even in elementary school yet, and putting two and two together, this story wasn't going to end well because I'd already gotten the diseases at such a young age. So I went to my doctors and they said no problem, we'll take care of it. They put me on a prescription drug for each one of the diseases which I took, and the symptoms got better.

Speaker 1: 5:15

But I didn't like the way this was playing out. So I began to, largely out of self-interest, I began to question what was going on and I began to take a look at the literature and there was a lot of new things that had come out in the last few years that were different than what I had been taught and indeed what I was teaching and what many of my colleagues still believed about, particularly about these chronic diseases the four of which that I had and several other ones, and how modern medicine is really treating the symptoms of them, and that these diseases, many of them, share a common root cause that can be reversed and addressed with things like lifestyle, nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress. And that's what I began to do. I looked closely at my own lifestyle and I began to address these things.

Speaker 1: 6:19

And, long story short, I went back to see my doctors and they couldn't believe it. They said what's going on? What have you done? You know you don't need these prescriptions anymore. So they canceled the prescriptions and I turned the page on my life. And now I want to help communicate this message to other people, my colleagues and, most importantly, all of us out there who are on this path to health. And eventually we're facing these chronic diseases, because these chronic diseases are the diseases that will determine our own longevity and kill. You know, 80% of us die of one of four or five of these chronic diseases.

Speaker 2: 7:04

Oh my gosh. So those four that you had specifically were hypertension, so you had high blood pressure, gout and arthritis and you had abnormal blood lipids and then you were pre-diabetic, where your glucose levels started to rise, a1c started to rise. So all four of those and they might be five if we separate gout and arthritis, but let's say four or five of those are lifestyle related, right? And then you identified okay, my lifestyle caused these symptoms. The medication were treating the symptoms. But there's a mismatch there, because if lifestyle caused it but medication is taking care of the symptoms, I don't think this medication is going to actually get to the cause, because that's not what caused it. It was something else.

Speaker 2: 7:48

So you started changing your lifestyle. But what were some of those first steps that you took and some of those individuals that you started studying? Cause your book has, by the way, your book is called lies. I taught in medical school and the truths that can save your life. The forward is by Dr Jason Fung, who my audience loves. You reference a lot of colleagues like Gary Tobs and a lot of people in our space. So who are some of those first people you started studying and what were those first steps that you took with lifestyles to help reverse these four conditions you had.

Speaker 1: 8:16

And, if I could, let me let me emphasize one thing you said before is that the important fact that that I wasn't aware of it was a wake up call for me was that the approaches to these chronic diseases by mainstream medicine, with with these the drugs indeed the drugs that I was prescribed treat the symptoms, but it's very important they don't necessarily treat the underlying cause and it's not just those four diseases as we talk about in the book. I was very surprised to realize that it's it's not just those four diseases, but it goes all the way from obesity, type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, cancer and even Alzheimer's disease and ultimately even longevity, the, the anti aging effects, and it's just to give an example, the number one cause of death in this country and really worldwide is a heart attack, cardiovascular disease affecting the heart right, and most people when they get a heart attack, the heart attack is due to narrowing of the blood vessels, do this atherosclerosis disease that you know, you've talked about with your audience before. But the blood vessels get narrowed and then the heart doesn't get enough oxygen from the blood and and you have a heart attack and the treatment, the accepted treatment today, is to go in and do an emergency procedure where you mechanically open up the blood vessels with a stent and that restores the blood flow. But the interesting thing about putting stents in, it doesn't actually. It may save you in the moment, so you don't die immediately from that heart attack, but it has no effect on your overall death rate from from cardiovascular disease. In other words, you will still continue to die of a heart attack at some point, and the reason is the stent only widens that one vessel and what happens is the underlying disease.

Speaker 1: 10:17

That is not addressed by the stents and even, as I argue in the book, is not adequately addressed even by statins. The underlying cardiovascular disease continues to progress and those blood vessels get narrower, even where the stent is. But all the other blood vessels of the body continue to progress. So things like stents or even blood pressure medicines can lower the blood pressure, but they don't address the underlying damage to the blood vessels, which continue. So the key thing about these lifestyle changes are that they get at the root cause and they actually slow down or can reverse the diseases that that modern medicine primarily treats the symptoms. For with all with these prescription drugs that we get, they may be lifesaving in the moment but overall we still move along the path to those chronic diseases. So sorry for the, sorry for the T-rail.

Speaker 2: 11:12

No, no, I you know it's very important to to emphasize that because you're right, the symptoms aren't even necessarily and you make the case for this in your book the symptoms are not necessarily the problem. They are a result of the problem. Sometimes that could be really disconnected and far away from the actual problem. It's the body's check engine light. So we want to look at those symptoms as a, as a gift. Okay, this is your body's way of communicating with you that something you ate, something you did maybe you smoke too much, maybe it was alcohol, whatever it was something that you did caused an interference in your metabolism, which we'll talk more about, the metabolism myth and lies but something you did caused interference. Now I'm going to show you a symptom as a check engine light for you to figure out what that cause was.

Speaker 2: 11:57

So medications and surgery and putting stents in while some of these are very important for term life changing and life saving, it's in that short term. But what happens long? It's not getting to the cause. It's kind of putting a bandaid over a bullet wound. Eventually that blood's going to just flow right through that bandaid. It's not getting to the cause. So I'm glad that you distinguish the difference between symptoms and getting to the cause, and when we start going into your chapters, we'll go a little bit more into these specific situations with symptoms.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Yeah, great. A great analogy people use is I walk out and my floor is wet. I notice the floor is wet in my house, so what do I do? I get a mop and I mop up the floor and I'm treating the symptom and what I don't realize is that the roof is leaking. And that's sort of what's happening with some of these chronic diseases with modern medicine that we're mopping the floor with prescription drugs in some cases, when lifestyle changes could really alleviate the need for the prescription drug and ultimately even reverse the chronic disease.

Speaker 2: 13:05

This is a perfect analogy. That's exactly it. Something that I loved in your book that I have here in my notes is this feast, famine, cycling, which our ancestors were hardwired genetically to go through periods of feasting, periods of fasting. So, in other words, in your book you talk about tour and tour versus like a top of G, and there's a lot of back and forth between people in our space and longevity space. Like m tour is bad for you. Stay away from it at all cost, eat a plant based diet, stay away from protein. And then you have the other aspect. Well, they're sorry. That same group is saying get a top of G, get as much as top of G as possible. Then you have the other group saying too much atop is not good for you. You need more protein, you need more m tour. So I want you to break down the difference between m tour and atop G and why. There is a beautiful dance between the two and when we could get a nice balance of both, that's when we're going to be in a good sweet spot.

Speaker 1: 14:03

Yeah, yeah, I love m tour. It's a fascinating molecule. It's arguably one of the most important biological molecules ever known, but it was only discovered really at the beginning, almost to the 21st century, and it's to to understand its significance. It's actually present and conserved biologically over billions of years, all the way from yeast to human beings, and it does. It does one thing it's a nutrient sensing protein that tells the cells either to grow or repair. So if nutrients are present largely oxygen, insulin and glucose m tour gets turned on and cells grow, our bones grow, everything grows, and then, when food is not available, m tour switches off and we hunker down into repair mode. We start cannibalizing ourselves and we, you know, we make do with what we can. Autophagy turns on, and that may sound like a bad thing, but actually it's a healthy thing for us once in a while to to do this, and so a fascinating thing about m tour is that it's now linked to basically every single one of the chronic diseases that that we talk about in the book and the major chronic diseases that are affecting us today and determine our lifespan and longevity. So m tour is actually a very powerful anti aging mechanism, and it's not only the chronic diseases of aging. But also when we change m tour around we actually affect the phenotypes of aging all the way from. You know, hair loss, gray hair, wrinkles, menopause, hearing loss, periodontal disease all these things actually slow down when we turn m tour off into that autophagy mode. So back to your question. The role of m tour is to basically protect the cell because if, if food is available, you want the cell to turn on and grow, if the cell turns on and grows when food's not available, the cell will die and vice versa will be a bad effect. So m tour is very, very important for survival. It's the number one survival switch in a lot of ways Over time it's believed and nobody really knows for sure, but it's believed that m tour in a normal organism switches back and forth because both are good. There's a balance there. In other words, sometimes turning m tour on for growth is good and sometimes turning m tour off for autophagy is good.

Speaker 1: 16:44

What's happened with human beings in our modern civilization? If you imagine a hunter, gatherer 50,000 years ago, m tour will turn on when there's food available and then maybe a few days will go by and there's no food and m tour will be off and you'll get a nice balance. Well, as everybody knows, about 12,000 years ago, that changed in. What Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari says is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind, and that is the agricultural revolution which made domesticated plants available and food to be stored. So it began.

Speaker 1: 17:24

We believe that it began switching m tour, so there were fewer and fewer times when m tour was turned off because food was available you could store grains and this hyper accelerated in the last 150 years when refrigeration was developed and then processing, and then finally, in the last 30 years, ultra processed junk foods have taken over our food supply and now people eat all the time, which turns m tour on, and the types of foods they they eat tend to be the types of foods that also turn m tour on. Of the three macronutrients, primarily carbohydrates and glucose turn on m tour. Protein has a mild effect and fat has very little effect on m tour. So what we're seeing today is a situation where m tour is turned on all the time, or at least an abnormally high amount of time in people and based on the mechanisms that we understand about m tour, there's a credible explanation of why turning on m tour can drive all these chronic diseases that we've talked about, and even driving aging and shortened life expectancy.

Speaker 2: 18:37

Such a great breakdown. Would that explain why bodybuilders, for example, die on average about 12 years? They live 12 years less than the average person. They're constantly in m tour eating every two to three hours, overfeeding to get a performance gain. But would that make sense that a lot of bodybuilders that age rapidly are constantly stuck in m tour? That might be why they age faster.

Speaker 1: 19:02

Yeah, that's a very interesting point that that wasn't clear in my mind until recently, the difference between performance optimization and longevity optimization.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Like we may want to optimize our performance for, you know, nfl football or to run a marathon and we get our body at a high performance state, but that sort of performance optimization may not be the same and actually may be detrimental for longevity optimization, which is just living, living a long time, and we're starting to see that now.

Speaker 1: 19:36

You know, the statistic you mentioned about bodybuilders is another you know, shocking statistic that's come out about distance runners and sort of ultramarathon people who do a lot of activity. What we're finding is that these people have a higher amount of coronary artery calcium scores in their coronary arteries and, in addition, they also have a type of myocardial fibrosis, of damage to the heart muscle that isn't present in people who don't do these, these ultramarathons. So there's, it appears, for exercise there's a sweet spot in there. You know, too little is what most of us err on, which is bad, but too much is also bad and it makes sense. You know almost everything else. You can do too much of two, but it appears, with exercising and and these performance optimizations, you may be trading off your longevity for a peak performance at one thing.

Speaker 2: 20:37

So important to understand that I know when I owned a CrossFit gym here in Miami and back in 2013, when I was really getting into keto and fasting, I would do seminars at the CrossFit gym and those members and our coaches they did not want to hear that message because they were all about performance and gains and PRs and the fastest WOD times. But I was trying to make it clear at that time your performance in your CrossFit gym here Might not be the same thing as health and longevity. Those goals are usually not synonymous. Now they could be, but sometimes you're sac. Most of the time you're sacrificing years off your life to perform short term. So you made that case right now with chronic lung long distance runners. I recently had Dr Sean Omara I'm not sure if you're familiar with yeah, he's great.

Speaker 2: 21:22

He was actually just here at my studio last week. We sat down for an interview and one of us you know we, we know we're the top five things that lead to visceral fat. One of them was chronic endurance exercise, because high chronic cortisol levels and plus, as you know, doc, a lot of these endurance athletes are just eating whole bunch of glucose and sugar just to kind of get through that run or whatever exercise it is. So there is a difference there. But let me ask you this question how do we know if we're getting just the right amount of M tour versus autophagy? Let's talk first about the majority of Americans. 88% plus of Americans are metabolically inflighted and flexible unhealthy. They probably need more autophagy than M tour. So how do you gauge if you're getting enough of both? Is there a certain lab tests like a fasting insulin we could look at, maybe IGF one? How can we gauge if we're getting a good balance of both?

Speaker 1: 22:16

Yeah, the honest answer about M tour and measuring it is we don't know. There, there, there is no test for M tour, so we can't, we can't check M tour levels or check what it's positioned in. So we, we have surrogates for it. We can look at fasting glucose levels, we can look at fasting insulin levels, ha1c and those, those metabolic markers as well, but but we, we really don't have a way to measure M tour directly. So we, just we, you know, we make inferences based on what we know.

Speaker 2: 22:50

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Speaker 2: 23:40

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Speaker 2: 24:58

You talk about these in your book. It's important to see where you're at, where your baseline is at, and if you find that your markers are out of range, that are higher, then you probably need more autophagy, less m tour. But if you found you're in a good sweet spot, like I am, I'm in a good range and I could have a little bit more feast days than I would have had several years ago when I was trying to get healthy right. So it kind of depends on where you were at in that spectrum. I want to shift the conversation to different chapters you have in your book, which I love the names of all these chapters. So you have chapters that go over specific lies that you taught in medical school, that you learned and taught in medical school. So you have the metabolic lie, the obesity lie, the diabetes lie. You have the fatty liver lie, hypertension lie, cardiovascular lie, the cancer lie, alzheimer's lie, mental health and longevity lie.

Speaker 2: 25:47

We don't have enough time to get, we don't have enough time on this conversation to go through all, but I want to focus on a few of them. So I want to focus. I want to start the conversation with the metabolic lie. And it's unfortunate because even to this day, robert, we have fitness pros and dietitians and nutritionists giving that information that look, if you want to lose weight, just eat less and move more and you totally like, disrupt that dogma and that dogmatic way of thinking and show the evidence. So let's talk a little bit more about that. Like, if somebody's listening and watching and they have somebody on their butt telling them to just eat less and move more, maybe they could share this clip with them so it helps the person understand and the person that's teaching this understand better. So why does that not work? Why do calories matter, but they're not as important as we were once thought and talked?

Speaker 1: 26:40

Well, first of all, whatever we're doing is not working. There's an epidemic of obesity and overweight. 50% of Americans are either overweight or obese. So whatever we're doing is not working. And, as you say, the conventional wisdom, which is still being taught by the medical school I go to and elsewhere, is if you're overweight, you exercise more and eat less. The problem is exercising more, as everybody knows. If you're going to a big dinner, you want to work up an appetite, what do you do? You exercise. It makes you hungry, it makes you consume more and finally, along that line, exercising in itself is a relatively inefficient way to burn calories.

Speaker 1: 27:23

If you want to lose weight, you change your intake of what you're eating. You can run a long time and barely make up for that twinkie that you ate. So that's the one thing. And then, as far as just eating less, it's problematic. And it ignores the fact that weight, and when we put on weight, is driven by a hormone called insulin, and insulin tells the body to add weight. And in fact, I know I can make anyone gain weight just by injecting them with insulin, no matter what they eat, and I can make anyone lose weight. Or I know that type 1 diabetics who don't make their own native insulin as soon as they stop taking insulin, will lose weight.

Speaker 1: 28:11

So it's really not the total calories you eat, but it's the calories that tell the body to store fat. So certain calories, certain macronutrients, carbohydrate and glucose I'm sure you've talked about this. I know drive insulin, protein doesn't much and fats practically not at all. So if I want to lose weight, I can eat 3,000 calories of fat and protein and my body will not store fat and it makes sense. A glazed donut of same number of calories as a couple of hard boiled eggs. Our body handles them very differently as far as what causes me to store fat and lose fat. So I think those are the basic problems with eating more and exercising less, and there are more and more studies that document this, at least in a limited way.

Speaker 2: 29:10

Yeah, there are a lot. I mean Gary Tops you referenced in the book a lot. He's done a great job exposing that lie as well. It's not that we're denying calories. Is that we're saying it's not the most important thing to focus on? I think it's a huge distraction personally Takes away from hormones and, like you said, insulin and what you just mentioned about protein, about carbs, protein and fat and the insulin response, for that parallels into what you said about 10 minutes ago about carbs, protein and fat and how that is going to activate mTOR in different levels. Right, you said the same thing. Carbs and sugar will activate mTOR and insulin a lot more than protein very minimal and fat barely anything, right. So it goes hand in hand with what you just said with mTOR, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 29:54

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 29:58

So that's the lie. And there's a lot more regarding the calories in versus calories out dogma. Like you said, if you ate hard boiled eggs versus some glazed donuts, there's going to be a completely different response.

Speaker 1: 30:08

You're going to feel very different, your energy levels will be completely different with the eggs versus the donuts and also one last point also the hunger effect that you've talked about on your show, I know, but just not to be overlooked. If I eat carbohydrates, 100 calories of carbohydrates, I'm going to be hungry again and I'm going to want more. You know that one potato chip thing. But if I eat 100 calories of cheese, let's say, which is largely you know, largely fat, I can eat one piece of cheese and walk away. I cannot eat one potato chip and walk away. I mean, I'm a recovering junk food addict myself. I know the mental pressures of junk food and I, you know, I had to fight that battle with myself every day.

Speaker 2: 30:56

I could relate in some sense. I used to have a big battle with junk food as well. But you're so right. When you eat fat and protein, you activate these different hormones and chemicals that signal satiety right Leptin, colostocinin, peptide YY. You don't get that with processed carbs. That's why when you're done eating a big steak and they offer you a free steak, you're like there's no way I could eat that. But they offer you some ice cream.

Speaker 3: 31:18

Sure, I got room for that right Cause it doesn't activate the same hormones.

Speaker 2: 31:21

You could go at it with the ice cream. So that is. It's very important and I know you're a big fan of keto and fasting, especially because so many people have hyperinsulinemia, and that all. Let's transition to that conversation, right? You gave some really alarming stats when it comes to pre-diabetes and diabetes. You said one in three adult Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic, and 80% of them don't even know it. So let's talk about that, because that insulin is making a lot of noise for a very long time and it takes 10, 15 years before that glucose changes. So let's talk about what is happening when somebody is consuming high carbs and eating frequently and, although they might not be diagnosed with diabetes or pre-diabetes in a few years, what's happening to the beta cells in their pancreas?

Speaker 1: 32:10

Well, I agree with what you said about the risk of pre-diabetes and diabetes, but I think it's even worse than that. My thinking has changed. I used to think that, like many diseases, some people either got it or they didn't get it, you know, based on genetics, environment, that sort of thing. My thinking has changed and it's based on some studies that have recently come out. That one study was a large number of non-diabetic adult Americans from the Framingham data and from the NHANES data and they looked at their marker for their diabetes marker, their insulin resistance marker, which is they didn't look at fasting insulin, they looked at hemoglobin A1c, which is this similar fact, and, as everybody knows, you know your hemoglobin A1c. Once it crosses a certain threshold, like 6.5 or so, then your doctor diagnoses you as a diabetic and you, he or she, can charge for the visit and they can prescribe metformin and insulin and all that sort of stuff, but before that they really can't because you're not you're not a diabetic yet. Well, what they found interestingly with these non-diabetic adult Americans was that their HA1c, in other words, their insulin resistance marker, or their damage due to sugar, increases with age and the older you get, the higher your HA1c gets. Over time. It just creeps up like that.

Speaker 1: 33:38

And what the way I think about it now is that we're all on the path to type 2 diabetes. We are all most of us, maybe not 100%, but most people generally. Our HA1c gets older. The older we get no-transcript, formal type 2 diabetes is basically it's in our future of all of us if we live long enough. It's sort of like gray hair if I don't die of something else, I will eventually, you know, get gray hair, I think type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance.

Speaker 1: 34:11

Based on these numbers, with the HA1C levels creeping up across the population with age, I think we're all on the path now to HA1, to diabetes. Now, what does that mean? Well, it just means that it's suddenly not. Well, I'm not diabetic, I don't have to worry about, you know, my carbs, or I don't have to worry about mTOR or these other things. Well, actually, I think we all do in a sense one for the reason that we're creeping up, our HA1C is increasing all of us over time with age, but also for a lot of reasons that turning on mTOR causes a lot of bad things in addition to diabetes, driving all the chronic diseases so that study about the older we get, the higher our insulin and a1c levels climb.

Speaker 2: 35:01

I wonder if that's still the case for individuals who are doing what we do in more of like that biohacking longevity space, because I don't know what the frame of reference was with the patients they surveyed, because the average American I mean 88% plus I would. I would find that it's believable for those individuals, but for us I find it hard to believe that it's inevitable before I get type 2 diabetes if I live to 120, even though I'm doing all the things that I'm doing. So can we just clarify whether you believe that is the case for all humans or for the majority of people who are not really doing some of the longevity things that we follow?

Speaker 1: 35:39

yeah, to be clear, the, the, the paper I'm citing and others I'm aware of didn't didn't subdivide that just because they didn't have the data. So it was a population-wide study showing that HA1C was increasing. So what I take home from that, or my inference, is that, absent changing our diets, we are all on this path. But, as you say, there are other studies that show very clearly, with people that eliminate junk food and eliminate carbohydrates from their diet, they can actually reverse their HA1C levels and bring them way down. So I I would agree with you that, while the general population has increasing HA1C levels, I think that we all have the the choice to to not go down that path if we pay attention to our lifestyle, junk food and diet yeah, exactly, and that's why conversations like this in your book are so important, because, let's face it, type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance are a lifestyle caused disease and they're all reversible.

Speaker 2: 36:52

Type 1 we're not talking about that, but type 2 and insulin resistance, yes, and you gave some stats that I was not aware of when it comes to some of the financial gain of people having diabetes, right.

Speaker 2: 37:04

So in 2013, your book says sales of insulin and other diabetes drugs reach 23 billion, and that's according to data from IMS health, which is more than the combined revenue for the NFL, the major league baseball and the NBA, which is interesting. So let's talk about the way that diabetes is currently being treated. I know that when my dad had type 2 diabetes, I didn't really understand it as a kid. I just remember my dad taking insulin and medication and then, as a as an adult 22, 23 years old I stood and understand until my dad got really sick and ended up suffering a massive stroke and then left in paralyzed and he ended up losing his life, which raised a lot of questions for me, which is part of the reason why, like I'm in this space because I want to learn and and prevent others from suffering like my dad did and I did.

Speaker 2: 37:57

So I remember my dad was taking insulin and he kept gaining weight and I was asking his conventional doctor because his doctor said he needs to lose weight to manage the diabetes better and then he would gain weight. And I remember looking up insulin and it says it causes weight gain. So it didn't really make sense to me. I know that there are different meds over the years that have come out, so there's some meds that lower glucose, that that put glucose, take glucose out of the blood stream and pack it in different parts of the body, which show you it's lowering your blood glucose levels. There is insulin, which does something similar, and then there are medications that cause you to pee out excess glucose. So let's let's talk about the most common treatments and why there are.

Speaker 1: 38:39

None of them are getting to the cause yeah, well, the basically, if you accept the cause is just dietary, then all these, all these other effects, all these other treatments are going to be downstream and, like insulin, it's for type 2 diabetics. It may save their life, in other words, preventing them from dying from an acute hyperglycemia episode of too much glucose. But ultimately the effects of high insulin on our body drive, emptor and drive the chronic diseases that that we see and ultimately, you know, have higher risks of cancer, have higher risks of heart attack, have higher risks of Alzheimer's disease. So insulin's probably, although it's life-saving for type 1 diabetics, for type 2 diabetics, if you can manage it with diet, that's, that's the way to do it. Now, there it's interesting. There's certain drugs, there's certain diabetic drugs that actually have a reputation for longevity and actually making people live longer. Insulin is not one of them. You know insulin is life-saving for a high perglycemic episode, but people don't biohack and take insulin because they know it. You know it basically has these bad effects.

Speaker 1: 40:00

But there are a couple that we can talk about. One is metformin. Metformin nobody really knows how it works. It works somehow on the liver to decrease glucose levels and your blood stream will decrease glucose levels or your HA1C will change. I mean, recently papers have come out saying that no met way metformin works is on the gut microbiome and you know it only works there. So it's unlike some drugs like rapamycin, which is a very clean, targeted drug. Metformin is a very dirty drug in the sense that it has many, many effects in many different areas. So it's not clear the mechanism. But the effect is lowering, lowering glucose, and it's interesting that there is some evidence, some pretty good evidence, that metformin increases the lifespan of certain organisms and possibly even human beings, when it's when it's taken. And why would that be? Well, if it lowers the glucose and doesn't have any other negative effects, then lowering glucose is going to turn mTOR off and it's going to be beneficial from that way. So why doesn't insulin lowers glucose too, right? Well, insulin actually turns on mTOR. So when you take insulin you turn mTOR on, you drive hyperplasia, all these other things.

Speaker 1: 41:26

There's one other drug called a carbose, which is a diabetic drug. Diabetics take it and it's an interesting drug because it doesn't doesn't really get absorbed, it doesn't work in our body. The place it works is in our gut and the way it works is. It blocks the absorption of glucose and carbohydrates in our into our bloodstream. So people typically when they take a carbose they do it after a fatty or after a carb meal, that they have a lot of carbs and that that prevents their blood from spiking and does that.

Speaker 1: 42:03

But an interesting thing happened with some longevity. Experts began using a carbose with another by itself and it actually increased the lifespan of mice that were taking it. And when they combined it with rapamycin, which is the most powerful lifespan extending drug, which works, incidentally, by turning down mTOR, when they combined a carbose and rapamycin they got a dramatic compound effect of life extension, at least in this mammalian animal model. But it's to the point that now human human experimenters are are taking rapamycin and a carbose off label and metformin for its longevity effects. But a lot of these effects are, through the manipulation of the glucose levels in our body, related to. You know what we're talking about with diabetes fascinating.

Speaker 2: 43:00

You take rapamycin yourself, don't you? I do, yeah, how long have you been taking that? Taking it about three years. You're doing it for the longevity benefits, because the science makes sense to you on that yeah, I mean it.

Speaker 1: 43:13

Yeah, I am, although rapamycin is FDA approved initially for organ transplants, which you know I don't have. But it's also FDA approved. If you coat stents and, like the heart attack stents, rapamycin will stop the atherosclerosis from reoccurring. So there's there's question that rapamycin taken orally may slow down atherosclerosis. You know, nobody knows, but there's a study there. Rapamycin is also FDA approved for several cancers. It stops for metastatic renal cell cancer and other cancers, as a primary treatment for these cancers or secondary treatment. So rapamycin has effects not only on cardiovascular disease but also on treatment. And there now some animal studies where rapamycin actually slows cognitive impairment and reverses cognitive impairment in the mouse model, to the point that the University of Texas and others are now doing studies with rapamycin for Alzheimer's disease patients.

Speaker 1: 44:11

So it's a lot of, a lot of effects of rapamycin, not just for longevity but by by slowing down these chronic diseases. And then the phenotypes of aging. You know, in the mouse rapamycin grows the hair back, makes the gray hair go away. In the human model it reverses skin changes with aging when you apply it as a skin cream. With hearing loss it it affects the cochlear cells in the animal model so that they regain hearing from age-related hearing loss in menopause. In the animal model, rapamycin actually slows down menopause and restores ovarian fertility and people are looking at all of these things in humans now with rapamycin. It's a fascinating drug, this, this whole m tour model. You know we're just scraping the surface on it and also, you know, for diabetes obviously yeah, very fascinating, it's very interesting.

Speaker 2: 45:06

So, with insulin and metformin, both are lowering blood glucose, but the question is when is the blood glucose going if it's not being burned off? So let me ask you that question if they're not changing their lifestyle and Type 2 diabetics and they're just eating the same way, which is Going to be high carbohydrate diet, and eating frequently, but they're taking either insulin and metformin, where does the sugar go?

Speaker 1: 45:32

So it's a good question, the the carbohydrates with them, with the metform? Well, first of all, with the insulin, the sugar is. It's taken up by the cells and and burned or stored as fat, and insulin, like we talked about, is the fat storage mechanism with with Metformin there's less insulin produced by you know the pathways like gluconeogenesis and stuff. So some of the insulin is coming from other sources even, but for whatever reason it's decreased insulin that's released into the bloodstream it's not. Metformin is not known to increase fat storage, so people taking metformin don't tend to get fat. I mean the. The main side effect with metformin is GI distress, but that may be related to the GI effects of the metformin mechanism which, like I said earlier, we really don't understand yet, but it's. It's interesting both drugs lower glucose, but one turns emtour on and is Negative, has a negative effect on chronic diseases, a bad effect. The other one turns emtour off, which is which is the metformin, and that has longevity effects and presumably you know health benefits for all these chronic diseases as well, possibly.

Speaker 2: 46:51

Yeah, and I know dr Fung says Just giving a type 2 diabetic more insulin to treat their type 2 diabetes is like given an alcoholic more alcohol to treat their alcoholism Right. Just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2: 47:04

Yeah we know that the goal is to reduce Reduce your your carbohydrate intake and the frequency. So get more insulin sensitive, because that's the Mitch, the mismatch there. Conventional dogma when it comes to type 2 diabetes is that we need to treat the blood glucose. That is the problem. But what we have found is that no, no, that is a result of the problem. The real problem is hyperinsulin anemia. There has been too much insulin for too many years now. The cells are full of sugar, the liver is fatty, which you have a whole chapter about fatty liver the pancreas is now fatty. We need to actually start pulling fat from the pancreas, from the liver, from other cells, and we do that with a low carb, keto diet, intermittent fasting some of the principles you talk about in your book. Then you get more insulin sensitive and that's how you're able to reverse these Insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Is that a fair explanation?

Speaker 1: 47:59

doc, absolutely, and you know in your program, you know with keto camp and all fits right into Right into doing this.

Speaker 2: 48:10

Yeah, we love talking about this. I love the book. Like I said, you're speaking my language. Let's finish up with one more chapter here, and that's the chapter about the cardiovascular line. You've got to touch upon Cardiovascular disease throughout this conversation, but let's go a little bit deeper. It's the most calm. The most common question that I get on social media is Ben, I started doing keto or carnivore and I'm down 70 pounds and I feel incredible, but my cholesterol is up, my LDL is up and my doctor says I need to stop doing this diet. Okay, let's help them understand that, that it's a lot of moving parts with cardiovascular disease and if you could just unpack some of those most common lies that we have been told with cardiovascular disease and how to understand that those markers a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 48:59

Yeah, the, and this is this is a key point the, the, the understanding of fat and its relationship to cardiovascular disease. And At the end of the day, you know, nobody really knows and intelligent people can agree to disagree, but the way I read the literature is that Well, first of all, even the American Heart Association now acknowledges it used to be people didn't eat eggs because they were afraid of dietary cholesterol. You can still go to restaurants in my town and get an egg white omelet, you know, to avoid the egg yolk. You know, yeah, yeah, and and so we now accept that dietary cholesterol doesn't affect blood cholesterol.

Speaker 1: 49:42

And the question is just blood cholesterol, how big a role does that play in your risk for, primarily, heart attacks? Because that's the number one killer and you know, the statistic is that half of people who come into emergency rooms for heart attack have a normal blood cholesterol. So, and you know, and statins, of course, the elephant in the room. It's a trillion dollar industry to lower blood cholesterol, these blood, these drugs, and we we took go into a lot of detail in the book, but basically the, I think statins are associated with a slight improvement in in heart attack, heart attack risk, and and lowering cholesterol is a Lowers risk factor for heart attacks, but it's a very small factor when, when we look at other things.

Speaker 1: 50:34

In particular, you can look at what's called the hazard ratio and we have a picture of it in the graph and you can see your, your LDL Cholesterol elevation, the hazard of that causing a heart attack, versus something like type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance or metabolic disease, our orders of magnitude higher. Or Smoking even all. There's so many other things that can cause the heart attack, and so my position is that that the the danger of Cholesterol has been overstated and we still don't really understand it enough to know. And, and certainly you know, as you've talked about before, our nation has been on an experiment since the 1960s and 70s, a low-fat experiment where the health pyramid and the national recommendations were that we replace, we go on low-fat diets and we replace fats with, basically, sugar, and I think that, along with other things like seed oils and other factors, is to blame for where we are now with with the junk food epidemic and our chronic disease epidemic.

Speaker 2: 51:49

Great, great explanation and it makes so much sense. Put your energy into these metabolic diseases like Insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Work on that and that should be. I agree that should be the main focus and I know dr Sean Amaro is a big believer that. Also.

Speaker 2: 52:06

Visceral fat and measuring your visceral fat with MRI, like if you have very minimal Visceral fat, even if you have high cholesterol or LDL, you're at very low risk because it's what these high Concentration of visceral fat does to release these cytokines and different inflammatory processes. But I'm with you there might be a slight improvement in reducing cardiovascular events with the statin very, very small compared to what happens when you actually get optimal insulin levels and optimal inflammatory levels. So for me, I know that my total LDL when I'm on keto or carnivore is usually high, but I'll get the LDL particles and I'll see that it's actually the larger LDL that is higher and the smaller is a little bit lower and that to me, of course we know through that's what we want to see. But also, my inflammatory markers are optimal, my a1c is optimal, my fasting insulin is optimal. So even if my total cholesterol is high, I personally don't give a crap because I feel great and all my other markers look great. So I love that.

Speaker 2: 53:10

And your book goes into some good details about Ancel Keys and, like you said, the low fat movement, the seed oil movement and how that relates to all these metabolic diseases. The book was really well researched and done. How long did it take for you to write it?

Speaker 1: 53:23

It was well. It was just gathering information over a few years since I started this, since I had these chronic diseases myself and Just sort of was born of that.

Speaker 2: 53:34

I Love it. I love it. Well, I can't wait for my audience to get it. By the way, for those watching and listening, you could pre-order the book right now. We're gonna drop a link for you to pre-order the book. It's gonna be out in 2024. You'll get updates along the way for those who do pre-order and you also have a gift for them to get a free download Chapter correct, sure.

Speaker 1: 53:55

Yeah, if you want a sample chapter, we have the first chapter that's available on my website, both an audio form and in a PDF. You're welcome to take a look at it and and see what you think. What's your website? It's Robert Lufkin mdcom. Its Luf is in Frank KIN MDcom and then Just go to the lies part and there's a free chapter sign there.

Speaker 2: 54:23

Everybody get that and I think you're gonna be so inspired to want to pre-order it when, once you read that it's gonna be, it's so good. I loved everything you put into the book because it's it's one of those books. Here's what I think it's the best way to use the book for my audience can gift the book to your doctor, like buy a copy for your conventional doctor who thinks keto is crazy and fasting is crazy, because you have a medical doctor, dr Robert, here who's talking about the things that you're doing and approving of them and giving the research. It's one of those books you wanna use as kind of a talking point for your doctor. What do you think about that, doc? Because a lot of doctors are closed off to the idea of doing keto and fasting. Could this be a good way to open up that door for?

Speaker 1: 55:06

them. Yeah, I mean, I made a point to try and reference. You know when things are quoted there. We're referencing primary peer reviewed articles, not just review articles. So hopefully that would appeal to an open-minded physician who wants to look deeper at this area.

Speaker 2: 55:23

Yeah, I think it will, so get the book. I have one more question for you, hey KetoKamper. I wanna interrupt the video real quick to share with you what I believe is one of the most important nutrients that we should be taking every single day. Most people are deficient in this nutrient and it's responsible for over 400 enzymatic activities in your body, and your body just doesn't make it. So it's required to be taken in a high quality supplement or from high quality foods. The problem with the food is that our soil is depleted and it's hard to get this quality nutrient. So what is this nutrient? It's called magnesium. But I'm gonna share something with you Very fascinating, Check this out.

Speaker 2: 56:03

Upgraded formulas has this incredible product called upgraded magnesium and Barton Scott, the developer of this product and company. He's a brilliant guy. He created nanoparticle magnesium, which has the ability to penetrate your membranes and go right into yourself. There's a 99.99 percentage absorption rate. Now, this is unheard of, because with other magnesium products you better believe it's not that high. And there's an interesting study they're doing with upgraded mag I wanna share with you real quick. Early results from a sleep study with Dr Sachin Patel showed that the average doctor in the group using this product has achieved an improvement of over 35% in deep sleep. More sleep studies in a double blind controlled placebo study with upgraded magnesium is coming sooner, and you better believe those results are gonna be super exciting. We already know this.

Speaker 2: 56:56

Upgraded magnesium is easily the best supplement you can take for better sleep, including deep sleep, muscle aches, cramping and any other signs of a magnesium deficiency, which is so common, unfortunately. What makes upgraded formulas unique, as I mentioned, is that it's a nanoparticle. This means it is absorbed very rapidly and efficiently by your blood cells. They produce a plasma like version of minerals that the body recognizes and absorbs without digestion, and the results are phenomenal. I really believe just taking this for a couple of nights, you'll notice a big difference. So if you wanna get upgraded formulas, upgraded mag and any of their products they also do some incredible hair mineral analysis test to see your mineral imbalances and deficiencies, et cetera, and other incredible products that we referenced before Head over to upgradedformulascom and use the coupon code KETOSIS to get 15% off your entire order. That is upgradedformulascom Coupon code is KETOSIS to get 15% off your entire order. I'm gonna drop a link for you down below in the notes of this video.

Speaker 2: 58:08

Okay, let's go back to this video. The question is about my favorite supplement. I think it's better than rapamycin in terms of longevity benefits, although I am intrigued about rapamycin. So I call it vitamin G. And I call it vitamin G because it's a vitamin gratitude. My shirt has it right there, gratitude. So the question is, Robert, what do you have vitamin G for today? What are you grateful for today?

Speaker 1: 58:36

Wow, I'm grateful to have friends like you and be on this podcast. I'm grateful for my family and my kids and I'm grateful for the knowledge that this information is changing and the possible benefit it can have on people's lives so they don't get these chronic diseases unnecessarily so important and you're doing a great job empowering people and helping them understand that it's not a chronic progressive disease.

Speaker 2: 59:09

You got control. Your DNA is not your destiny. I cannot wait for the book to be released into the world. So, for those who are watching and listening, share this episode with a friend, robert. You also have a podcast. Share a little bit more about your podcast and your YouTube channel as well.

Speaker 1: 59:23

Yeah, yeah, we have a video podcast that Ben was on recently and it comes out once a week and I think we're gonna have this episode on our podcast as well. You've got such great questions, as always, ben, so we're gonna include it there.

Speaker 2: 59:41

Thank you, I appreciate that and I'm gonna put that in the notes down below so everybody go subscribe to Dr Robert's YouTube channel and podcast. We're also gonna be speaking together at a conference Biohacking Expo in February of 2024 in Miami. I'll put details down below. So, robert and we'll do a round two in person, so can't wait to see you.

Speaker 3: 1:00:00

Thank you so?

Speaker 2: 1:00:00

much for the research you put into your book and for coming on the show and educating us today, brother.

Speaker 1: 1:00:05

Yeah, thanks so much, ben. I'm a huge fan of your work and your show and thank you for all the great that you're, the good that you're doing in the world.

Speaker 2: 1:00:15

Likewise, thank you, brother.

Speaker 3: 1:00:17

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