Dr. Ben Bikman

What about humans?

In fact, humans provide the most convincing evidence of all that you cannot get fat unless insulin is elevated because one of the more common eating disorders among young people with type 1 diabetes is a condition called diabulimia.

which is this terrible, tragic scenario where the person feels such pressure to be lean, and they have learned that that little syringe of insulin is the absolute gatekeeper of the fat cell.

So they will deliberately underdose their insulin in order to stay as thin as they want.

They can eat as much as they want

And as long as they underdose their insulin, and it's not even at zero, they're just doing a deliberately lower dose, they will be as skinny as they want.

Now there's metabolic hell to pay, right?

They're hyperglycemic, they're getting into ketoacidosis, so they're dying, but they'll be as thin as they want.

So as much as people wanna say, no, it's just calories, we have a human case study that absolutely proves that wrong.

that it's not just calories.

Now, having said all that, I'm not claiming calories don't matter because on the other hand, if you just have high insulin in the absence of sufficient calories coming in, that's also incompatible with life and the person will die.

Because if you and I were fasting, in fact, Dr. George Cahill did these studies about 40 years ago.

You could never get IRB approval to do it now.

He would fast men for days and then give them an insulin dose and drive their glucose levels down to about 20 milligrams per deciliter just to see how low could the glucose get and the person maintains consciousness.

And they did.

But suffice it to say, if you spike insulin, which is telling the body to store energy, but there's not energy coming in,

then the total energy available in the blood drops to essentially zero.

Glucose goes down to zero, ketones go to zero, fatty acids go to zero because you're inhibiting lipolysis, you're inhibiting ketogenesis, you're stimulating glucose uptake.

Now the brain has no energy because it doesn't have a reserve of energy like the liver or the fat cells or the muscle.

And so as blood energy goes to essentially zero, the brain shuts off.