Dr. Ben Bikman

That to me is a pretty big win.

And that touches on something that's become a theme for my lab where if you'll allow me very briefly – we'll try to be brief.

I'm not very good at that.

But over 100 years ago –

two famous legendary scientists, Francis Benedict, who you and I may recall wrote, created what's called the Benedict equation, which is an equation that is still used to this day to try to assess metabolic rate based on someone's body size.

So the Benedict equation, this legend of energy expenditure

He collaborated with Elliot P. Joslin, the most famous endocrinology clinic in the world, the Joslin Diabetes Center is named after him.

So you had these two legends in their own realm who tried to understand the metabolism of people in what they called severe diabetes, which we would call type 1.

They found that their metabolic rate was about 20% too high.

And then years later, when insulin began to be a therapy, a group at Minnesota, the first authors, Nair, Sri Nair, N-A-I-R, they not only confirmed the findings from 60 or 70 years earlier that in type 1 diabetes, the metabolic rate is too high.

Like something's broken.

They're burning too hot.

But when you gave them insulin, within minutes, the metabolic rate began to slow down.

And so all of this, back to that study from 2021, the reason I even brought all of this up is to me that's further evidence of the lower insulin gets, like with a low-carb diet, the more metabolic wiggle room a person has where energy expenditure is up by several hundred calories a day.

And we found in human work that part of it is because the fat tissue starts having a much higher metabolic rate when insulin comes down.

There's much more mitochondrial uncoupling there.

So the engine is just revving and revving and burning energy just to create heat.

But at the same time, the more you're making ketones, the more you're expelling those ketones, and ketones are calories.

And so maybe those 700 calories a day that the low-carb group was eating in excess, the fact that they only had one other pound of fat could be that they were just burning the rest off because of these metabolic advantages.

Absolutely.