Dr. Ben Bikman

So we have just the whole animal data so far.

And then the next step will be isolating individual particles to try to find out, all right, which culprit, if one culprit, is more to blame with regards to the e-cig exposure versus the cigarette.

Because it is different chemicals.

Yeah, I will.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

And I'll just mention one that you just mentioned, which is statins, just because of how common they are.

So there's no evidence that statins that I'm aware of are going to create weight gain.

But there are metabolic consequences to messing with cholesterol.

Lest people forget, cholesterol is a precursor to an essential component of the electron transport system.

And so it's no surprise that if people are waging war on cholesterol synthesis, the mitochondria may suffer.

And in women, middle-aged and older women have a 50% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes when they get on a statin.

That's a meaningful increased risk.

Women appear to be much more susceptible to the consequences of statins, metabolic consequences of statins, not to mention the increased risk of Alzheimer's and even certain cancers that come with statins.

Now, I'm not intending to sound like I don't think there's ever a place for statins, but I do think they're over-prescribed.

Now, more heavily metabolic, any steroid that's been prescribed to control inflammation is

is going to be deeply problematic for weight gain so if a person has an autoimmune disease or a chronic inflammatory condition and the clinician has prescribed a corticosteroid they're going to gain weight very very quickly because that starts to play on that stress pathway where the more cortisol is that pathways being activated which is what that's doing the more you're going to make the body insulin resistant higher insulin promotes fat gain and then just for the sake of time perhaps i just mentioned the atypical antipsychotics the any drug that ends with an

Apine, at the end of it, the suffix being A-P-I-N-E, is generally going to promote weight gain.

That's probably through a central insulin resistance of the hypothalamus.

When the hypothalamus becomes insulin resistant, you have a reduced satiety signal and the person's just going to start eating more.