Dr. Ben Bikman

For example, the connection between insulin resistance and breast and prostate cancers, the two most common cancers in women and men respectively.

I'm not saying insulin resistance is the singular contributor.

Not at all.

But it is absolutely a contributor.

With regards to Alzheimer's disease, insulin is not probably the singular contributor, but it is one, undeniably.

And the same goes for polycystic ovary syndrome, the most common infertility in women, or erectile dysfunction in men, and fatty liver disease and hypertension.

So when I...

In fact, this question is the question I asked myself as an academic at my university.

When I got tenure, I thought – I looked at my future career and I thought, do I want my career to be defined by the number of peer-reviewed papers I publish in science journals?

And I thought, no, that's not enough because most people will never read those articles.

No one will ever get a direct benefit from them.

And I thought, what would be the one message as a biomedical metabolic scientist that I would want to convey to people?

And it was this one.

It was that to some degree, most of chronic disease can be attributed to one common origin.

And so rather than...

trimming at the branches of this sick tree where we are giving the patient a drug for their Alzheimer's disease.

We're giving them a drug for their hypertension.

We're giving them a drug for their infertility.

What if all of those were actually just branches coming off of one tree?

Let's just cut down the tree.