Dr. Ben Bikman

And so you've deprived your brain in that acute moment.

of its primary fuels, glucose and ketones, although the brain does use lactate as a fuel as well, albeit to lower levels.

But if glucose and ketones have started to go low, that's going to be a panic at the brain because that is its two primary fuels.

And as I mentioned earlier, the brain doesn't have a reservoir of stored energy, a very, very modest amount, but its metabolic rate is so high that it

It needs constant supply.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a lot of that conversation, there's so many topics I could take with this.

And perhaps just to try to bring it to one common theme, I would describe the two ways in which a human can gain fat mass.

So earlier I'd mentioned, and it's a perfect opportunity to bring in different ethnicities, because different ethnicities will store fat differently.

And this all is underlying the earlier conversation of the slow insulin resistance, where I said it starts in the fat cell, and I very much advocate that view.

So why is it that Singapore, 15 years ago, was recruiting young scientists to come do diabetes research?

Where you look at the average body weight in Singapore and by American US standards, they're very lean people.

And that's reflective of all East Asians and many South Asians as well.

So India up through Japan and the Koreas.

Why is it that these are people with such low body weights?

And even low body fat levels, and yet their diabetes rates are way higher than we have in the US.

And that is the difference in how people store fat.

So if a human body is gaining fat mass, it will gain that fat mass through two different mechanisms.

It will either be a function of multiplying the fat cells, so the person will have the ability to make new fat cells.