Dr. Ben Bikman

I can't help but wonder whether insulin has been somehow facilitative to promoting some degree of visceral growth because insulin wants to promote fat growth.

It wants to.

It's like a fertilizer for fat cells.

And so someone who's wanting to overdose on insulin in an effort to promote muscle when you're just maybe enhancing some anti-proteolytic effect, I'd say there are better ways to do it.

Like, not that I'm endorsing any intervention like this, but you'd be better off just focusing on growth hormone than you would injecting yourself with insulin.

So I am not a fan.

Now, I appreciate some big yoked bodybuilder looking at relatively svelte small Ben Bickman and saying, well, what do you know?

Maybe I don't know a lot.

Right.

Well, there's no question.

It's a bit of a shortcut.

And I'm worried about the long-term effects.

So with GLP-1, I have had my finger on the pulse of GLP-1 probably since, well, not since its inception, but since the late 90s, early 2000s.

My PhD lab was one of the first labs funded in the U.S.

looking at the study of incretins by a drug company.

And so I've long been familiar with GLP-1 and the other incretins, incretin being a word to describe these gut-derived hormones that have metabolic effects.

But it's been interesting for me to note the evolution in their use because originally they were only used as anti-diabetic drugs.

And then what was considered kind of an off-target effect of controlling satiety is now the mechanism of action at these much higher doses as the dose has been multiplied up to the kind of current Wegovy weight loss dose.

So it's really just been an evolution in the dose of semaglutide for the most part, although there are other glutides that fit in this as well, but semaglutide is the main one.

So at the lower dose,