Dr. Rhonda Patrick

For one, insulin in the brain plays a very important role.

And that role is to basically tell the body how to store fat and how to use energy and whether or not you're satiated after eating a meal.

And what happens is when you're insulin resistant in the brain,

it all gets messed up.

And so your body starts to store fat, not as what's called subcutaneous fat, that kind of fat that you can pinch and see.

It's visceral fat.

This is the belly fat.

This is the fat that's deeply surrounding your organs.

This is the very dangerous type of fat because this fat is metabolically active.

It is generating inflammation.

It is

constantly being metabolized in what's called free fatty acids, which then cause insulin resistance, right?

And so what happens is that these individuals, these healthy young men, all of a sudden, even though they didn't really gain much weight on the scale, they gained visceral fat.

And they were no longer satiated.

So what happens is when you become insulin resistant, both in the brain and in the body, so visceral fat gaining, they were gaining fat around their liver.

I mean, they were gaining fat, this visceral fat that is really, really dangerous.

That visceral fat, what happens is every time you eat a meal that's got a lot of glucose, for example, refined ultra processed meal,

Your body makes insulin, but you're insulin resistant, so you're not able to respond to that insulin.

And so what happens is your body overcompensates and produces – your pancreas causes more insulin to be released as an overcompensation to help your body bring that glucose into your muscle or into your adipose tissue.

And then what happens is your blood sugar crashes.