The following is the full transcript of Dr. Sten Ekberg’s talk titled “Top 10 Secrets To Reverse Insulin Resistance Naturally”, (Sep 2, 2022).
Listen to the audio version here:
DR. STEN EKBERG: Hello Health Champions. If you’re watching this today, you are probably insulin resistant because that’s something that affects most of the world’s population today. So we’re going to talk about in simple terms what insulin resistance really is. And if you stay with me to the end and you really understand and apply these 10 secrets to reverse insulin resistance, then you won’t have to be one of the victims.
Understanding Insulin Resistance
The biggest part about reversing insulin resistance is to understand what it is and what it is not. So first of all, it is the most common disease in the world. And it is also the disease that claims the most lives. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most poorly diagnosed, the most misunderstood, and the most mismanaged.
But unlike what you will hear or read when you do a search into this topic, they say that it is not curable, it is not reversible. But that is a misunderstanding. And the hopeful thing is that if you understand what we’re talking about today, it is also one of the most easily reversed conditions.
If we do a Google search for insulin resistance, it’s going to reveal the first problem. Because right away, they’re going to talk about glucose, they’re going to talk about glucose in the blood, and they’ll explain that insulin resistance is when insulin doesn’t work, or we fail to respond to insulin, and therefore blood glucose increases. And if you notice, all the focus is on blood glucose. But that’s not what the condition starts with. That’s not the first thing. That’s the last thing.
So what they’re saying on this page is that insulin resistance leads to increased blood glucose. And that is absolutely true. I’m not disputing that in any way. But they are starting with the last step. They’re focusing all about blood glucose. That’s how they diagnose it, that’s all they measure, that’s all they treat. They’re missing the bigger picture, and they get this backwards.
The Root Cause: Overload
Because if you’re going to describe insulin resistance in one word, it would be, in my opinion, it would be overload. And when we overload the body with carbohydrate, with things that stimulate insulin, now we get a high insulin level. And that’s not so bad if it happens once or twice. But if this becomes chronic, if we do this every day or several times a day like we’re told to do, we’re told to eat high carbohydrate meals many times a day with frequent snacks, now this leads to insulin resistance. And now we have a chronic condition. But the blood glucose that they measure is the last thing to focus on.
We need to understand that insulin resistance is a survival mechanism. And it happens on two different levels. First of all, it’s at the species level. So if humans didn’t have the ability to develop a little bit of insulin resistance, we wouldn’t be as good at storing energy.
So back when we were hunter-gatherers, when we had a lot to eat maybe in the summer and not so much in the winter, it was a good thing to be a little insulin resistant because that would allow us to overeat and to store the extra energy for future use. If we were a little extra padded with fat, we could survive the winter better. If you were super insulin sensitive and you couldn’t put on a lot of fat, you might have a six pack to show off, but you may not make it through the winter. But that’s not so much a problem anymore, I think you would agree.
Insulin Resistance at the Cellular Level
And the insulin resistance we talk about today is more about the cellular level. And that is what we need to have a look at. So when you eat something, let’s say that you have a pile of food and you ingest that. Let’s call that 400 calories. And let’s say that this is pure carbohydrate, just for purpose of illustration. So that would be 100 grams of carbohydrate. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot because most people eat many times that every day.
But we have to realize that this has to be absorbed into the bloodstream, into our vascular system. And we have miles of blood vessels and they hold a total of about five liters of blood or about a gallon and a half. But that entire blood volume, if we have 100 milligrams of glucose per deciliter, that amounts to a total of about three grams, a little bit more than half a teaspoon. And if we convert that to calories, that would be 12 calories of blood glucose at any given time.
And it is terrible. It’s an emergency if we allow that to rise very much. If that gets up to even double, then we have very, very poor glucose tolerance. Our system, our physiology is basically broken. We can’t handle it. We’re carbohydrate intolerant if that even gets up to 24 calories. And yet we have to get these 400 calories through the bloodstream quickly.
And some of this 400 calories will be used up in real time. But most of it, we have to get into the bloodstream, into the tissues and then store it. So we can store it in one of two ways. First way is that we store it as carbohydrates. So we basically take these glucose molecules and we chain them together into glycogen. And now we can store them in a type of container, if you will. And the muscles is one container and the liver is another container.
But all in all, we can store about 1,500 calories of carbohydrate in the body.
That’s all. And I mean, that sounds a lot compared to the 12 calories in the bloodstream. But if you realize that you use up about 2,000 calories in a day, then your total carbohydrate wouldn’t even last you one day.
So how do we survive longer periods without food? And that is because most of this is going to get stored as fat. And these containers are not proportional by size or anything. But the fat container can hold almost unlimited amounts of fat. So if you’re very heavy, you can have hundreds of thousands, maybe over a half a million calories of fat stored.
So the insulin takes the blood glucose, it stores glycogen, it puts the glucose into the fat cells where it’s converted into fat for future storage. And insulin is a wonderful thing that allows us to store this extra energy.
How We Develop Insulin Resistance
But I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that too much of a good thing is not so good. And what happens if this container starts filling up, if we eat a bunch of carbohydrates and we keep storing this because we’re always in overfeeding mode, then pretty soon this container is going to fill up. And once it starts overflowing, once it’s full, that cell says for survival purposes that I don’t want anymore. If you push more stuff into me, then I’m going to burst. And that is literally what happens eventually.
But before that happens, this container starts leaking. It starts overflowing because we’re just pushing too much into it. And it’s the excess insulin that does that. And then the body starts to resist the action of insulin because it says I’m too full. I don’t want that insulin to push more stuff in me.
But the body is desperate because it has to get that glucose out of the bloodstream because it’s extremely toxic to the brain. It can get into a coma with too much blood sugar. So the body is desperate to get it out of the bloodstream so it makes more and more and more insulin to fill up this container. And the container says, no, I’ve had enough. And this is how we develop insulin resistance.
And this is where a lot of people get confused because they hear that this is primarily a fat cell that gets filled up. It starts leaking and it starts signaling that it’s insulin resistance. And this message spreads to other tissues. So it sort of signals a spreading tendency of insulin resistance in the body.
Fat Is Not The Problem
So people erroneously think it’s about the fat cell. Therefore, fat is the problem. But again, they get it backwards because it didn’t start with the fat. It’s not the fat that filled up the fat cell. It’s the glucose that through the influence of insulin was converted into fat. So it’s the high carbohydrate consumption. It is the high insulin level that stuffs that cell too full.
So insulin resistance is not caused by fat. And this may be the biggest health problem we have today, that we have a fat phobia. And there’s so much recent research that says that the more saturated fat you eat, the lower your insulin levels, the less insulin
The longer you live with less insulin resistance, the less cardiovascular disease and inflammation you have. So it’s exactly contrary to what we hear because we have a fat phobia. We have decided once and for all that fat’s the bad guy. And then we kind of stop using our common sense and understanding how physiology works. But if it’s not fat causing it, what is it primarily?
And the number one answer is sugar. Because sugar is 50% glucose, which stimulates, raises insulin. So starch and bread and rice, it’s all glucose. But sugar is even worse because 50% glucose raises insulin. The other 50% is fructose. And fructose is very similar to alcohol in the sense that fructose and alcohol can only be processed through the liver.
The vast majority has to go through the liver. And if we push all that volume, that’s enough fuel for a whole body basically, but we push it through a three pound organ, then the cells of that organ are going to overflow very quickly. And it used to be that only alcoholics could get a fatty liver. But today there’s an epidemic of fatty liver and type 2 diabetes in kids as young as teenagers or even younger than that. And for the most part, I’m sure it’s not because they’re alcoholics. It is because we feed them candy and cookies and soda.
So sugar and alcohol are primarily responsible for causing fatty liver and insulin resistance. But there’s also a lot of talk about carbohydrate and starch. And why is that? Because once you have started to become insulin resistant and your insulin levels are high and you feed your body starch, now that starch turns into glucose and you’re going to perpetuate, you’re going to constantly drive that insulin level higher and higher and higher. And to the extent that the body was ever able or wanting to clean out and burn through that fat, there’s that with chronically high insulin levels. So sugar and alcohol cause most of the problem, but starches and carbs contribute to it and perpetuate it.
Is Insulin Resistance Really a Mystery?
Insulin resistance is also not a mystery. And I understand why the American Diabetes Association would post an article like this and say that exactly why a person fails to respond properly is still a mystery. But this is more of a perspective that they are used to science and logic. They want to pin it down on a single mechanism that can define once and for all, there it is.
But if we step back a little bit and use some common sense and have a different perspective on the body, and we recognize that the body is infinitely intelligent. It is as smart as anything on the planet gets. It’s way, way, way smarter than we are or will ever be. It is perfect. It is incapable of making mistakes. The only thing the body knows is to follow the laws of physiology, to follow the laws of nature.
So if we analyze the statement a little bit and we look at these two words, properly and mystery, and we understand that physiology is as perfect as gravity. It is a law of nature. Then it is no way, there is no possibility for the body to act improperly. It only knows how to do things one way. And if we were to observe something that contradicted that, if we observed gravity and then one day we see a balloon floating up, then if we understand that gravity is consistent and can only do things one way, the perfect way, then we would explain that balloon by something else. We would understand that there are other forces at play.
Just like we would look at the body and say, I wonder why this cell is behaving that way. If we know that it can only behave perfectly, then we have to come up with another explanation and say maybe we are doing something that the body isn’t equipped to tolerate. The body only knows how to adapt. If we push it, it’s going to adapt. If we leave it alone, it’s going to return to balance. So maybe if we push it too far, maybe we just have to undo what we were doing. Stop creating that insult and the body would return to balance. And that is what we see happening.
Misunderstanding the Progression of Insulin Resistance
Here’s what Medical News Today says we have to know about insulin resistance. And it tries to outline what the current understanding is on how insulin resistance develops. And they say first, insulin loses its ability to support body cells effectively. So what they’re saying is, insulin resistance is where it starts. That’s the last step. Is there any wonder we’re in such a mess if that’s our current understanding? No.
First, we induce a stress on the body. Then the body adapts over a period of many, many, many years, often 10 years, 15, 20 years. Then we abuse the body. It adapts. It resists. And then we get to insulin resistance, which they think is the first step. And why do they think that? Because they only focus on blood sugar.
Number two, they say at first, the body responds by increasing insulin. Well, that’s what it does all along. When we eat too many carbohydrates and frequent meals, that is when it responds with a lot of insulin.
And number three, they say that eventually, as the body becomes more resistant, glucose levels go up. The body can’t keep up with making more insulin. And that is extremely rare because most people who are type 2 diabetics, they make tons and tons of insulin. But it’s more like the body’s intelligence, again, just throwing its hands up and said, I don’t know what you’re doing, but there’s only so much I can do. Sure, I could release more insulin, but what would be the point? All we’re doing is we’re exploding these poor fat cells.
Number four, they say that if we maintain these high blood sugar levels, then that can lead to prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Again, only focusing on blood sugar as if it was the blood sugar that led to the diabetes rather than the insulin resistance.
The Problem with Current Diabetes Treatment
And then they say this will happen unless we can get treatment and control blood sugar levels. So you see the problem. They’re focusing only on blood sugar as if that was some completely independent variable that had nothing to do with anything else going on or anything else that we are doing.
But if we stop focusing on the blood sugar and we start looking at what does the body adapt to over a period of many, many years, then it’s not a mystery. And we stop focusing on the blood sugar and we start looking at the whole system and the behavior.
And what they’re saying at the end here is basically that if a person was able to get treatment to control blood sugar, then we might be able to avoid the prediabetes and the diabetes. And this is the biggest fallacy of all because the treatment is aimed at blood sugar, not reversing insulin resistance. And therefore, insulin resistance treatment makes insulin resistance worse.
Now, at first, it’s not so bad. It’s not my favorite solution, but they give you metformin. And what this does is it helps the tissues become a little more insulin sensitive. So it helps bring some of the glucose down without increasing so much insulin. But it doesn’t help reverse the problem in the least bit because the problem is still that we were putting more in the system than it could burn up. And the metformin isn’t going to change that in any way. It will just buy us a little bit of time.
So the metformin will improve somewhat temporarily. And it really won’t bring the A1C down, but it will probably take a little bit longer before it gets worse. But eventually, it kind of loses its effect because we keep doing the thing that caused the problem. And then the only solution they have left is to inject insulin or to give you something to stimulate your body’s own insulin production.
And what’s the problem with that? Well, the problem is that we were already doing something to create chronically high insulin levels. So if you take a fasting insulin test, then a healthy level for someone who’s very insulin sensitive, ideally insulin sensitive, is somewhere between 2 and 5. And before they get to that point where they give them additional insulin, their insulin levels are already at around 25 to 30. So they’re basically 8 to 10 times higher than a healthy level. These people are not short on insulin. They have too much. They have way too much. And what happens now when we give them more?
We are making the problem worse because we’re giving them more of the thing that created the problem in the first place. So basically, what we’re doing is by focusing purely on treating blood sugar, then we’re making the blood sugar a little bit better at the expense of health, at the expense of making the problem worse.
And if you seek help for insulin resistance, the first thing they’re going to tell you is that it would help if you lost weight. And that’s probably true, but you can’t because your insulin is too high and insulin keeps packing that fat cell full. And now when they give you insulin, when they inject insulin or give you something to stimulate more insulin, they are automatically and every time making you gain weight.
So the treatment does the opposite of what they tell you would help to get healthy. As a result, you will most likely die sooner because this treatment of increasing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome is going to increase two to three fold the rate of cardiovascular disease and stroke and Alzheimer’s and high blood pressure and so on.
Conclusion
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