30: Control Fat by Burning Fat with Dr. Ben Bikman

So, all right, we're going to move right in to Dr. Bickman's metabolic classroom. And each week, Dr. Bickman prepares and puts us in our seats in our classroom. And I'll turn the time over to Dr. Bickman.

Yeah, great, thanks. So this study, I thought, was timely. It's an old one, actually. It's almost 30 years old, but it is timely. It seems every year, certainly around the beginning of the new year, where I've had this study in mind, as I've imagined so many people making their New Year's resolutions, which so often, justifiably, will revolve around controlling body weight naturally. The question is how to best do that. And there is so much obsession. I think that's the best word on metabolic rate, and that's reflective of our obsession on just calorie number and this idea that you have to always be in a caloric deficit in order to be losing weight. And to achieve that caloric deficit, you need to exercise more and you need to eat less calories or fewer calories. And that always means eat less fat, get fewer of those calories from fat, and so focus on carbohydrates, for example. That's typically the way these things go. This study, it's a part of what is a bigger study known as the Baltimore Longitudinal Study, basically just tracking people as they age and seeing what's going on. Well, this small little aspect of the study looked at metabolic function and looked at weight changes over 10 years in these study subjects. Now, one weakness of the study is that they only included men. And so we could debate on the merits of that, and then some might want to then debate on the relevance in women. And I can't refute that debate. I will just say this is what we know, and hopefully someday we know more. What they did at the beginning of this study, at year zero, if you will, they measured resting metabolic rate, the metabolic rate that everyone's obsessed with. And I'll elaborate more on that in a moment. And then they also measured respiratory exchange ratio, and I'll elaborate on that more in a subsequent moment. So, firstly, resting metabolic rate is metabolic rate. As people talk about it, when someone's getting older, they gain more weight, and then they say, oh, my metabolism slowed down. That's always the excuse. My metabolism slowed down. I graduated from high, from college. I, you know, I got a job, you know, and I'm sitting down all day. My metabolism slowed down.

It's funny. Dr. Ben, sorry to interrupt you, but, Carly, how often in our coaching sessions do we Hear that?

You know, when people come in, not having understood this, that's always what they say, always.

My metabolism is so slow, it slowed down.

Yep. And that's part of the power of the study. Why I find it so compelling is because it really shoots that idea down. First of all, just some basics on metabolic rate. First of all, it actually doesn't tell you all the energy that you're expending. It gives you an idea of what you're expending, but it doesn't tell you what you're wasting. For example, if a person is making ketones, then they're breathing out these ketones or urinating out ketones. That is a totally unaccounted for outlet energy. But that's. Let's put that aside. That can be a topic for another time. But the truth is that the bigger a body is getting, the higher the metabolic rate. And the smaller the body is getting, the lower the metabolic rate. Now that's some of the truth with metabolic rate. Now let's briefly just mention and define respiratory exchange ratio. This is a test that can be done clinically or academically in a lab, but you do need some equipment to do it. Basically, the person is hooked up to this breathing apparatus. And if you could imagine those videos or those images of when someone's on a bike or on a treadmill and they have these tubes hooked up into their mouth that they're breathing in and out of, that's what this can do. Basically, the respiratory exchange ratio is an indicator by measuring your oxygen and your CO2 of which fuel you're burning. Briefly, the higher the RER, the closer it is to one, and in some instances even a little above one, the more reflective that is of a sugar burning state, or in other words, the vast majority of the energy that your body is using at that moment is coming from glucose or blood sugar. In contrast, the lower that number is closer to around 0.6 as the way this ratio is going. And I won't get into the details of that, but that is more reflective of the body being predominantly fueled by fat. So the higher the rer, the more the person is a sugar burner in that moment. The lower the rer, the more the person has shifted and they are presently more of a fat burner. All right, so that's some of the background. And so we're looking at these two key outcomes in this study. And then of course, the third variable they were looking at was just body weight changes and that's self explanatory. So the details of the study, they took these guys who have a tremendous age range from about 20 years old almost to 100 years old, and then they followed them for 10 years. And at year zero, they measured these variables, their body weight, their metabolic rate and their respiratory exchange ratio, or rer, to get an idea of what fuel they're burning predominantly. And then they did a follow up and then at 10 years out, they then took all that data and did an analysis and across. Now into the results of this, across all of the body weights, whether the guy came in and he was already really big or he was already lean, metabolic rate had zero predictive power. In order with this sort of prospective view of who gained the most or least amount of weight, you would expect, given our obsession on metabolic rate and how readily people use it as an excuse for their weight gain, that that the people with the lower metabolic rate would have gained the most weight. And in contrast, those with the highest metabolic rate would have gained the least amount or maybe even lost weight. That didn't happen. Metabolic rate had no predictive value. It in no way correlated with who gained the most or the least amount of weight. That's a powerful conclusion and it's one that I hope all the listeners take away. And they change their own excuses, if I may be a little bold, or their own description of their body weight changes and they correct their friends. And it'll make you wonderfully popular at parties when you tell them, oh, metabolic rate has nothing to do with it, you just got fat. I'll tell you what has to do with it. Of course, I say that facetiously. My wife has hit my foot under the table many times at social gatherings, so don't do that. Now, what you can say, if you do feel so inclined to correct your, your family member or friend, you could say, well, you just were burning too much sugar. And that's to the other part of this study that I think is really powerful. What did predict weight gain was people having a higher rer. And you'll remember that the higher RER was reflective of someone who is a sugar burner, as I like to say, where they're predominantly burning or relying on glucose as the key fuel for all their metabolic processes across all the cells in the body. So again, the people that had the higher rer, the sugar burners, gained the most weight. In contrast, the people with the lower rer, remember, that is not metabolic rate. The lower RER means that these people were burning more fat, but they didn't have a higher metabolic rate that had nothing to do with it, they just were burning fat as the primary fuel. They gained the least amount of weight. And in fact, the group with the higher rer, as they kind of stratified this RER up in the sugar burners, being on the top end of this, the higher rer group were two and a half times more likely over these 10 years to gain a substantial amount of weight over 10 pounds. That was sort of considered the high end of that 10 year weight gain. And this was 30 years ago. So people weren't as big as, or gaining as much weight as they are now, if that seems a little underwhelming. But again, they were two and a half times more likely to gain the highest amount of weight if they were so called sugar burners. Now those are the findings. That's where the study ends. And this was a beautifully on Figure 1. If anyone has access to the manuscript, you can see this beautifully playing out across this stratification of RER where the people with the lower rer, in other words, the fat burners, always, always had the least amount if they were either losing weight or they gained the least amount of weight. And in contrast, it just steadily climbed up in this beautiful line where the people with the higher rer, the sugar burners, were always gaining the most weight. Now, lest anyone accuse me of only sharing science and nothing practical, I'll take a step into Rich and Carly's territory and say, well, what might someone do with this? And then much rely on Carly to tell them how to do it. But I would just say simply become a fat burner. Don't worry about your metabolic rate. There's really nothing you can do about that. But you can intimately control the fuel that you're burning. You can, you can alter that. You can shift that, that hybrid engine away from sugar burning rapidly, I would say within hours, certainly within days, you can shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. And the key variable that will dictate which fuel the metabolic engine is relying on is a hormone that we just don't discuss enough, a little known hormone called insulin. Insulin is the key variable that will dictate, I mean, absolutely a firm grasp on that on that fuel line. It will determine what your metabolic engine is burning. If insulin is elevated, you are a sugar burner. If insulin is down, you are a fat burner. And so the logical step is lower your insulin. Then that result that leads to the question, how do I lower my insulin? Where there's some easy, I think, not easy, simple, I'll say Simple, because it's not necessarily easy. Control your carbohydrates, prioritize protein, fill with fat, and hurry up and fast. These are these simple ideas, not always easy to implement. But if, if a person really just is controlling their carbohydrates and focusing on protein and fat as the primary macronutrients in their diet, insulin will come down and the body will start fat burning. And the person, I'm sure everyone listening to this is thinking, well, of course, that makes all the sense in the world. Good, I hope it does. Don't worry about your metabolic rate. You can't directly really influence that. You can change the fuel you are burning by changing what's getting in your body. I like to say the old adage is you are what you eat. Bs you burn what you eat. And if you're eating fat, you're a fat burner. If you're eating glucose, even if you have fat in that glucose, you've become a glucose burner and you're burning the glucose. You're a sugar burner at the moment. And all that fat has no choice but to be stored. And so don't think that, well, if I eat more fat, Ben says, if I eat more fat, I'm going to be a fat burner. So I'm just going to add a little more. What would they do, a little more cream onto my banana split or something? Because the cream is pure fat. That won't work. If you've mixed glucose and fat, the glucose wins and you're a glucose, you're a sugar burner. So in order to be a fat burner, you focus on fat without the carbohydrate. That's the way to be a fat burner. There you go. That's the best way. Over 10 years, this study suggests if you want to gain the least amount or indeed lose weight, become a fat burner.

Your last statement was really interesting. I think a lot of our clients who do this long term, they end up having this problem where they've developed a new relationship with fat. They're now not scared of fat. They come in very fearful of adding more fat, but once they're done with us, they're not fearful. And so they leave. And often you'll see somebody who will come back after a year or something and say, I've gained more weight than I lost. And the problem, you see that with a lot of diets. But I think what's happening with the low carb protocol is a little different. What's happening is, like you said, People will go back to their old lifestyle, but without the fear of fat. They'll add fat to their old lifestyle and now all of a sudden they'll be high fat, high carb, thinking that they're doing good because the fat was good in their last. When they were with us, the fat was doing good. You can't combine those two fuels and see success because sugar will always be burned first. Like you said, if you're burning sugar, then you're in storage mode. Basically, your body's just going to put all that fat away for later. It's not going to burn through it.

Yep, yep. And in nature, protein and carbohydrate and fat really don't come together. I think the only exception would be full fat dairy or natural dairy, which I say it's high in all three macronutrients, which makes it the perfect cocktail for growth, which is why every mammalian mom is preparing this for little brand new baby to help baby grow as quickly as possible. It is the perfect mix of all three macronutrients. In other words, high in all three to fuel and foster growth. Other than that, you really don't have carbohydrate and fat coming together naturally. But that is a wicked combination. Wicked both in the sense that it's terrible for our metabolic health. So I mean that in a negative sense. And then to kind of rely on the 80s definition. It's also wicked in a wonderful way because it's so good, it's so delicious, but it's a hack, if you will. We've sort of bypassed what nature would have intended by putting those two fuels together all the time in every processed food.

And we talk a lot about different other foods. Ben, when. I know. I've heard you give many lectures and we've had many streams where we've talked about something as simple as an egg. An egg is. You've talked about it being the perfect mix of protein and fat, because protein and fat come together in lots of great ways, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. All the best. So the demonstrably, objectively best proteins for humans. Well, any animal, really, well, that could eat them. So I'll go back to humans. So I'm being totally accurate here. The best proteins for humans are dairy, meat and eggs. And they all come with fat. And the fat, nature has them come together. God knew what he was doing when he put them together. And the body is built to handle those together. The fat helps them, the body digests the protein better, and the fat helps the protein be more anabolic. You're actually building muscle better by having protein and fat together than just, say, getting a scoop of whey and chugging that down.

And Ben, thank you for the metabolic classroom topic today. It was really, really interesting. We appreciate it. And to kind of tie a little bow on that. Before we move on to some of your questions, we have in our audience, we have the full spectrum. We have folks that are, that are very familiar with the science and have read all of Dr. Beckman's work and are very much on that end of the spectrum. We have lots of people that are so new to this whole space. So if you're new, don't be discouraged by thinking, oh, it's so scientific, it's so hard to understand. Just do one thing. Go take our free preview course@insuliniq.com and it's so easy to understand the fundamental foundation and the basis for all of this to actually apply. Start applying it in your life. We encourage you to do that if you're certainly, if you're new to this, and it'll help you kind of get this balance between this scientific stuff and the practical application. Okay.