Dr. Ben Bikman explains what actually causes insulin resistance. Refined starches and sugars drive it more than seed oils do, though polyunsaturated fats can worsen inflammation. The debate over which matters most misses that both play a role in metabolic health.
Shannon. Hey, Ben. I'd love your opinion on the idea that insulin resistance comes from the inflammatory response of seed oils. Dr. Kate Shanahan just put a post on X stating that the oxidative stress induced by the toxins in seed oils is what's causing insulin resistance, not carbs. I actually have a lot of respect for Kate. We've never met. We've exchanged some brief correspondence in the past. I have a lot of respect for her and her efforts to bring to light the ills of polyunsaturated fats, particularly linoleic acid. However, the seed oil crowd, if. If I can kind of lump them all into one, they sort of want to have their cake and eat it, too. So they want to claim on one hand that seed oils are the cause of all insulin resistance, and yet there's another contingent within the seed oil cohort that says the reason seed oils are more fattening than poly linoleic acid is more fattening than saturated fats is because it doesn't make the fat cells insulin resistant. Have you guys heard this? Because if a fat cell becomes insulin resistant, it does start to correct or check its own growth. A fat cell can only continue to get fat insofar as it can maintain its insulin sensitivity. So if a fat cell becomes insulin resistant, it becomes. It becomes limited in its growth. So I hope you can see. Let me just take that one more time so that you can see the. The kind of paradox that they've created within that seed oil group. And I consider myself to be sort of seed oil adjacent because I do appreciate its pathogenicity, its harm, and yet I do not assign all ills to seed oil consumption. So again, you'd have someone like Dr. Shanahan, for whom I have tremendous respect, saying that seed oils are the cause of insulin resistance. And yet then you have others who say the reason seed oils are more fattening is that they do not promote insulin resistance and that allows the fat cells to continue to get big. Well, those two ideas clearly do not work. Now, let's challenge what she had said. There was a study published Lee et al. In 2006, and let me just tell you that the name of that study that's saturated but not N6 polyunsaturated fatty acids induce insulin resistance. So this was a rodent study here, and it's difficult to find humans correlates. But even in some of the human studies, the unsaturated. The polyunsaturated fats, when you're infusing them, which is not the same as eating, of course. They are generally the fat that causes the least level of insulin resistance. It pains me to say this, but when you directly infuse saturated fats, and I've talked about this before, and it's too big of a topic to revisit now, Please look at some of the metabolic classroom on this on the insulin IQ YouTube channel. When you infuse saturated fats, it causes insulin resistance. Now, that's not the same as eating them, of course. That's the problem. And I touched on that in other episodes that I've done. So. Yeah. Anyway, to. To claim then that eating the, the polyunsaturated fats directly causes insulin resistance, that. That is not true. Now, it can do a lot of other things. It really can, and these are very harmful molecules, and I'm an advocate of avoiding them. But to claim that they're causing insulin resistance, I do not find that evidence very compelling. Um, because in vivo evidence does not support it, like giving the animals or giving the humans the fat. I'm unaware of evidence that shows it's causing insulin resistance. And I indeed am aware of evidence showing that it doesn't. Now, to, to then dump on the carbs. There are studies to show in healthy individuals, you have them simply overeat. Let me, let me be clear here, because a lot of people want to say, well, there are these groups of people around the world where they eat a higher carb diet and they're insulin sensitive. The reason I point the finger at carbs is because carbs are what's going to spike insulin the most. And so as much as I am pointing the finger at refined starches and sugars, it's only because of what it's doing to the underlying hyperinsulinemia. And so if a person's eating a high carb diet, but they're very kind of fibrous tuber, you know, vegetables or whatever, and they're eating them infrequently or whatever. I have no problem with that because it's really, the question is, what is this doing to the insulin? But you can take healthy individuals, have them overeat carbs for one week, and their insulin levels go up by two and a half times, even in a fasted state. So I don't like to say that it's the carbs causing the insulin resistance. It's the insulin causing the insulin resistance. Anyway, so that's. This is big here. But Shannon, you'd mentioned the inflammatory response. Inflammation is a primary cause of insulin resistance. And yet even still, in the animal study I just mentioned, Lee et al. And in some human studies, you do not see immediate insulin resistance that comes from eating the higher linoleic acid diet. As much as I think they're problematic and I even mention them in my book, both books, I think a person, while they should be avoiding. The nice thing about this is I often think that we are sort of picking a strange battle because if you are avoiding refined starches and sugars, that's where you get those seed oils. Overwhelmingly. If you look at that label on that, on that container of the, the bag or the box with the barcode where you're getting your refined starches and sugars, the fat is going to be soybean oil or so called vegetable oil, always. And so just as you end up, as you control your carbs, to me, which is rule number one for improving insulin sensitivity, inherent in that is this reality that you're also actually restricting your seed oils too, because that's where most people are getting them. You know, if, if you choose to not eat french fries, then yeah, sure, you're losing, you're removing the insulin induced, the insulin spike from the refined starches of the potato, but you're also getting rid of the oil in which those potatoes were fried. You know, so they end up just coming together. If you're restricting your consumption of potato chips, yes, you're removing the starches of the potato, but you're also avoiding the oils in which the potato chips were fried, et cetera.
