Dr. Ben Bikman explains how insulin controls fat storage and ketone production. Low insulin levels increase metabolic rate and trigger ketone production, which shifts how your body burns fuel. The video covers biomedical research on weight loss and the mechanics of fat metabolism.
Sherry, in the absence of insulin or low insulin and not type 1 diabetes, and you eat more fat than the body needs, will the body store this excess as fat or burn as ketones? Sherry, I like that question and I appreciate it. One of the things that has frustrated me with regards to biomedical literature that has studied weight loss is that it's always in fact studied weight loss. This results in people not knowing, is it calories or insulin? Because if you cut calories, you take an individual who's eating a standard American diet, and then you put them on a low calorie diet, they actually are eating less carbs than they were before as well. We commonly think that all of a sudden they're just eating less fat. No, they're eating less of everything. Guess what happens to insulin when you're eating less of everything? Insulin goes down. So there's this unavoidable, enormous confounding variable that prevents solid conclusions from any study that has ever attempted to tease out the caloric versus insulin view of obesity. Now, why do I say that? It's because you're touching on the other end, which I appreciate. I think to truly answer and understand the question of why we get fat, we need to try to make people fat. We need, rather than doing low calorie studies that compare low fat to low carb or the caloric view or the low insulin view, we need to try to make them fat and see which of these two diets a hypercaloric low fat diet or a hypercaloric low carb diet, which can result in the least amount of fat gain. This has been done and published, but only in an N1 single study. And it was a clinical case of one single individual. And so we are limited in what we can do. So to answer the question now with all of this, if insulin is low, it is impossible to store fat. It simply cannot work, and thus the body burns it. And it does so through two primary mechanisms. One, it increases its metabolic rate. This is very well established and we've known this for about 100 years. If insulin is low or absent, metabolic rate is much, much higher. Even more recently, David Ludwig has found this, and non diabetics give people two different meals that are the same in calorie number but differ in the fat to carb ratio. The lower the carbs, of course, the lower the insulin and the higher the metabolic rate. So we have an increased metabolic rate allowing the body to get rid of what it cannot store, but at the same time as you're burning more fat, because insulin is down, you're making more ketones because there's nothing to turn ketogenesis off. Or there's less ability to turn it off because insulin turns it off. And when ketones are high, ketones have a caloric value. And when you're making ketones, you start eliminating ketones. So every ketone that's coming out in the breath, every ketone that's being excreted in the urine, those are calories that are just directly dumping from the body, okay?
