Dr. Chris Masterjohn explains why reactive oxygen species aren't always bad, how nutritional deficiencies block your body's ability to clear harmful aldehydes, and why insulin actually protects you from aging damage by keeping blood glucose stable.
If you're going to throw something under the bus, don't throw fats or carbohydrates under the bus. Throw the reactive oxygen species under the bus. But before you do that, step back and say, hey, wait a second. Actually, reactive oxygen species play physiological roles. We do want them in small amounts in the right context. What we don't want is them in large amounts in the wrong context. Are there specific nutritional deficiencies that would cause you to not be able to get rid of small aldehydes or to produce more of them than you should be producing? There are, yeah. And, I mean, there are so many different things that feed into this pathway that it's hard to sort of wrap your brain around them all. And if you were to map it out, you could take like a, you know, a wall and make a poster on a wall and have this whole interacting of many complex pathways mapped out there. And even looking at it visually would hard be hard to understand everything. But if we could sort of tease out a few practical things, I would list a handful of them. So, first of all, before we get to micronutrients, let's talk about carbohydrate. One of the reasons that it's so misleading to talk about glucose as the enemy in terms of forming ages, is that insulin is actually the most protective factor that you can have against the formation of ages. Really? So you don't want to be insulin resistant.
But you also don't want to be insulin deficient. Right. So people can get so obsessed with insulin resistance that they're trying to minimize their insulin production by never giving their body carbohydrate. But if your cells are super sensitive to insulin and there's no insulin there, then what good does that sensitivity give you? As it turns out that, you know, first of all, in the pathways where ages are derived indirectly from glucose, that's mostly happening in the blood rather than inside cells. And insulin helps take glucose out of the blood and stabilize your blood glucose. And so being sensitive to insulin, having insulin there is protective in that way. Inside cells, it's mainly methylglyoxal that's causing advanced glycation end products. But insulin, you know, I told you before that when the intermediates in the glycolytic pathway accumulate, that's when you get methylglyoxal. Insulin stimulates.
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