AI Mark argues that 93.2% of Americans have poor metabolic health. He says fasting insulin is the single most important test to measure, since high insulin predicts diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer, and dementia, yet most doctors never check it.
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The biggest problem facing America today is poor metabolic health, a condition that affects 93.2% of Americans and most of them have no frickin clue. So one of the things we look at when we look at blood sugar, that's great, but by the time your blood sugar goes up, your horse is way out of the barn. By the time you see elevations in blood sugar, you've already probably been in poor metabolic health for a decade or two and your body has compensated for it. And your blood sugar only goes up when you stop compensating for it. So what else should you measure to know what's going on with your metabolic health? Well, the single most important test, I think, particularly for longevity, is something called insulin. Now, sadly, even though I've been measuring this for 30 years, for the most part people don't look at insulin. Yet. When you look at the scientific literature, elevated insulin levels are extraordinarily predictive of bad health outcomes. Diabetes, heart attack, strokes, cancer, dementia, you name it, pretty much everything related to aging. So high insulin levels are easy to measure, but almost never measured. Unless you're going to a functional medicine doctor, you're probably not going to get that test.
