Ask AI Mark explains how insulin resistance drives aging and metabolic disease. Reducing sugar and starch can activate sirtuins, genes that extend lifespan and improve insulin sensitivity.
The central feature of aging has to do with loss of metabolic resiliency. And the biggest cause of metabolic dysfunction is what we call insulin resistance, which means your body can't regulate your blood sugar and insulin. Your body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and you get higher insulin, higher blood sugar, and end up with diabetes. But here's what we know, that this can start 20 or 30 or 40 years before you even get diabetes. So we have this whole epidemic in this country of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes that affects every other American. One in two people have this 90% are not diagnosed. Not only that, children now have it. When I was going to medical school, we used to call it adult onset diabetes. We changed that. It used to be juvenile and adult onset. Now we have to change the name to call it type 2 diabetes because little kids were getting it. Now one in four teenagers have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. That's one in four kids. How does that make any sense? And it's because of a starch in the sugar in our diet. And what we're learning is that this insulin resistance phenomena is the central feature of aging, whether it's cancer or heart disease or dementia. These are all driven by this single phenomena of insulin resistance. I remember being at this longevity conference and I was walking, I was at a retreat in upstate New York and I was walking in the field with this MIT researcher, Leonard Guarente, who was studying sirtuins, which are the master regulators of aging in our cells that control gene expression. And I said, what is driving aging? And what do these sirtuins do? And he just looked at me and he said, it's basically sugar. It's screwing this up. That sugar and insulin resistance are what is driving the aging process. And sirtuins, when you activate them, these master regulators of aging that increase longevity, can increase longevity by up to a third in animal models. The thing that controls it is cutting out the sugar. So making yourself insulin sensitive instead of insulin resistant, well turn on this set of genes that are the master regulators of aging. So if we cut out the starch and sugar, and we activate these sirtuin genes, we literally can extend our lifespan and our health span.
