#113 Appetite, Insulin, Leptin, and mTOR with Omar Mohtar MD PhD

Omar Mohtar (0:00)

When you eat protein, you can activate mTOR. However, it's been shown that it's not that, like a pure protein diet would be the solution. Let's say you did like 90% protein, and you still got enough of everything else that was vital. Whatever percent you can max out on protein, you would be getting diminished returns.

It's better to have a more balanced composition of what activates mTOR, so you don't build up resistance on one side. Because we find there's so many different ways to activate mTOR, but if you overburn one side, like imagine, you can get triple the amount of mTOR activation if you balance out your diet, as opposed to just doing only protein only. This is what the diet industry likes to make you keep thinking that the more protein, the better.

Siim Land (0:40)

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Siim Land (0:47)

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Siim Land (0:52)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Omar Mohtar. Omar is an MD PhD student at the Boston University in Molecular Medicine. He's published papers on treating lung cancer, cell disease, Lipton and mTOR.

Omar, welcome to the show.

Omar Mohtar (1:11)

Thank you, Siim. Thank you so much for having me.

Siim Land (1:13)

Yeah, you did contact me, and we talked briefly about our kind of common interests in this field of mTOR and these other nutrients sensing pathways. But before we get into that, I wanted you to give like a brief overview or a backstory about how did you get involved with science research?

Omar Mohtar (1:32)

So, I joined the MD PhD program about eight years ago. And I actually, when I joined, I didn't have much of an interest working with, you know, in diabetes and obesity.

I was actually interested in doing nanomedicine. So, when I first started my PhD program, I was looking for a nanobiology lab. And things didn't work out there, unfortunately, but when I was trying to find a new lab to jump into, I found this lab that was in diabetes and obesity. So, I joined them because I was looking for something to jump into. And I ended up liking it a lot. And it was coming at an interesting time when I was also struggling with weight loss.

And I was trying to research on diet. So, around the same time, I was trying to figure out what diet worked best for me, was when I was joining a lab that was studying obesity and diabetes. So, the knowledge I gained from that really fueled my passion to learn more about proper dieting techniques and even applying some of those concepts which are controversial into my own scientific practice because of the need for science to clarify what's going on there. So, that's how I essentially got on to the project which became my thesis because I was convinced from a lot of things I've researched prior that there is a way to regulate feeding that we haven't figured out yet. And then I realized that no one ever figured out the true mechanism of leptin.

From this discovery, now everyone will tell you, every scientist will say, we've figured out what leptin was a long time ago and it just didn't work out because they tried it as a clinical trial as a weight loss drug. But I found that really silly because it was not intended to be a way to understand the hormone further. It was just, they really went to like a cash grab and just tried to give it to people as much as possible. It didn't work out because you get something called leptin resistance, which is when your brain just says like, I'm not buying it. Like I'm not buying that. You're telling me you're full. Like I don't believe this.

Siim Land (3:47)

Can you maybe give a brief overview about what is leptin as well for some?

Omar Mohtar (3:51)

Oh, sure. Yeah. So to give you a brief overview of that, leptin is what we call the satiety hormone. So what happens is whenever you eat a meal, you would have a spike of insulin.

That's how your body deals with the glucose that goes around. It's also the triggering mechanism of a pathway we call mTOR.

And mTOR is, in an essential basic explanation, it's the growth pathway. It basically helps with biogenesis, it helps the mitochondria to grow. And in fat cells specifically, it does two things that we now know. It makes leptin, which is the hormone that would go to the brain and tell you you're full through a complex mechanism. And then the other path would be to suppress lipolysis, which is the breakdown of fat. Now the reason why that would happen would be because once you've just eaten, you have fuel already, ready to go, just the most bioavailable fuel. So your body does not want to waste energy to do lipolysis because it is energy consuming. So it would shut off, imagine that's a factory, it would shut off that factory, which is the fat burning factory, it will turn on the glucose utilization pathway because that is now what's readily available, let's go eat it up.