The Exact Formula to Reverse Insulin Resistance (Doctors Won’t Tell You This) | Dr. Sten Ekberg

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Sten Ekberg** (0:02)
Basically, everything else you can think of gets worse with insulin resistance. That's why it's the number one health problem. And we've never seen anything like it where the majority of the world has something. And it's not about diabetes, it's about metabolic poor health that leads to cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia.

**Jesse Chappus** (0:24)
Destruction can be happening in the background for 10, 15, 20 years before blood glucose actually starts to rise and the A1C goes up.

**Sten Ekberg** (0:32)
Which is why it's so crazy that they're measuring glucose and they're not measuring insulin. One of the first things is going to be that you have less energy, you can crash after meals, weight gain. Some of that is going to go into a fatty liver, into visceral fat, you have more hunger and cravings. We have to understand that it's not about willpower. If you have high insulin, you will get hungry. There is only one way out of this, and it's to dramatically educate people and change lifestyles. Fewer meals that don't jack up blood sugar and insulin. And the body responds amazingly well.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:13)
Dr. Ekberg, why do you think insulin resistance is the biggest health problem facing the world today?

**Sten Ekberg** (1:20)
Because the majority of people on the planet have some degree of it.
So, officially, they set the rate... Like, pre-diabetes is defined as a 5.7 A1c.
But to me, if you're at 5.5 A1c, you're kind of slipping. You're on your way there. If you're not stable and healthy and insulin sensitive at an A1c of 5 to 5.3, if you're above that, chances are that you're kind of slipping and on your way up. And I think there's like 30, 40% of the US population is officially pre-diabetic, but there's like 80% who are in that slipping zone. And around the world and around the globe, I think we're talking 60, 70, 80% of the world's population have some degree of it. And pre-diabetes is basically what they say is if you don't change things in your life, in your lifestyle, then you'll probably have diabetes in five to ten years. That's why they call it pre-diabetes, because if you don't change, you'll probably get it. So what that means is we're looking at an epidemic here for the world where most people on the planet are heading to that stage. And it's not about diabetes, it's about metabolic poor health that leads to cardiovascular disease, that leads to stroke, that leads to dementia. And basically everything else you can think of gets worse with insulin resistance. So that's why it's the number one health problem. And we've never seen anything like it on that scale, where the majority of the world has something.

**Jesse Chappus** (3:26)
Let's talk about the mechanism, what people are doing, and then the underlying physiology as somebody walks into this.

**Sten Ekberg** (3:34)
So we're designed for feast and famine. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, they had seasons, they had growing seasons, they had probably more food in the summer than they had in the winter. So we had a way of putting on weight, of storing fat as a reserve for the winter. And same thing on a shorter scale, if we hunted a woolly mammoth or we were lucky, we got some good results from a hunt, then they would eat as much as they could, and then the body would store the excess as fat. So the next three, four days, when they may not have as much, then the body could pull off of those resources and burn that fat for energy until the next meal. But the problem is we are never short of a meal anymore.
And then in addition to that, we stopped eating food. We started eating candy and drugs. Because basically everything with sugar in it is a drug. It's extremely addictive. And everyone knows that if you eat a big fat steak, then you're going to be full for a long, long time. If you eat a bag of potato chips, then you're still hungry an hour later. And the same thing goes with virtually any processed foods, or any cookies, or a soda. Anything with sugar, and anything with processed grain in it, it is not... it is very, very...
It's satisfying in an addictive way, very short term. But then you're hungry a couple of hours later, and now you go eat again, and again, and again. And I've often used the idea... the analogy of a pantry.
So the purpose of a pantry is to put something in so that you can take it back out, right? And that's what our ancestors did. They ate, they put some reserves in fat storage, and then the next few days or over the winter, they retrieved it. But we just keep... with the analogy of a pantry, we just keep shoving things in there, and we never ever take anything out because there's never a shortage.