You Won't Reverse Insulin Resistance Until You Fix This | Dr. Sten Ekberg

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

**Dr. Sten Ekberg** (0:02)
High blood glucose is one part of the problem. High insulin levels is a bigger part of the problem. High glucose causes swelling, microvessel damage, blindness, but high insulin clogs up the cell and causes all of the downstream effects from metabolic syndrome, inflammation, dementia, cardiovascular disease. So insulin is the thing to watch. Carbs are a drug. Why are all the comfort foods carbs? Because it changes how we feel. If it changes how we feel, it's a drug. Diet is 80% of the solution. But now we live in such a complicated world and there's more and more factors that complicate it. For optimal health, we want to do all of them for a period of time. And that's where a lot of people miss out. Oh, I'm just going to do this one. It's like, no, your body can't operate if you're violating one of these. I tell people it's a low carb diet. It's a moderate protein diet. The fat is just the rest. The reason the keto diet works, it's because you're lowering insulin. You're reducing the addictive foods that make you overeat because this is all about hunger.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:15)
What would you say is the biggest lie people still believe when it comes to metabolic health?

**Dr. Sten Ekberg** (1:21)
I think the biggest and most dangerous lie is that fat is dangerous. And the fact that there are still low-fat products out there promoted as healthy.
I think it's that simple because fat is the fundamental fuel. It's the one the body stores as a reserve. And throughout history, I believe that fat has always been the majority of our calories. And it's not until the recent time, recent era that we have made fat a bad thing and people start avoiding it. And I think that's a big part for the degeneration in health that we've seen in the last 50 years.

**Jesse Chappus** (2:12)
All right. Well, let's really break this apart. What makes a good fat versus a bad one?

**Dr. Sten Ekberg** (2:17)
If we eat it the way nature made it, it is almost invariably. I'm sure someone can find an exception somewhere, but if nature made it, then it's a good fat.
And if we mess with it, then it becomes a bad fat. It's really that simple. When we harshly process the seed oils, when we hydrogenate the oils and turn them into margarine, now they become franken foods basically. So anything that any animal fat that we eat directly with the animal meat or fish is excellent. And any fat that is minimally processed, like butter, cream, if we tolerate dairy, olive oil, which you can cold press, you just put a little squeeze on it and the oil comes out.
Those are healthy oils. But when we have to start applying high heat and high pressure and then we ruin the oils and they stink and taste horrible and we have to deodorize them and degum them and send them through all these different processes to remove all the rancid flavors that they introduced in the processing.
Now it's a Franken food. We might as well eat plastic basically.

**Jesse Chappus** (3:43)
Okay, talk more to the specifics of what those are, the seed oils. What types of oil?

**Dr. Sten Ekberg** (3:48)
So they call them vegetable oils and it's most of the stuff that you find in the supermarkets, but there's basically soybean oil, which is the best seller in the US, which is a legume.
Then there is canola, which is a seed, and then there is corn oil, which is a grain. So none of those are vegetables, they're plants, but they're not vegetables. But they put the vegetable label on there, because now people think that this is something healthy. Because we've shifted the bias onto plants as something magical. It's like you can do no wrong.
But those are the foods. And like corn only has a few percent of oil in it. So you got to use all sorts of tricks to get the oil out of there. And for one thing, they use solvents even, like acetone. And traces of that acetone remain in the final product.

**Jesse Chappus** (4:50)
Somebody that says, okay, this is good to know, but I've been consuming them for years. What are they doing to the body that's so harmful?

**Dr. Sten Ekberg** (4:58)
They're just setting them up for a... It's just a piece of the slow degeneration.
And that's the problem in all the things that we're talking about. For most people, these things don't kill us fast enough, right? If they knocked us out like an Ebola virus, people would pay attention. If they knocked us out like cyanide, we'd pay attention. But these things take 20, 30, 40 years, and therefore we have a hard time connecting them, right? But it's all the little toxins and the little overfeeding and the chemicals that become a piece in the puzzle for the metabolic poor health, the low-grade chronic inflammation that drives all degenerative disease.