Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Diabetes Doctor: 80% Of Adults Are Heading For Chronic Disease! Keto’s Shocking Effect On Your Brain! About this episode He led the longest-ever human study on the ketogenic diet and spent 15+ years studying metabolism, now Dr Andrew Koutnik reveals what the science says about fat loss, depression, diabetes, and disease.
Dr. Andrew Koutnik is a leading metabolic research scientist specialising in metabolic health, human performance, and Type 1 diabetes management. He has contributed to over 100 scientific publications and, in 2024, co-authored a landmark 10-year case report on the ketogenic diet and diabetes.
He explains:
◼️ Why ultra-processed foods are silently destroying your brain and metabolism
◼️ How 70% of grocery store food is designed to keep you sick
◼️ How this one diet could prevent Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and diabetes
◼️ How keto and fasting can reset your body better than any workout
◼️ The hidden reason you can’t burn fat and how to fix it fast
00:00 Intro
02:38 What's Your Mission?
03:32 What Areas of Health Have You Spent the Last 15 Years Researching?
09:37 High Blood Sugar Is the Biggest Cause of Long-Term Health Problems
13:33 The Keto Diet
18:30 Regulating Elevations in Blood Glucose
21:42 Food Patterns Through Evolution
26:09 What Do You Notice When You're in Keto vs. Not in Keto?
33:45 Should We Be Restricting Carbs?
35:32 10-Year Study on the Impact of the Keto Diet
38:52 Your Blood Sugar Levels Have Risen
43:26 Ads
44:34 The Keto Diet and Physical Performance
52:22 Exogenous Ketones
56:40 Exogenous Ketones for Mental Health
58:52 Exogenous Ketones Helping With Cancer Body Weight Increase
01:00:21 Keto Diet and Gaining Muscle
01:03:33 Not Feeling Hungry on the Keto Diet
01:06:35 The Food Industry Engineers Food to Make You More Hungry
01:11:21 Ads
01:13:18 How Can Our Audience Live a Better Life Practically?
01:18:37 What Is Something Surprising About Glucose?
01:23:57 Should Everybody Try the Keto Diet?
01:27:21 What's on the Other Side of the Simulation?
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Transcript 15,595 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? What can you tell me about this?
0:01 Speaker 01 Well, if you look at the science, it's enhancing cognition. We've seen a 50% improvement in how individuals were able to read and absorb information, have better decision making. And also, we did a study and showed that it delayed the progression of metastatic cancer. And I've actually taken this a number of times because having been in research for the last 15 years and having lived with multiple chronic diseases, one of which I reversed, some of the most powerful strategies like this were not being told to me when I went to the doctor's office. So let's dig deeper.
0:31 Speaker 02 Dr. Andrew Koutnik is a research scientist who's worked on over 100 studies on metabolic health, diabetes, and the keto diet.
0:39 Speaker 03 And through his findings, he's helping people prevent chronic diseases, improve cognition, and optimize performance.
0:45 Speaker 01 I went through some pretty dramatic moments in my childhood. You know, I did everything I was told, right? I exercised all the time, I ate what I was supposed to eat, but I still became obese.
0:54 Steven Bartlett? You weighed about 255 pounds?
0:56 Speaker 01 Yep. And I had no idea how damaging that actually was to my body. And I think the vast majority of people also don't. But over 20% of children have obesity. That's quadrupled over the last 30 years. And a big part of that is when it comes to food, what looks healthy isn't always healthy. And it's not by accident. And it wasn't soon after that I ended up getting diagnosed with a chronic irreversible disease that obesity puts you at risk for. And that immediately turned into a journey to understand how to be healthy. And I came across this diet a little over a decade ago called the ketogenic diet. So then I went into the science of this diet and found positive impacts on things like diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, serious mental illness, chronic diseases. And I was like, oh, wow.
1:38 Speaker 01 Because a lot of people don't realize that many of these are not just preventable, but also reversible.
1:43 Steven Bartlett? And you did the longest study ever done of its kind on the impact of the ketogenic diet on a patient that had type 1 diabetes?
1:50 Speaker 01 Yes. Let me tell you all about it.
1:54 Steven Bartlett? Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to. And we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.
2:38 Steven Bartlett? Dr. Andrew Koutnik. If you had to try and sort of summarize and encapsulate what you spent the last couple of decades of your life focused on, and really trying to accomplish, prove, understand from the highest level. What exactly is that?
2:53 Speaker 01 The core of my mission, Stephen, is really to empower individuals to take control of their own health. It's empowering them with science, you know, bridging science to actual action. And you know, science is very complex. It's very hard to break it down. But having been in, you know, research for the last 15 years and having lived with multiple chronic diseases, one of which I reversed and one of which I is irreversible. I, my mission is to empower patients with the same tools and strategies that I had access to. So they can take control to maximize their health and performance.
3:26 Steven Bartlett? For the average person who may not be as knowledgeable about health and fitness, what are the areas of health that you've spent the last 15 years researching and trying to understand?
3:37 Speaker 01 I would call it, you know, Stephen, like metabolism in a broad terms. Now, I would say, you know, to break that down further for people to understand that. Metabolism is trying to understand how the body metabolizes or utilizes things like nutrients or foods. So you have oranges here. What's, what's in that food? How, when you ingest it, will your body respond to it? Both from, you know, glucose levels, which I'm sure many have heard of, to insulin responses, to all this different nuance. A lot of that comes down to nutrition, but it also is things like exercise. Exercise has such a powerful impact on metabolism, incredibly important for overall health. But From a personal perspective, this journey's been very honestly selfish for me.
4:20 Speaker 01 I wanted to understand how to get the best performance, the best for health for myself. And I very quickly realized that, you know, some of the most powerful strategies out there were actually not necessarily the ones that were being told to me when I went to the doctor's office, because I went through some, some pretty dramatic moments early on in my, my journey with, with trying to overcome some of these, these challenges.
4:43 Steven Bartlett? So take me back to the start of your story in the earliest context that's relevant to understand why you became the person you became. I mean, I've got some photos here from your, from your childhood, which are
4:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:57 Steven Bartlett? very, very telling. And, you know, some of our listeners might be listening on audio alone, so they might not be able to see these, these visuals on the screen. So if you could describe some of these, these pictures for me.
5:06 Speaker 01 When, yeah.
5:17 Speaker 01 It brings back some powerful memories of the challenges with obesity for me. You know, the, the picture on the right is a picture with, on a, a family adventure where we went to the, we'd go, I'd go fishing with my dad a lot. You know, I'm very heavy at the time. I was, you know, obese and, and the picture on the right here, this really gets me because, you know, I did, you did everything I was told, right? I exercised all the time. I ate what I was, I was supposed to eat or what my doctor recommended, what the fitness magazines recommended, but I was just constantly challenged with gaining more and more fat tissue. And I had no idea how damaging that actually was to my body. And I think the vast majority of people also don't.
6:02 Speaker 01 Over 68% of America right now is obese. Okay. That means seven out of 10 people walking around the street in the United States of America have obesity. And we know that the second you start building more and more fat tissue on your body, insulin levels rise almost double immediately before you even have symptoms of obesity or tissue damage or organ damage or anything along those lines. We know that that almost immediately reduces insulin sensitivity. So how? Well, insulin is a very powerful fat storage hormone is able to actually bring nutrients from the blood into tissues. That goes down around thirty four to thirty five percent in early stages of obesity.
6:45 Steven Bartlett? And just to summarize for a muggle like me, insulin is basically the Uber, which takes things out of your blood and puts them where they need to be.
6:53 Speaker 01 It's essentially like a thermostat for blood glucose. That's how most people know it. So as blood glucose levels rise, it works as a thermostat to, let's say, release cool air to bring it back down. In this case, releases insulin to bring blood glucose back into range. As blood glucose drops, insulin is stopped, it stops releasing insulin out of these cells called the beta cells. And ultimately, what your body's trying to do is keep the, you know, one teaspoon of sugar that's in your blood that is critical for your life. If it goes up, it can cause damage. If it goes low, it can be life threatening in this very, very tight range. And it builds, builds a number of mechanisms to ultimately make sure and ensure that you don't go outside of that range. But imagine losing the one
7:37 Speaker 01 molecule that directly controls it.
7:40 Steven Bartlett? You're wearing two devices, I believe, on you at the moment. So you've got this.
7:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:44 Steven Bartlett? What is the device on your arm?
7:47 Speaker 01 It's an insulin pump.
7:48 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
7:48 Speaker 01 So Stephen, your body produces insulin. Most people who are probably listening to this, they, their body probably also produces insulin, unless they have type one diabetes. And so when my body no longer produces this molecule anymore, there's got to be a way to get it. It sits on my arm twenty four seven because it's a way of essentially packaging a pancreas that I don't have anymore and putting it on my arm and, and a way of getting that same type of, of insulin.
8:17 Steven Bartlett? And you have a CGM as well.
8:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. So on my stomach here, so on my stomach here is a CGM.
8:24 Steven Bartlett? Which is a continuous glucose monitor.
8:26 Speaker 01 CGM is a way of tracking sugar levels or glucose levels.
8:30 Steven Bartlett? And both of those devices linked to your phone, which is in front of you. I'll throw that up on the screen so people can see.
8:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
8:36 Steven Bartlett? What that, what that kind of looks like.
8:38 Speaker 01 So on this device, you have. A green line that is glucose levels. Okay, my blood sugar says that it's a hundred and nine right now, which means that the interstitial signal of glucose is
8:53 Steven Bartlett? Interstitial meaning within, not in the blood, but in the tissues.
8:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the amount of glucose right outside the blood around the tissues. And that signal is an indication of the amount of glucose in the blood. That's the green line. Okay, it says that I'm a hundred and nine right now. So average blood sugar levels using milligrams per deciliter is seventy to a hundred and twenty. That's considered normal. Below that is blue lines, almost like, looks like squares and triangles. Those are illustrations of insulin being administered. But they're not perfect devices, despite them being premier and it, you know, the most advanced technology on the market. There are significant limitations to them.
9:37 Steven Bartlett? And I've actually, I saw a clip of yours that I was watching earlier that said, you think having high blood sugar over a long time is the biggest cause of long-term health problems.
9:47 Speaker 01 When you're focused on improving your overall health, you have to find out what matters most, right? So what, what's the hierarchy in the health? You know, one, two, three, four, five, what matters most on that? And we can look at that by looking at risk factors for future disease. Well, the number one cause of death in the United States and across many parts of the world is cardiovascular disease. Well, it's also the number one cause of death in people with diabetes. And when you look at what are the strongest predictors of developing some form of cardiovascular disease, a measure called HbA1C comes up at the top. HbA1C is a average measurement of your blood glucose over a two to three month period of time.
10:30 Speaker 01 And that is incredibly powerful at predicting future risk for, let's say, diseases of the eye, diseases of the kidney, or even cardiovascular disease. And so when I think about how do we tackle improving health or in, particularly in these, these common, more, more common diseases.
10:53 Speaker 01 Glucose control sits at the very top of that pyramid. And if unregulated, it's equivalent to analogy I often use, which is you're driving a car and you're focused on what type of rims you have, but you don't even have an engine in the car, like your engine doesn't work, or you don't have a chassis or an axis, but yet you're focused on rims or a sound system. And so the number one factor, particularly in diseases like diabetes, that matters most is HbA1c.
11:23 Steven Bartlett? So does that just mean that we should be eating less sugar?
11:26 Speaker 01 So if we wanted to control the most powerful risk factor in diabetes, we would need to understand how to regulate it, right? So then let's look at the science of this. Well, the science says that carbohydrates, food, is the most potent factor in regulating elevations in glucose at every single meal of the day. Well, most people are eating three to four plus meals every single day. And so the very first logical thing to look at is food, because what you're consuming has the most potent impact on glucose control. And glucose control has the most potent impact on your health, not only today, but in the future.
12:09 Speaker 01 And so focusing on nutrition makes sense. But this isn't like a new phenomenon. We've known that nutrition could be potentially lifesaving for people. There's a, you know, there's something called a ketogenic diet, if someone's heard this before. It's a diet that dramatically reduces the amount of carbohydrates in the food. And the dramatic reduction in carbohydrates in the food was used to save lives of patients with type one and type two diabetes, since there was the first report ever known, to my knowledge, is in 1796 by a gentleman named, a physician called John Rallo. He published a report on two cases of diabetes mellitus using basically a carbohydrate replete or reduced diet to resolve the disease.
12:53 Speaker 01 But we know that some of the most premier diabetologists, meaning people who study diabetes or treat people with diabetes, were utilizing these strategies. For over a hundred years before we then discovered in 1921 that this diet could also help neurological disorders like seizures and beyond. And so the phenomenon of nutrition playing a role in overall health is certainly not new. It's actually only recently that we're rediscovering century old wisdom of what nutrition can do for overall health due to the emergence of explosion in science that has really drove a ton of public interest into this kind of unique dietary strategy.
13:33 Steven Bartlett? So the ketogenic diet then, it's a diet that I'm familiar with because it's a diet that I cycle in and out of throughout the year. Probably I'm in a ketogenic state three or four times a year. I use the little keto reader just to check my blood ketone levels. What is, for anyone that's unfamiliar with the ketogenic diet, I'm a bit of an advocate for it. So I'm fairly familiar, but that's also taught me how unfamiliar people are with it because I talk to my friends about it and there's a lot of misconceptions. If you're in a ketogenic diet, what are you eating?
14:04 Speaker 01 So typically when someone visualizes a ketogenic diet, I think there's a lot of misinformation. They think it's just steak and bacon. And I guess for some people it might be that. But it's actually, if we're talking about a well formulated ketogenic diet, we're talking about green leafy vegetables, things that we typically associate with health, salads, broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower, these kind of nutrient dense, green leafy vegetables that are high in fiber and phytonutrients. Then you also have protein as a component of that. That can come from meat, that can come from fish in the form of salmon, eggs, cheeses, a little bit comes along for the ride and things like nuts. And then you also have the rest of the diet, which is made up of fat. And this can come a lot of times
14:48 Speaker 01 from various plant forms. This can come from olive oil, avocado oil.
14:54 Steven Bartlett? And what are you removing then?
14:56 Speaker 01 Sugary, starchy carbohydrates. So you're not having bagels, you're not having donuts, white rice, pastas, these type of foods. The reason they're not a part of this diet is because These foods rapidly elevate blood sugar levels. And the rapid elevation in blood sugar also spikes insulin. Insulin shuts down fat breakdown and the ability to take that fat to the liver. The liver built this amazing mechanism to be able to convert fat to ketone bodies. Because ketone bodies, fat can't actually, long chain fatty acids, which is the primary form of fat that you consume in the food you eat, and also the type that's broken
15:41 Speaker 01 down from your own fat tissue, can't readily cross the blood brain barrier. And we know that glucose is a fuel for the brain, but what happens if you fast or you don't consume a lot of carbohydrates and you have low insulin levels? And you can't transport the fat, which is now your primary fuel source on a ketogenic diet, because you reduce glucose or carbohydrates in the diet, which causes a reduction in glucose. The reduction in glucose lowers insulin. The reduction in insulin causes fat to be rapidly broken down and now becomes your primary fuel source.
16:15 Steven Bartlett? And so there's an evolutionary basis for this, right? Because once upon a time, we might have gone long periods of time without eating something. And so our body turns inwards and starts using our fat stores as a mechanism to fuel our body. And that's why it produces ketones.
16:29 Speaker 01 Basically, the evolution of this diet was believed to be a cyclical, meaning on and off, pattern in human history. Because if we were to go through bouts of abundance in food, we'd probably consume it as much as we can in one moment, and then we're seeking the next meal and seeking the next meal. What happens in that in-between time? If you're 100% reliant on having food 24/7 like we do in our current food environment, you would never survive evolutionarily beyond a few days.
17:03 Speaker 01 With the ability to switch from a carbohydrate-based metabolism over to a fat-based metabolism, we store months and months and months of fat energy in the event that we don't have nutrient. So it's one of the most powerful survival mechanisms we have to survive moments of famine. But we also have known since times of biblical texts that fasting has therapeutic potential, you know, most probably and the ability to what would be described as attenuate seizures. You know, convulsion-like behavior was described when you just completely eliminate food. It's actually a common strategy in many religious practices because of its quote-unquote
17:45 Speaker 01 "healing" properties. Well, now we actually know that fasting induces a state of ketosis. We know that ketosis is actually shown to, in many of these cases, have a therapeutic impact in many of these environments, like seizures. We've known since 1921 out of the Mayo Clinic that ketogenic diets not only mimic the physiology of fasting, but also attenuate the seizures in children with epilepsy. And that work has subsequently gone on to John Hopkins and other research institutes to show that this is a very verified strategy for not just epilepsy, but it has been used for obesity, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes for centuries at this point.
18:27 Speaker 01 And it all starts with the reduction of carbohydrates in the diet.
18:31 Steven Bartlett? One of the things that's been most beneficial to me, but also I know Joe Rogan has talked about this before, is as a sort of a podcaster that spends a lot of time talking, you notice high variance in your ability to think, articulate yourself for long periods of time, based on my blood ketone levels and my diet broadly, but specifically the amount of ketones that are in my blood.
18:55 Steven Bartlett? Why is that? Why is it that I feel like I'm more effective in communication and thinking when I'm on the ketogenic diet or taking exogenous ketones versus when I'm having a normal Western high carb diet?
19:10 Speaker 01 A lot of people would know why this is if they had the same tools and insight that type 1 diabetes gives. Because when you're consuming that diet, what is often happening is near constant elevations and dips, elevations and dips, highs and lows in blood sugar levels that we know are ascribed to changes in energy levels. So we know that high blood sugar levels, if someone can Google if they're so interested to look up the term high blood sugar hyperglycemia, or low blood sugar or hypoglycemia, and just type in symptoms. And you'll see a laundry list of things like fatigue, irritability, lack of concentration, shakiness.
19:55 Speaker 01 These are all symptoms of a lot of what you're describing, right? Which is change in your ability to concentrate, your energy levels. It's a very, very clear that glucose levels are linked to that. We also know that the chink-
20:08 Steven Bartlett? Just to be clear, so is that when I'm at the high or the low in the glucose? So if I, you know, if you ate one of these right now-
20:15 Speaker 01 Yep.
20:15 Steven Bartlett? What are these, oranges? What, tangerines?
20:17 Speaker 01 Oranges, yep.
20:18 Steven Bartlett? If you ate one of these right now, your blood glucose levels are going to go up, presumably?
20:23 Speaker 01 Yes, because these oranges are composed of bound sugar molecules together. So most fruit has a structural component to it, which is why you see it has mass to it, right? It's not just a liquid. And then that structural component binds together as a part of it, sugar that's bound together, they call them polysaccharides. And those polysaccharides, when you consume them, your gut actually takes those, breaks them down into individual glucose molecules to then be absorbed into the bloodstream. That's when the insulin's released, that's when insulin takes that glucose and stores it into tissues like the muscle and the liver for future glucose needs.
21:08 Speaker 01 And so, yes, we would presume that with this, high, or oranges, or even most fruits, pastas, rices, would all elevate blood sugar levels. But then that accompanies with a high insulin load, right? So the more of the oranges, the more insulin that you would need. And despite many of these foods be considered very healthy, those with metabolic disease or metabolic dysfunction may not maybe have a be more vulnerable to even what would typically be considered healthy foods. And type 1 diabetes is a powerful example of that.
21:42 Steven Bartlett? So you said you'd be open to eating one of these. We've got your blood glucose and insulin levels, which we're going to put on screen for people that are watching. And it'll be interesting to see how quickly we see that orange, which is considered a health food by many people, have an impact on your glucose and insulin levels.
21:58 Speaker 01 So yeah, so what I'm going to do is normally I would never do this, but I think it's very important for people to understand, especially those at home who either have a chronic disease, which is most Americans at this point, or kids who have a disease like diabetes, what the impact really could be. So let's say
22:20 Speaker 01 oranges are considered a superfood by the American Diabetes Association. So it's a fruit highly recommended by almost every organization USDA or USDA, American Diabetes Association. And the amount of orange is three oranges. Three oranges is probably going to make up around 70 to 90 grams of carbohydrates. For me, my energy needs is around calculated at around 3,000 calories per day. Now the activity I'm consuming, if I were to eat the amount of carbohydrates recommended per day, which is around 55% by, let's say,
22:59 Speaker 01 the USDA guidelines, that I would need to consume at least or more than this at if I split up all my calories over four meals. And so
23:12 Speaker 01 this is an opportunity to see what this will actually do to blood sugar levels.
23:20 Speaker 01 And type 1 Ib's, if you consume, will be a near equivalent to around a 50 amount of carbohydrates that I would consume per day if I was on a standard diet.
23:31 Steven Bartlett? The ketogenic diet, they typically say that to stay within it, you need to be below, is it roughly 50 grams of carbohydrates a day?
23:38 Speaker 01 It is roughly because 50 grams of carbohydrates per day is a rough number that we suspect most people will be able to get carbohydrates low enough to where insulin would be sufficiently low to produce ketone bodies.
23:52 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:53 Steven Bartlett? So there's variants depending on your insulin sensitivity and insulin response. And I guess body weight is one's gonna be a factor.
23:59 Speaker 01 Big factor, major factor, because anytime you're talking about things like glucose, insulin is always very individualized responses to each individual person.
24:08 Steven Bartlett? I don't really, I try and stay away from fruit these days. I don't know. I have berries and raspberries and stuff like that. And because people tell me there's like polyphenols in blackberries.
24:17 Speaker 01 But those are totally cohesive with a ketogenic diet.
24:20 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
24:20 Speaker 01 Because they're higher in fiber. So like, you know, half of what you're consuming, not half, but a large portion of it's fiber. So it's more about the net carbohydrates. It's the glycemic metabolic impact of the food. So if the fiber is non-digestible, which in fruit it isn't, then it shouldn't, it doesn't count, right? So higher fiber content, most of the vegetables on a ketogenic diet are higher fiber, you know, because, you know, it's the total carbohydrate to fiber ratio. So the net carbohydrates that really matter because that's the amount of, that's the metabolic, real metabolic impact of food. Yeah.
24:54 Steven Bartlett? A lot of keto-friendly foods say like net carbs, one gram or something. But you look at it and you go, fucking, it says 20.
25:00 Speaker 01 It's total bullshit, man.
25:01 Steven Bartlett? Is it?
25:01 Speaker 01 So, oh, 100%. So I've tested two different foods that are keto-friendly on the label, same as like calories, same as like fat, protein, even fiber.
25:14 Speaker 01 And they can produce completely different responses. I mean, the food environment nowadays, you essentially need almost a PhD in nutrition or biochemistry to walk into a grocery store and be able to understand what the hell's on the label. It's, and it is, and I, I don't want to sit here and say like, oh, they, they don't know. Like, no, they, they know. I mean, there's a companies who have tons of resources, food scientists galore, and they're putting zero sugar on the label and keto-friendly at, as a trick because it's associated with health benefits, right? There's all these studies on keto diet diets that can, that can show to improve health. And so they want to have that on their label. But what is often happening, if you look on the back of the label, there's about a hundred different ingredients they can swap sugar for, for something that has the same exact metabolic effect as sugar.
25:57 Speaker 01 So maltitol, maltodextrin, all these different ingredients that are going to cause glucose to go up rapidly. They'll just swap it. And now you can put on your label, zero sugar.
26:08 Steven Bartlett? If you've been in a ketogenic diet since you were diagnosed with diabetes, have you cycled in and out of it yourself? And if so, what have you noticed in terms of when you are in that diet and when you're not?
26:20 Speaker 01 So I actually came across this diet a little over a decade ago. What I found is that almost every blood meter that I was taking, this is before CGM for present, I had to just prick my blood, you know, six to 10 times a day to see what my blood sugars were. I was finding that I was very rarely outside of the normal range. And I was also finding that I wasn't feeling these extreme highs and lows anymore. When I transitioned to a ketogenic diet, almost immediately, my insulin requirements dropped substantially, around forty, a little over forty percent. So the, the amount of insulin I needed to take dropped dramatically. But I didn't have continuous glucose marker. I didn't have this instant feedback of like, what is my blood sugar doing? I just know I needed a heck of a lot less insulin. And
27:03 Speaker 01 so what happened was I went into my doctor's office at the time. He happened to be the American Diabetes Association president at the time. He's like, I've never seen a blood sugar level in the normal range with someone with type one diabetes before. He said, what are you doing? From that point forward, that's when, for me, it like transitions even into like a lifelong journey of like, wow, you know, obviously nutrition had a huge impact on me losing weight when I had obesity. Now it was directly regulating this very powerful disease where upon diagnosis, nearly all patients.
27:42 Speaker 01 Are going to have high invariable glucose levels for the rest of their life. Ninety-nine percent of patients will never see normal metabolic control again for their life. A hundred percent of them are expected to get insulin resistance. And within three years, we see neuroanatomical changes within the brain of children who are diagnosed.
28:01 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
28:02 Speaker 01 So it means that when we look at MRI scans of the brain, we see that children with high invariable glucose levels, with this disease, with type one diabetes, they have shifts in the type of white and gray matter. The sections of the brain that are associated with normal brain development and childhood, they're not developing the same way. And we see this within three years, and it's directly linked to the poor glucose control. We also know that we see signs of the early signals of atherosclerotic progression in children within four years.
28:37 Steven Bartlett? Atherosclerotic progression, what's that?
28:40 Speaker 01 So, one of the primary causes of death in individuals across the world is cardiovascular disease. And how do we get that? Well, you have changes in your blood vessel and how it functions is the first and earliest signal of future, what will ultimately be plaque, or this kind of blockages within the blood vessel, which ultimately cause things like heart attacks or strokes. Well, in type one diabetes, we see that children who have high invariable glucose levels, again, ninety-nine percent of patients are expected to just live this way for the rest of their life, if they follow standard of care, if they follow the doctor's orders. They're going to see changes in how their blood vessels literally functionally and structurally change.
29:24 Speaker 01 Their blood vessels will now shift from being this very compliant, almost like a smooth wave, to that blood vessel now becomes very rigid. It starts to build collagen, and more and more collagen around it, it becomes stiffer and stiffer. It's almost like taking a hose. And turning on a hose and pinching the hose. When you pinch the hose, as you get on stiffer and as you shrink the size of the blood vessel, it goes faster. And so we can measure that by the speed of the blood in the body. Another clear signal, one of the most powerful signals that the blood vessel is starting to change, before you see plaque, before you see blockages, I mean decades prior. These are all happening in childhood, by the way. You know, 10 to, you know, 10 to 14 year olds with diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
30:07 Speaker 01 We see that the blood vessel isn't able to respond to what they call shear stress, Stephen. So that means, let's say you go for a run this morning, Stephen, and your blood pressure initially increases because as your heart rate increases, the speed of the blood increases, the amount of pressure on the vascular wall increases. That phenomenon when the blood moves fast through blood vessels, it, it causes stress against the blood vessels. That's not a bad thing. It's actually a signal for the blood vessel to release something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a potent called vasodilator. It causes the blood vessels to open up. And this is how your body responds normally to stress.
30:52 Speaker 01 Okay, you go for an exercise, vasodilation or vasodilation, then vasodilation. Or, you know, and these are normal responses the body has. Well, what happens in type 1 diabetes very early on is that the ability to produce nitric oxide is diminished. You're not able to respond to high stress loads. So not only are the blood vessels becoming stiffer, but now the blood vessels aren't able to even respond as well to the stress. And so as you're looking at this and you're looking over time, you see these early signals of atherosclerotic progression. You also see very early on that it was once expected that all patients with type 1 diabetes would have eye damage, some form of eye damage called retinopathy, where you start to lose
31:37 Speaker 01 vision, eventually can go blind within 20 years of diagnosis. So most people are diagnosed in 10 to 14 years of age, which means by 30 to 34 years of age, you're going to see a lot of patients who have altered eye function and/or some who are blind. Now that has extended out over time, but we know that all patients with this disease. Because of high invariable glucose levels are expected to get at least one complication in their lifetime if they follow standard of care advice today, even with the best technologies out there. There is no pharmaceutical intervention, there is no technology that normalizes this disease.
32:20 Speaker 01 And the effects of these high invariable glucose levels and insulin resistance that accompanies it is cumulative, dose-dependent, and not completely reversible, which means that once you're diagnosed, the clock starts ticking. It just like smoking. The more you do, the earlier you do it, the earlier the impact and the more lost life you probably will get.
32:43 Steven Bartlett? And there was a study done with 326 participants that found that the keto diet can increase glycemic control of patients with diabetes. That was in the Precision Nutrition publication. When it says it can increase glycemic control, what does that mean?
33:00 Speaker 01 So.
33:01 Steven Bartlett? Is that what we were talking about there?
33:04 Speaker 01 Yes. So if you, when you do a diet, known as the keto diet, you're reducing carbohydrates. Well, when carbohydrates are consumed, they elevate glucose levels. Well, if you dramatically reduce the amount of carbohydrates consumed, you're not having those same type of glucose elevations and fluctuations because you're not consuming the most potent glucose elevating factor in our life, which is carbohydrates. And so when they talk about improvements in glycemic control, it is the measure of 24-hour over multiple day levels of glucose in the circulation. And how well is that being controlled within a normal, healthy range?
33:44 Steven Bartlett? And so is your goal then to encourage people to restrict carbohydrates in their diet? But, you know, because carbohydrates and sugar have been somewhat, I guess, demonized because you never really hear many good things about sugar. So what is your, what is your goal here? What is the advice to the listener? Is it to restrict their, their carbohydrates?
34:08 Speaker 01 To be very conscious of what they're consuming because nutrition has a powerful, potent impact on overall health. And for those patients who have chronic disease, which is unfortunately the overwhelming majority of us, yes, carbohydrates can be a very, restricting carbohydrates can have a powerful therapeutic effect on diseases like type 2 diabetes. The American Diabetes Association and their 2019 consensus report described type 2 diabetes as the most evidence-based nutritional strategy. We know that it can have potential positive impacts on things like Alzheimer's disease. There are studies that have looked at this. We also know that for-
34:49 Steven Bartlett? Carbohydrate restriction.
34:50 Speaker 01 Yes. Yep. So, and I like to term this therapeutic carbohydrate restriction because it's the therapeutic outcome of a carbohydrate reduction. And that's really the goal of this is can you improve your overall health? Many people will just do this simply to improve, you know, to lose weight, to feel, like you say, to feel more cognitively alert. But in my case, where you're along, further along the metabolic spectrum with diseases like diabetes, it has a even more potent impact on how you feel, even more potent impact on your overall health. And, but unfortunately, about 93% of Americans have some form of metabolic derangement, as cited by multiple studies and multiple research groups.
35:31 Steven Bartlett? You did a 10-year study on the impact of the ketogenic diet on a patient that had type 1 diabetes. I think this is, this is most certainly the longest study ever done of its type, where you took one individual and over 10 years, you, I guess, controlled their diet?
35:50 Speaker 01 So, we had access to the ability to monitor a unique patient who had type 1 diabetes. And they were diagnosed and had followed the American Diabetes Association diet, a healthy diet, for six years. And then switched over in 2013 to a ketogenic diet. Upon the initiation of the diet and post, they had DEXA scans, they controlled their calorie intake, their body composition, they weren't taking any additional medications. And we were able to monitor the impact over a 10-year period. While controlling all those variables. And why that's so important is because one of the common concerns of a ketogenic diet
36:33 Speaker 01 is the hypothetical risk it can increase cardiovascular disease. And the reason that they think that it can increase cardiovascular disease, or it's hypothesized that it will, is because of the elevation in LDL that often accompanies an increase in saturated fat in the diet. Now saturated fat comes from things like animal proteins. It's in coconuts as well. What we found is that despite a near doubling in LDL cholesterol on this diet, which again should be associated with worsening cardiovascular health, we did an advanced cardiovascular assessment in this patient and found that despite doubling LDL, they had maintained completely normal glycemic control, which again, based on all the data, says is the number one risk factor.
37:18 Speaker 01 They reduced their insulin load over 40%. And their cardiovascular health was not only better than the average patient of similar age and sex with type 1 diabetes. It was better in almost every single category than people even without type 1 diabetes, despite the doubling of LDL cholesterol. It illustrated that over a 10-year period, it maintained not only no sign of cardiovascular disease, but remarkable cardiovascular health. And in fact, we actually followed on that study with the largest ever analysis of the impact of nutrition,
38:02 Speaker 01 particularly carbohydrates, in over 46,000 patients with type 1 diabetes. We showed that in over 70% of all reports of very low carbohydrate ketogenic diets, that patients were completely able to normalize their glucose control, normalize the most potent risk factor for the disease of type 1 diabetes.
38:23 Steven Bartlett? And is this, this is a sort of a spectrum of, I'll put that on the screen for people to see, the different sort of stages and categorizations of being normal, prediabetic and diabetic, right?
38:34 Speaker 01 Correct, yes. So, normal is anything less than 5.7% HbA1c. Prediabetic is that 5.7 number up to 6.4. And then diabetic is anywhere between 6.5 all the way up into essentially, uh, there's no cap on how high that number can go.
38:52 Steven Bartlett? I mean, I noticed your, your blood sugar levels have risen quite dramatically.
38:57 Speaker 01 Yes. So what you see initially is, is probably only the first phase of this, right? So started at an average of around 100 milligrams per deciliter on average. And once the food is then consumed, because once you consume the food, it takes some time to break down into glucose. That glucose then goes into blood and then the blood then moves glucose into this compartment around the cells, which is called the interstitial fluid. And now we're starting to see the direct impact of just consuming probably a fifth of the amount of carbohydrates I should consume from a superfood. Um, this, you know, oranges are considered both a citrus and a fruit, and it's considered like a superfood by the American Diabetes Association,
39:41 Speaker 01 in the context of diabetes.
39:43 Steven Bartlett? So when the glucose spike is high, so you've just eaten some oranges, the spike is going up.
39:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:49 Steven Bartlett? Wha- what does someone feel? And then what do they feel when it's then crashes down and goes below? Because it started at about 100. So I imagine that it's going to go up to whatever it goes up to. And then it's not going to drop back down to 100. It's going to drop below 100 typically in a, in a normal, um, non-diabetic person, right?
40:09 Speaker 01 So 100 is right around the, uh, normal. So what you'd hope would happen is that you're going to go up just a little bit. Insulin's going to respond quickly and they're going to come back down to normal. If you have total healthy metabolic function, again, the vast majority of us do not. But in this case, what's gonna, what would be predicted to happen is that as blood sugar elevates and insulin responds.
40:34 Speaker 01 It's going to go as high as the amount of glucose that's present in the food. Okay, but at the same time, the my pod is also, which is holding my insulin, is immediately trying to respond. It's immediately trying to say, okay, oh, no, we need to bring this and keep this into a normal range. And so it's trying to release insulin. And so you can see on the screen that there's this massive uptick in the blue line, which is the initial response in insulin immediately to the elevation in glucose. This is exactly what happens in normal physiology, yet no one can measure it. But you can see it here.
41:05 Steven Bartlett? So how would I feel when the glucose spike is high? Do I feel energetic? Do I feel focused or do I feel tired?
41:12 Speaker 01 My personal experience here, Stephen, is that as blood sugar becomes very high, I become, my focus reduces, I become fatigued. I can also, according to my wife, become irritable. And but you can even look this up. You know, you can look up what are the symptoms of hyperglycemia? What are the symptoms of elevated glucose levels above the normal range, which is normal 70 to 120? That's when you can start to see very clearly that the evidence over time has shown a very clear impact on not only how you feel physically, but also your mental health status as well.
41:50 Steven Bartlett? I've just looked up the symptoms here and it says, the common immediate symptoms of having a high glucose spike is you feel thirsty, dry mouth, frequent urination, headache, brain fog, fatigue, sluggishness, blurry vision.
42:06 Steven Bartlett? And then once you go down and you crash, where your glucose really drops below the normal range, what do you feel then typically?
42:13 Speaker 01 So a lot of how I like to describe this is almost like imagine you're outside and it's sunny outside and you're having a great day, great conversation with other friends. And then all of a sudden, very rapidly, Clouds come over top. Everyone kind of dissipates and it starts to rain. It's almost like it's, we know that glucose levels have a direct impact on the neurobiology of the brain, meaning how the brain functions, how it operates. And particularly at very high glucose levels, you know, typically above 180 milligrams per deciliter, you start to see signals of inflammation, signals of stress, like oxidative stress in the body, if people have heard of that before.
42:56 Speaker 01 And that can start to cause damage on tissues and cause a stress response. But the problem here, Stephen, is that most patients are living there 24/7.
43:05 Steven Bartlett? I was looking at some of the symptoms here and it says the short term crash you get after a spike, after a rapid rise is a bit of an insulin overshoot. So it's reactive hypoglycemia, which is the sugar crash. And then you might feel in that crash jittery or shaky, hungry, often craving carbs and sugar again, irritable, anxious, weak or lightheaded. I stayed up until 3am the night I first tried Replit and it blew my mind. Replit, our sponsor of this podcast, are one of the most powerful AI platforms I've come across. They allow you to turn any idea you have into real working apps in minutes using plain English. Just describe what you want to create and Replit's AI agents will create it for you. And you don't need any coding experience to get started.
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44:34 Steven Bartlett? You did a study in 2025, I believe, on the impact of the ketogenic diet on physical performance?
44:42 Speaker 01 You know, if a ketogenic diet has all these therapeutic potentials, you know, going back for over two centuries, what is truly the impact of it on performance? Because that's one of the primary reasons where someone were to walk into a clinical setting and say, well, yeah, you can do this, but I've heard it's going to decrease my performance. Physical performance. Physical performance. And so we were very, very interested in this because we thought, okay. You know, when we look at why carbohydrates are currently being recommended as sports nutritionists, because since 1921, they've been shown to improve performance. And how they showed that in 1921 was that physicians out of Harvard in Boston actually
45:24 Speaker 01 watched Boston marathoners, half of which wouldn't even finish the race, slurred words, they would have like almost pale skin, shaky, weren't able to articulate their words, or some wouldn't finish at all. And what they were finding was that these, when they tested the blood of these individuals, that they were finding that glucose levels were low. Basically, they reached what they call hypoglycemia. It's a medical term to describe very low blood sugar levels. And then next year, they provided carbohydrates and these marathoners in the Boston Marathon, and all of them improved their performance. And so since 1920, or 1925, actually, we've known that carbohydrates can improve performance.
46:05 Speaker 01 But what has happened, though, over time is that in 1960s, we, there was a measurement technique called the Bergstrom method, where you actually did a muscle biopsy, pulled out muscle tissue and found that, oh, wow, there's actually glucose stored in the muscle. So it must be really important for physical performance, if the muscle which is used to contract and move the body during physical performance, that if glucose is in that tissue, it must be essential for performance. And then after they discovered that, there was all these associations between low glucose levels in the muscle, called glycogen, low glycogen, and fatigue.
46:43 Speaker 01 Then after that, in the 1980s, they were able to look at the amount of sugar or carbohydrates and fat that the body was burning during exercise. And what they found at that stage is that, oh, wow, it looks like the amount that people are able to sustain intense exercise is proportional to how many carbohydrates they're burning.
47:12 Speaker 01 And then there was a few modeling studies, Stephen, that then looked at, okay, what's the relationship between, let's say, the intensity of exercise and what type of fuel you use, whether it be fat or carbohydrates? And they found that, they modeled it, okay, and said, okay, well, at lower intensities, you must burn almost all fat, and at very high intensities, you must burn carbs. And there was a number of studies in 2017 to 2020, three different studies that looked at the ketogenic diet over a five-day to three-week period. And they saw that, in those studies, that there was a decline in performance by around 2%.
47:57 Steven Bartlett? If you were in the ketogenic diet, if you were on the ketogenic diet?
48:00 Speaker 01 Correct, compared to a high-carb diet.
48:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
48:02 Speaker 01 And so what did that tell these researchers? Well, it said, okay, well, obviously, the ketogenic diet must impair performance. And there's all this evidence since 1921 that the amount of carbohydrates, glycogen, how much carbs you're consuming is essential for performance. But here's the kicker, is that one major confounder of all of this is that we've known for quite a long period of time that the adaptation to a ketogenic diet is not one week, it's not two weeks, not even three, it's four weeks or more.
48:33 Steven Bartlett? And when you say adaptation, you mean your body's transitioned to being in a state where it's efficient at burning, using ketones?
48:41 Speaker 01 So, the body's ability to lower its glucose oxidation, or the amount of carbohydrates it's burning for fuel, because you're giving your body less of it, the amount of fat that's being utilized for fuel goes up dramatically, and then you produce way more ketone bodies, and ketones are now being used as not only a body tissue... Substrate, meaning energy for the muscle, but also for the brain. And so it's this transition over. But when people were looking at these studies, they were just looking at some of the metrics of what happens when you, your body transforms when you reduce carbohydrates.
49:22 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
49:23 Speaker 01 So what we wanted to do is say, okay, if there's all these health promoting benefits of a ketogenic diet, that sounds great. But all these studies and sports dogma would say that's going to impair performance. Okay. So let's test that. Let's actually put athletes on a ketogenic diet for four weeks. We are going to control not only their calories, we're going to control their body composition, we're going to control their activity level, we're going to control all these key confounders that many of these prior studies never controlled. So that we could truly test the diet induced, so the macronutrient, meaning the shift from carbs to fat, effect on performance. But we're going to do it in the same person.
50:08 Speaker 01 So now we're going to control their genetics, we're going to control their environment. Once we did that, Stephen, we tested what most people think is, you know, a very glucose-dependent form of exercise. We asked them to do six by 800 meter sprints. They were on a high carb diet and then they switched to a low carb diet. Now, what happened, and this is all randomized and controlled, when they switched over, they had no deterioration in performance.
50:38 Steven Bartlett? At four weeks?
50:39 Speaker 01 At the four week mark. In a form of exercise that we would expect would be extremely glucose-dependent, extremely carbohydrate-dependent.
50:49 Steven Bartlett? But before four weeks, was there an impairment in their performance?
50:52 Speaker 01 So what we were interested in, Stephen, is studying at the end.
50:56 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
50:57 Speaker 01 So we didn't look intermittently, we exclusively look at the end time point. Because the question was, well, if, is there a difference once you stick to this diet? Because if you, you go on this diet, ideally you're, you're sticking with it over time. And so.
51:12 Speaker 01 If it is true that you require carbohydrates, we then also measured how many carbohydrates and fat they were burning during exercise. And it was over what we call 85% of their VO2 max, which means 85% of their total maximum oxygen consumption during exercise. That is when we would expect almost no fat to be oxidized or to be burned, and almost exclusively carbohydrates. Well, we found that these athletes recorded the highest levels of fat burning during exercise ever reported in the literature, illustrating that when these athletes-
51:54 Steven Bartlett? The ketogenic.
51:55 Speaker 01 Ketogenic diet. That when these diets adapted to the diet for sufficiently long, they had record levels of fat oxidation, even at very high intensity levels, which means that fat was able to provide nutrients and fuel at very, very intense form of exercise, when we would expect only carbohydrates would be relevant and utilizable.
52:22 Steven Bartlett? So many of my friends that are endurance athletes or that are involved in things like cycling, talk about exogenous ketones. I'm a co-owner of a company that produces exogenous ketones. That's my disclaimer. I've got the product here. What can you tell me about products like this? Exogenous ketone products? Exogenous meaning externally supplemented, I guess.
52:45 Speaker 01 Right, so with a ketogenic diet, you produce them. Your liver produces them for you. With exogenous, you're consuming these. Well, why would you consume them? Why not just do a ketogenic diet? Well, we know that a ketogenic diet-
53:03 Speaker 01 Takes time to adapt. We just talked about that with physical performance, that we see that, you know, up to four weeks to see the full effect on, on performance, or more. Well, what happens if you're, let's say, a warfighter, or someone who's going out into the field, or immediately wants to flip into this state? You can't do that. Unless there was a molecule that you could consume that could rapidly elevate ketone bodies in circulation within minutes. Insert exogenous ketone bodies. We have known since the 1960s that the product in there was studied by MIT in the aerospace department called 13 butane dial, that it was able to
53:46 Speaker 01 be consumed and rapidly elevate ketone bodies in circulation. There was a study in 2016 called the metabolic optimization, it was $10 million program from DARPA.
53:56 Steven Bartlett? DARPA being the...
53:58 Speaker 01 DARPA is an advanced research organization from the United States government where they fund very high-risk, high-reward programs. And one of which was the, the use and testing of ketone bodies. And so that molecule that they tested was utilized, the same molecule is in there, and they kind of tweaked some of the formulations a bit. And they showed that, and we know that this is the same for this molecule as well, that when you consume them, it rapidly changes metabolism. Almost not identical to what happens with the keto chain type, but it has an almost direct impact. It has a blood glucose lowering effect.
54:35 Speaker 01 It directly binds to receptors like the, they call it GPR109A, or, or some other key receptors that directly impact inflammation. So it directly blocks something called NLRP3 inflammasome, which is a molecule that leads to increases in inflammation. We also know that it changes the way that our genes... Are used in the body called epigenetic signaling. And so the consumption of ketone bodies can actually change the molecules on our genes and how those molecules are ultimately manifested.
55:14 Speaker 01 And that increases our antioxidant capacity, meaning our ability to block oxidative stress in the body. We, we see all these powerful effects, these rapid shifts in metabolism within the body. And this 2016 study showed that just orally consuming these molecules could rapidly shift metabolism, but there was also linked to an improvement in physical performance. But if you look beyond that and just like these, these kind of studies, because we looked at them in athletes. We looked at them in healthy individuals and then also in military settings. But we've also, there's studies looking at this in patients at risk for cognitive decline. So patients at risk for Alzheimer's disease.
55:53 Speaker 01 They've shown that in a six month study administering exogenous ketone bodies was able to attenuate the decline in cognition that we know happens with advanced age.
56:04 Steven Bartlett? And just to be clear there, you're saying it reduces the decline. It doesn't
56:07 Speaker 01 Correct.
56:08 Steven Bartlett? Cure Alzheimer's or fix Alzheimer's.
56:09 Speaker 01 Correct.
56:10 Steven Bartlett? It just delays.
56:13 Speaker 01 Accurate, yes. It's, it's, we know that as individuals age, you're on a precipitous or steady decline in, in brain function. And so the goal is to, to offset or to stop the decline. You know, that's our goal. We want to maintain normal brain function and our ability to think clearly and to understand things clearly, like reading and, and doing problems and solving problems. There have also been these emergence of studies in the world of psychiatry. I think there's around 11 ongoing active clinical trials looking at the impact and interaction of ketone based therapies and brain health, particularly serious mental illness.
56:56 Speaker 01 One in four adults in the United States, actually over one in four adults in the United States has serious mental illness. In fact, I believe over the numbers are over 20% of, of adults are taking some type of psycho altering medication. At its core, we see all of these relationships between underlying metabolism being a key.
57:17 Speaker 01 Factor contributing to mental health status and the application of this unique diet, which we know increases ketone bodies, which appear to have direct impacts on the brain, now seems to be linked to improved serious mental illness. And it'll be interesting to see where that evolves. But it's just a fascinating world to imagine that nutrition, not a medication, not a technology, but the simply going to the grocery store and swapping the things you choose in there can lead to these powerful, powerful therapeutic effects in people of all sorts of different conditions or disorders.
57:56 Steven Bartlett? On one of the studies that I read about the administration of exogenous ketones and the impact it has on brain network stability was from 2020, where they investigated if brain network stability responds to two major brain fuels, either glucose or ketones. And participants came to the laboratory on two occasions and drank exogenous ketones or glucose. And after consuming these drinks, they underwent an MRI scan. Strikingly, the study showed that ketones increased the stability of brain networks. In contrast, glucose decreased the stability of the network. The network stability was 87% greater after ketone consumption than stability measured after glucose consumption. And in that study, which is on PubMed, the last line of the abstract says, dietary interventions resulting
58:41 Steven Bartlett? in ketone utilization increase available energy and thus may show potential in protecting the aging of the brain, which is super interesting.
58:51 Speaker 01 So we did a study looking at cancer and applying exogenous ketones in a very aggressive form of metastatic cancer. And what we saw in my work in graduate school is that when applying just exogenous ketones, that it delayed the progression of the metastatic cancer. But it also
59:11 Speaker 01 When looking at body weight, reduce the rapid decline in body weight we sometimes see with cancer, a phenomenon called cachexia, which is a way, a term to describe the rapid wasting of body tissue with disease. And it is no more aggressive than the context of cancer, particularly metastatic cancers where it's most common. And when we saw the lack of decline in body weight, I then looked at where the body weight was coming from. And it was clear that the lack of body weight decline was because of the preservation in muscle mass. So it also appeared, and there's been a number of what they call
59:50 Speaker 01 clinical physiology studies, so studies that actually directly manipulate human beings with molecules and tests, you know, like muscle tissues and how they function. We see that exogenous ketogenic administration can dramatically reduce the amount of muscle breakdown or breakdown of muscle tissue, essentially illustrating it may be a powerful mechanism in promoting healthy muscle mass as well.
1:00:20 Steven Bartlett? In terms of being in a ketogenic diet, one of the things I'm always quite concerned about is, am I still able to gain muscle mass if I'm in a ketogenic diet? Because I, when I go into a ketogenic diet and I stop having carbohydrates, I tend to lose weight rapidly and shred. The fat falls off and I get very lean, but more skinny.
1:00:44 Speaker 01 You smiled though, because maybe you like to be more shredded. So a phenomenon with a ketogenic diet, so there's no deterioration in muscle mass with a ketogenic diet. There have been plenty of studies that have shown that you're able to maintain muscle mass.
1:00:58 Steven Bartlett? And build it?
1:00:59 Speaker 01 Yes, and build it. So they've shown that as well. So Jeff Volokh out of Ohio State University has done a number of studies in this area, looking at individuals who were actually on a Reduced intake diets, they're reducing less calories, so they had less energy in the diet, and they were also doing the ketogenic diet, it was actually a military study, and they showed that they were able to maintain muscle mass just as much as if someone was on a high carb diet while under a caloric restriction, or another way of describing it as like a semi starving starvation state. So there's no impact, negative impact that we see with these diets on muscle mass. However, to your personal example, one of the first
1:01:41 Speaker 01 things that happens when you go into ketogenic diets, there's a naturopatic or naturopathic effect, but basically you reduce the amount of sodium in the body, so you piss it out basically, and you hold less water weight. And that's one of the first things, that's why people see this rapid shift in body weight initially when they're on a ketogenic diet, which for many people is great, because if they're trying to do it to lose weight, that's like immediate reinforcement, but sometimes it's water weight. Well, water's in both the fat and the muscle. So it's not necessarily that you're losing any muscle mass per se, but it just might be in a phenomenon of less water weight. And in some contexts, that might be beneficial, right? If you're in a sport where you have a power to weight
1:02:21 Speaker 01 ratio, but you're able to maintain the same power at a lower weight, simply by shifting water, that's great, as long as you're able to function equivalently.
1:02:30 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything I do need to be thinking about in terms of my diet to make sure I'm still gaining weight, just to, I guess, to keep my protein levels high?
1:02:39 Speaker 01 So the most important thing related to your diet when it comes to trying to build muscle mass is to exercise hard and with resistance exercise. That's the most important thing. When it comes to your diet, to enhance that effect, protein is one of the most powerful nutrients you can consume to augment that response. Another is to ensure you're having sufficient
1:03:03 Speaker 01 Calories, right? So you're in a caloric deficit. So you said that, you know, you tend to eat less calories because you're probably not as hungry. Well, yes, that's one of the most powerful ways to lose not only fat, but also muscle is to just not eat food.
1:03:15 Steven Bartlett? I think that's it because I lose my appetite when I'm in the ketogenic diet. I also lose my appetite a little bit when I take these exogenous ketones like Ketone IQ. And I've seen some of the studies that show that there's roughly 20% decrease in appetite when you take exogenous ketones, according to one particular study that I read. But when I'm in the ketogenic diet, it's like food is, I get hungry, but then I start eating and I stop very quickly.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:46 Steven Bartlett? And it's really bizarre. Like I was in Cape Town for 10 days or two weeks writing my book. And so I had the chef there and the chef cooks me my food and makes this amazing food. And I'm so hungry, I look at it, I'm like, amazing. I start eating it. I have like five or six bites and I'm done. And only when I'm in the ketogenic diet, there's something going on in my body, which just doesn't, just doesn't want to binge eat like I sometimes.
1:04:09 Speaker 01 So there's two things to talk about. One is the type of foods you're consuming on a ketogenic diet. And the other is what is happening in your body, in your metabolism on the diet. So there's a book called Always Hungry by a physician, endocrinologist named David Ludwig. And he's kind of coined this carbohydrate insulin model. And, you know, it's somewhat controversial, but the reality is that there's, there's some important notes in it. One related to hunger, which is if you're able to have a fuel source on a ketogenic diet that's sustained over time. So you don't have the up and downs of glucose and up and downs of insulin, these constant swings. Whereas on a ketogenic diet, you have this sustained level of fuel influx, right? So you have this nutrient availability in the
1:04:51 Speaker 01 blood. So glucose levels are much more stabilized. Insulin is much more stabilized. And you don't have those fluctuations, particularly in those specific molecules. That might be one potential reason. But the other potential reason is that when you're on a ketogenic diet, you tend to not consume the type of foods that drive hunger. So again, we talked about in the grocery store, the 70% of the grocery store, and particularly in the center of the grocery store, that is highly processed where they combine.
1:05:19 Speaker 01 Carbohydrates with with salt or fat or some combination there and that makes it highly palatable or very, very tasty, you know, increase the dopamine response, this positive reinforcement response of the food. That drives people to to seek more of that pleasure response. And as a result, they want to consume more. So everyone has probably felt this example where you're in a restaurant, you eaten enough food to where you feel physically full, you're like, oh, I'm totally full, like, I don't want any more food. Someone walks by, what's your favorite dessert? And you're like, oh, well, hmm, I could eat that. You're literally physically full, but yet you want to consume more food.
1:06:02 Speaker 01 This is a is a phenomenon that has been the struggle of of in America and the rest of the world essentially now, where the food environment often drives people to overconsume. And it's not by accident. These are like well-conducted strategies in the food industry to lead to these positive pleasure responses.
1:06:24 Steven Bartlett? I think about this with bread in the restaurant. You know, they give you bread first.
1:06:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a good, it's a solid strategy, Stephen, to cause you to want to consume. Start to finish, not only the bread, get a big meal and follow on with dessert. You know, it is a is a is a great strategy for ensuring that, but it's also the same strategy that, you know, Doritos is using where like you combine this mixture of new molecules in the food that you consume it, you get, oh, this tastes great.
1:06:55 Steven Bartlett? Pringles.
1:06:56 Speaker 01 The same exact thing where you combine these different components and it forces you this like, oh, this tastes great, I need more. And you never feel full. One of the most common tricks that the the food industry utilizes in these environments is that they, one, they certainly are aware of this, right? And so when you consume these type of foods together, they they know they consume more of it, but sometimes people aren't even aware of it. And the best example of this, go look at the back of most of the bacon. On the grocery store aisle, go look at the back of most peanut butters, almond butters, nut butters in the grocery store.
1:07:37 Speaker 01 Most of them have added salt and added sugar, even to levels where you don't even taste it. But go look at the label. The reason those are added is to increase the flavor profile, the positive brain response to the food, so that you consume more of it. And this is a huge part in why people always feel hungry in today's food environment. They're always seeking more food. And they can't get off that hamster wheel. They're always over-consuming or always referring to this phenomenon called food noise, where they always feel the drive to consume foods, or they never feel full.
1:08:21 Steven Bartlett? And it's because of the sugar in the soap?
1:08:23 Speaker 01 It is because the food is composed and made in such a way to have a flavor profile that your brain says not just eat one bite, eat as much as possible, because we're always seeking these pleasure responses, right? In our lives, in our world, this is even independent of food.
1:08:44 Steven Bartlett? So what do we do about this?
1:08:47 Speaker 01 So the solution for most people in this situation is to try to focus, number one, don't consume liquid calories. That's like a dead giveaway bad move, because those are, abundance of calories will drive people often to overconsume them and very, drive this pleasure response in the brain.
1:09:08 Steven Bartlett? Liquid calories, what's a liquid calorie?
1:09:10 Speaker 01 So let's say you have a soda or a Coke.
1:09:14 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:09:14 Speaker 01 So basically, completely void of any nutrients and really high in calories, spikes your glucose through the roof, insulin through the roof, and then often makes you hungrier afterwards, not less hungry by having it.
1:09:27 Steven Bartlett? Like orange juice.
1:09:28 Speaker 01 Is another great example.
1:09:30 Steven Bartlett? Smoothies, those fruit smoothies people have.
1:09:33 Speaker 01 Exactly. In fact, just taking fruit and then blending it up actually increases the speed by which it's absorbed, changes the hormonal response, and leads to a worse outcome for most people.
1:09:42 Steven Bartlett? Most people think a fruit smoothie is a healthy thing.
1:09:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know about that. I would, I think that when you take fruit, which for most reasons isn't terrible, right? Like it's not, these are nutrient-dense foods. If people can consume them and get away from them, great. If you have a metabolic disease, you might be more vulnerable to, let's say, glucose elevations. But when you then take foods like that, it could be any foods, it could be taking potatoes and then making mashed potatoes, by simply changing or blending that food up, you are now taking a lot of these structural components that your body would take time to digest and you're removing them. And you basically almost are like, almost turning on like a small hose that's just giving it a little bit of water at a time and is turning it on all the way. You know, you're rapidly increasing the speed of how the nutrients
1:10:30 Speaker 01 enter the body and it completely changes the hormonal response of molecules like GLP-1 and normal levels of GLP-1 in the body are completely altered. The insulin response is also altered.
1:10:42 Steven Bartlett? And GLP-1 is the hunger hormone?
1:10:45 Speaker 01 It's known for being related to hunger because it's released in response to food. It changes the brain's hunger drive and most people know of it because of
1:10:56 Steven Bartlett? Ozempic.
1:10:56 Speaker 01 Ozempic, semaglutide, wolgovi, trisipotide, all these GLP-1 receptor agonists that are increasing GLP-1 levels, not to normal levels. They're increasing them to super physiologic levels, levels that would never be observed or ever seen in normal settings of the body.
1:11:22 Steven Bartlett? I've just invested millions into this and become a co-owner of the company. It's a company called Ketone IQ and the story is quite interesting. I start talking about ketosis on this podcast and the fact that I'm very low carb, very, very low sugar and my body produces ketones which have made me incredibly focused, have improved my endurance, have improved my mood and have made me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast, a couple of weeks later, these showed up on my desk in my HQ in London, these little shots. And oh my God, the impact this had on my ability To articulate myself on my focus, on my workouts, on my mood, on stopping me crashing throughout the day was so profound that I reached out to the founders of the company.
1:12:06 Steven Bartlett? And now I'm a co-owner of this business. I highly, highly recommend you look into this. I highly recommend you look at the science behind the product. If you want to try it for yourself, visit ketone.com/steven for 30% off your subscription order. And you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. That's ketone.com/steven. And I'm so honoured that once again, a company I own can sponsor my podcast. Just give me 15 seconds to explain how you can build a viable business online. The people I see winning in life don't have a perfect plan. They just take the first step and then the next, and then they keep going. They stay obsessed and they stay consistent. And Stan Store, a platform I co-own and one of our sponsors, is the best first step to help turn your knowledge into income. It only takes a couple of minutes to launch your business and
1:12:50 Steven Bartlett? start selling digital products, coaching, memberships, or communities online without any tech headaches or endless setup. Thousands of entrepreneurs, creators, and risk takers, you stand to take control of their future. Because Stan is for entrepreneurs, for those willing to put in the work and bet on themselves. If you're ready to start building, join us. Launch your business today with a free 14-day trial at stevenbartlett.stan.store. So I want to give the audience that are listening some practical ways that they can change their life to live a better life and to navigate the food environment we live in. But just to, just generally, the advice that you would give if you had the ear of, I don't know, five million people right now, and you could say something to them to help them live
1:13:34 Steven Bartlett? better lives, to perform better, what advice would you give them?
1:13:38 Speaker 01 Number one is I would say, be conscious of the food you're consuming and what you're consuming on a daily basis. The impact of food is equivalent to medicine. It is, and sometimes more powerful than medicine. So what you drink, what you eat, you know, focusing on whole foods, not consuming liquid calories. And if you're someone who could benefit uniquely from stable glucose levels, lower insulin levels, like someone who has some type of metabolic disorder like I do, reducing carbohydrates oftentimes can be a very powerful strategy. In fact, known to prevent and reverse things like obesity and type 2 diabetes, with emergent evidence for its potential ability to put things like serious mental illness into remission. But we'll see as more evidence comes out.
1:14:20 Speaker 01 Exercise on a regular basis. We know that exercise might not be the primary, the lack of exercise might not be the primary driver for why someone is or isn't obese. But we do know that physical activity promotes health. We do know that physical activity is extremely important for overall well-being.
1:14:37 Steven Bartlett? You've got big muscles.
1:14:38 Speaker 01 Oh, well.
1:14:40 Steven Bartlett? Is that somewhat linked to your type 1 diabetes at all? Is that part of your strategy?
1:14:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, look, I was obese at one point and so I've since that point taken a very, I've become obsessed with trying to find out how to be bigger, stronger, faster, optimize my metabolic health, optimize my performance. And so it's been a lifelong kind of self-experiment in that journey. But exercise is just important in general. But for me, it's about all the different experiments and strategies I can use with exercise, with resistance exercise and beyond to kind of play around with what affects my body, what affects my insulin, how do I increase my overall metabolic health? And what I have seen is that that's directly linked to my performance.
1:15:22 Steven Bartlett? How often do you exercise?
1:15:25 Speaker 01 I try to exercise every single day.
1:15:28 Steven Bartlett? And how long for and what types of exercise?
1:15:31 Speaker 01 So what I do right now is I typically do weightlifting for 30 minutes to an hour every, or six days a week. And then I will go typically ride a bike to jiu-jitsu, so Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which can be uniquely, almost like a mixed exercise, intense exercise, where it's going to be extremely intense for like five minutes and then you have a one or two minute break, extremely intense and then a break. And I do that typically around five days a week. I also try to purposely engage in some type of aerobic exercise when I can. If I wasn't able to do as much jiu-jitsu one day or as much resistance exercise, I always try to add on some type of cardiovascular work, whether that be a run, a bike, or these
1:16:15 Speaker 01 aerodynamic bikes where it's just lower and upper body. I find those to be incredibly effective and powerful tools and actually just not causing damage to muscle tissue, but also allowing you to improve your overall cardiovascular health.
1:16:30 Steven Bartlett? What does your diet look like?
1:16:32 Speaker 01 So I tend to wake up and not think about food. That's one thing that I've also experienced similar to you, that when I switched to a ketogenic diet, not only improved my glucose and insulin, but I also found that with a ketogenic diet that I...
1:16:47 Speaker 01 Don't feel hungry. So I would wake up and I don't tend to eat food right away. In fact,
1:16:53 Speaker 01 I enjoy when I don't eat food, more so than when I do eat food oftentimes, just because, not because I don't enjoy the feeling of sitting down and having food. I love that. But the experience and lived quality of life of not having high variable glucose levels, high insulin levels, and the uncertainty that comes with that in my daily life, I enjoy the 23 hours or 22 hours of my day where I have this stability, not the moments in time where I'm introducing uncertainty and variability. To dumb that down a little bit, what I'm saying is that when I, when I don't, I wake up and I don't eat food because I find that it, I'm not hungry, but I also find that it makes managing diabetes easier.
1:17:37 Steven Bartlett? And so do you eat once a day or twice a day?
1:17:39 Speaker 01 I tend to eat two to three times a day, you know, sometimes right before jiu jitsu or weightlifting jiu jitsu, always afterwards and always before, sometime before bed. Try not to do it right before bed because it tends to impact my sleep quality a little bit. But I find that I just eat whenever I feel hungry and I try to give myself sufficient protein to be able to respond to the exercise that I'm doing.
1:18:03 Steven Bartlett? So I've got the first one's about being intentional about your food choices. The second one is about exercise. Anything else?
1:18:10 Speaker 01 Well, sleep's really important. You know, these are, you know, Stephen, this isn't like, oh, like this is the most revolutionary advice of all time, but these, these core foundational components, good nutrition, tailored to your specific needs, exercising as much as you can, and getting good sleep are the pillars of health. If you don't have those corrected, then you're wasting your time everywhere else.
1:18:36 Steven Bartlett? And is there anything as it relates to glucose?
1:18:41 Steven Bartlett? That surprised you because you're someone that sees a lot of this data. I mean, you, you, you, you walk around with the, the, the two devices on that you've mentioned and you're, you're looking at the insulin and glucose response. Is there anything that people don't understand as having a really pronounced impact on their glucose levels that they wouldn't expect? Like, orange juice is one of the ones that, growing up, I thought, fuck, I thought this was a healthy thing. I used to, I used to drink Sunny Delight, thinking I was putting all these amazing vitamins in my body. And now I actually look back and regret it. And I, you know, not to be judgmental of any parents, because parenting is very hard. But sometimes I'll see parents giving their children like a big glass of orange juice. And in my head, I just see the glucose spike that that child's about to have.
1:19:23 Speaker 01 It's funny when you mention parenting, because I have a three and a six year old at home. And it's amazing when they try one of these foods, these very sugary foods, these very tasty foods, they, it's almost like they become incessant on wanting it again. You know, like, normal food isn't good enough anymore.
1:19:45 Speaker 01 And I think that's a great illustration of, of what many of us adults are, are challenged with on a daily basis. But yet, many people are just unaware of the impact that it's having on their metabolism, impact that it's having on their hunger, the impact that that's going to lead to on their future health.
1:20:00 Steven Bartlett? And is there anything that you've spotted from your experiments with your, your CGM and your insulin device? That people should most certainly avoid. So you said liquid calories. Is there anything else that causes a really pronounced or unexpected glucose response?
1:20:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, there's so many, honestly, Stephen, over time, that it's honest, it's really hard to pinpoint any singular one. A lot of the foods that are out there are often surprisingly challenging on glucose levels, on insulin levels, particularly the processed foods, because what happens when you make these food products is that you're trusting the food company to put ingredients in that you're going to respond favorably to, that your metabolism will respond well to. And the truth is that that's.
1:20:44 Speaker 01 Far from a guarantee and in many cases, maybe less likely than it is likely. And so, yeah, I don't have a singular example for you, Stephen. I just, but I've experienced it numerous times.
1:20:54 Steven Bartlett? So I've got a small list here. Sugary drinks, white bread and bagels, white rice. That surprised me a lot because I used to think white.
1:21:01 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
1:21:02 Steven Bartlett? I thought, growing up, rice was like a health food.
1:21:05 Speaker 01 Okay. Well, so on that note, white rice, potatoes.
1:21:10 Steven Bartlett? All potatoes in any form.
1:21:12 Speaker 01 Sweet potatoes tend to have less of a glycemic response, but it's still going to have a potent glycemic response.
1:21:18 Steven Bartlett? So mashed or baked potatoes, obviously french fries. Yeah.
1:21:20 Speaker 01 For sure, french fries. Most of, like pasta is a big one.
1:21:25 Steven Bartlett? Cereal, refined cereals.
1:21:28 Speaker 01 Most cereals are actually worse than the foods I just described on blood sugar and insulin by a long shot. In fact, most of the, you know, these heart healthy cereals, these, I would never, blood sugar would just spike through the roof proportionally amount I ate. So, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be consuming a lot of those. And I think, I think most people at this stage in the, the health and science world would also generally align with, with that, that those aren't necessarily the best foods to consume. We would think, you know, more, more of the less glycemic or less, foods that have less of an impact on glucose levels, less of an impact on insulin levels. You know, one thing
1:22:12 Speaker 01 I constantly hear, especially in the research and clinical community is like, well, look, you know, not everyone needs to be concerned about that because, you know, people can respond to a lot of these foods just fine. And I say, well, you're, you're right. Except that over half of America has prediabetes and 90 plus percent have some form of measurement that indicates that their metabolic health is impaired. And over 86, 68% are obese. And now children are affected with these diseases with obesity and prediabetes at around 20%. So it's, it's the fact that we are now.
1:22:55 Speaker 01 Less healthy than we've ever been.
1:22:59 Steven Bartlett? We don't have the foundation to support.
1:23:02 Speaker 01 Correct, and I think, you know, when we think about healthy nutrition, we think about exercise, we describe them as medicine, but the reality is, these are just normal aspects of things you should do every single day because that's what our bodies were made to do. And when we don't do those things, this is when health deteriorates. This is when we're challenging our body to maintain normal health.
1:23:22 Steven Bartlett? One of the surprising ones for me was dried fruits. And it said, while fruit contains natural sugars, the process of drying it concentrates those sugars. This removes the water and can make the sugar more readily available for absorption, leading to a higher glucose spike compared to fresh fruit. Typically, people think of dried fruit as being a health food as well.
1:23:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't, I don't touch those because unless I, I don't have any glucose on me and I, my blood sugar is going down for some reason, and it's dangerously low levels, that's when I consume those foods. Otherwise, I would, I would not consume them, just because of how quickly they raise blood sugar levels.
1:23:56 Steven Bartlett? Do you think everybody should try the ketogenic diet?
1:24:00 Speaker 01 Oh, that is a good question. I think, wow. What I would say is that you will never know the potential of its benefit or lack thereof if you don't try. Like anything in life, we're, we're left to assume what everyone else is like, you might have, we've talked about the ketogenic diet numerous times here. We talked about exogenous ketones numerous times here. But if you don't try it, you don't know how it'll work for you. In science, Stephen, one of the most important things to appreciate
1:24:37 Speaker 01 is that we often publish bar graphs, look like this, you know, the, a line that illustrates the average outcome of a group of people. But what you don't appreciate is that that line or that bar graph is made up of numerous individuals who all averaged to that number. But what if you're the person who's at the very high dot or the very bottom dot, meaning that you're the, what they call an outlier, or someone who responded negatively or positively to that. And then you just follow the average advice that that study showed. Well, oh, look, I tried this approach and it didn't, it didn't work for me.
1:25:20 Speaker 01 I'm just going to keep trying because this study said that I should. Well, no, you might be the person who was in that study who didn't respond, just like the person on the opposite end of the spectrum who did, who averaged out to the metal.
1:25:34 Steven Bartlett? So when, in that study that talked about the impact of exogenous ketones on brain stability, someone might have had a hundred percent improvement in brain stability and someone might have had 20% improvement or whatever, and that they've averaged it out across a bigger group of people. So if you, you are that person that had a hundred percent gain in brain stability, it's a pretty unbelievable tool for you to understand based on your body.
1:25:56 Speaker 01 Exactly. And that's, that's always the case in science. I mean, there are, and this, sometimes we look at this as responders and non-responders. But actually in the study where we gave the product from Atrium and Ketone IQ, in the, the SoCom study, we actually saw that nearly all of them saw an increase in SpO2, nearly all of them saw an increase in heart rate, but that's rare. That is rare.
1:26:21 Steven Bartlett? SpO2.
1:26:22 Speaker 01 Ah, so the amount of oxygen in the blood. So the, the measure that would indicate whether someone in these low oxygen environments had more blood or less, more oxygen or less oxygen. Ultimately, it's, it's important to try. I, I think it's, I would always say, yes, you should try because, or any nutrition strategy, because you should try different ones. I've probably tried over 10 plus different diets, honestly, maybe like 15 or 20 at this point in my life. I've just come to find that the ketogenic diet, for all the reasons we described, and because I have type 1 diabetes and I had, or have type 1 diabetes but had obesity. Find that a ketogenic diet is remarkably powerful at helping me live a dramatically
1:27:05 Speaker 01 improved quality of life, not have the increased risk for the high and variable glucose levels, high insulin levels that lead to a near guarantee of complications and 10 to 20 years of lost life expectancy. That's why I do it.
1:27:20 Steven Bartlett? I have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And this is a really tough question. So it's a very strange question as well, but I'm gonna ask you it anyway.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:32 Steven Bartlett? The question is, what is outside the simulation?
1:27:45 Speaker 01 I think it depends on your philosophy, on how our existence is with the limitations of understanding that our awareness of our world is completely limited to our, our brain's capacity. And our interpretation and then explanation of the world and the term of a simulation or lack, you know, however you want to frame it, I believe it is, is always going to be limited by our brain's ability to understand and articulate that.
1:28:24 Steven Bartlett? So what do you think is outside the simulation?
1:28:33 Speaker 01 Consciousness.
1:28:35 Steven Bartlett? You think consciousness is outside the simulation?
1:28:37 Speaker 01 I think that our ability to have, not consciousness, Stephen, but our ability to operate beyond consciousness.
1:28:52 Speaker 01 Got me on that one, man. That was a
1:28:54 Steven Bartlett? Tough question.
1:28:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is a tough question. That's, that's, that's a burner right there. I don't know.
1:29:00 Steven Bartlett? Do you think there is, do you think there is a God?
1:29:04 Steven Bartlett? Beyond, beyond this, all this stuff that we see here?
1:29:07 Speaker 01 I'm gonna give you the most real, honest answer possible.
1:29:10 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:29:10 Speaker 01 I don't think we ever can actually answer that question accurately.
1:29:14 Steven Bartlett? So your, your answer therefore is you don't know?
1:29:16 Speaker 01 I don't know. And I don't think I'll ever know.
1:29:18 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing the work that you do. Really appreciate it because, you know, so many of my friends in this field and even Michael, the founder of the ketone product on my, on my table here, talk about you as being the sort of gold standard of research, science and thought leadership on the subject of ketones and more broadly on the subject of glucose and all of the adjacent subjects like insulin. So you've really pushed the field forward and the thinking forward in this space in a really profound way. And you're only just getting started at 34 years old, which is remarkable. We're basically the same age. And you've had such a tremendous impact on the field of health and that's born out of the story that you told at the start through your own complications. So although it was, it's such a tragic thing to have such a diagnosis at such a young age.
1:30:02 Steven Bartlett? What's come from that is a beautiful thing for so many people that will better understand themselves and their, their illnesses, but also their performance and everything correlated to that because of you. So please keep doing the research you're doing and spreading the word in the way you're spreading it because it's much, much needed work and it's, it's important work. So thank you so much and thank you for giving me your time today.
1:30:21 Speaker 01 Stephen, it was an honor. Appreciate it, sir.
1:30:24 Steven Bartlett? Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released and so much more. In the circle you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community,
1:31:08 Steven Bartlett? head to the link in the description below or go to D O A C circle dot com. I will speak to you then.
Previous Most Replayed Moment: This Longevity Protocol Actually Works! - Biohacker Bryan Johnson Next Ray Dalio: We’re Heading Into Very, Very Dark Times! America & The UK’s Decline Is Coming! Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
