520. Is Your Diet Killing You? | Dr. Benjamin Bikman

Jordan Peterson sits down with bestselling author and bioenergetics Ph. D., Dr. Benjamin Bikman. They discuss the epidemic of insulin resistance in America and its profound effects on health, the sugar addiction crisis, how dopamine hijacks your brain, how to navigate the American diet, and the potential to fix it invitationally from the top down over the next four years. Benjamin Bikman earned a Ph. D. in bioenergetics at East Carolina University with a focus on the adaptations to metabolic surgeries in obesity. He continued to explore metabolic disorders, with a particular focus on insulin resistance, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Duke-National University of Singapore. As a professor at Brigham Young University and the director of its Diabetes Research Lab, Dr. Bikman has continued to study insulin, including its role as a regulator of human metabolism, as well as insulin’s relevance in chronic disease. In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Bikman actively serves as a research mentor to undergraduate and graduate students. He and his students frequently present and publish their findings. This episode was filmed on January 27th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Benjamin Bikman: Website https://www.benbikman.com/ On X https://x.com/BenBikmanPhD?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/benbikmanphd/?hl=en On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@benbikman Read Dr. Bikman’s most recent book, “How Not to Get Sick: A Cookbook and Guide to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance, Lose Weight, and Fight Chronic Disease” https://a.co/d/iPrxgTE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Si solo le persone si sedute su un giovedì sera ascoltando noi conversare e pensando: "Oh, voglio davvero un pezzo di burro." Ci vogliono qualcosa di dolce e ghiaccio. Ci vogliono carboidrati e hanno un milione di effetti metabolici. Uno di cui è il rafforzamento dell'insulina.

• 0:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Che succede ai diabeti di tipo 1 se non mangiano niente di più di grassi?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Le cellule grassa si fanno grandi. Si fanno così grandi che devono dire all'insulina: "Ho finito." Un governo scrive un mandato dicendo alle persone cosa mangiare e, oh, hanno fatto sbagliato.

• 0:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Tutte quelle verdure e frutti sono state geneticamente alterate ad un grado che è oltre la comprensione.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Una dieta basata puramente sulla piante è così deficiente in nutrienti che è incompattibile totalmente con la sopravvivenza umana. Studi sugli uomini hanno mostrato che se l'uomo smette di mangiare carne, il testosterone si esploderebbe, la produzione spermale si esploderebbe.

• 0:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ascoltate quello, uomo.

• 1:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ciao a tutti. La prima cosa che penso di dirvi è che sto di nuovo in giro dal febbraio al giugno, in usi d'America, in Canada e in Europa. E se volete più informazioni su questo, andate su jordanbpeterson.com e lo guardate. Così potete venire a vedere me e mia moglie, se vi è convinto di farlo. Oggi sto parlando con il dott. Benjamin Bikman, che è un professore di biologia delle cellule a Brigham Young University e un oratore all'Academia Peterson. Ha fatto tre corsi per noi. E stiamo parlando oggi principalmente perché sono interessato in... e non io solo, ovviamente, nell'uscita del movimento "Fare la America ancora più sana."

• 1:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  E ho parlato con le persone che sono integralemente coinvolte in quel movimento e stavo cercando di determinare, strategizzare sulla direzione. E è una cosa molto complicata da fare. E una delle cose che voglio fare è scoprire dove la più spesa per il pezzo potrebbe essere. Con la minima quantità di difficoltà. quasi ogni problema è come questo. Ci sono molte cause di un problema determinato, ma c'è uno o due cause che sono il 90% del problema. E volete concentrarci. E forse avete una possibilità. E quindi ho parlato con il dott. Bikman oggi su... Insulin resistance. And really, to put that in more simple terms, excess carbohydrate intake. And that's the carbohydrates that are rapidly

• 2:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  transmuted metabolically into sugar. And that's pretty much all carbohydrates, by the way. And the fundamental problem with America's health is an abundance of carbohydrates. And so, we discussed insulin resistance, which is a metabolic condition that arises as a consequence of too much carbohydrate intake. And then we discussed the multiplicity of cascading catastrophic health effects that produces. Type 2 diabetes being particularly well-known, let's say, as a secondary consequence. But cancer, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction, more generally,

• 3:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  high blood pressure, you name it, immunological disease, depression, anxiety. There's almost no serious medical condition that's widespread that can't be traced to excess of carbohydrate intake. And so, obviously, it seems to me, that's where the focus should be. And so, we walk through the biology, we walk through the practicalities, we walk through some hypotheses about how that problem might be redressed at the government level, but also at the level of individual behavior. And so, this is very important. There's likely nothing you can do that will improve your life more, both in the short run,

• 4:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  but even more importantly, in the long run, than to modify your diet away from high carbohydrate intake. And so, we walk through why that is. So, join us. So Dr. Bikman, I've been talking to the Maha people about their plans. And it's clearly the case that Americans, Westerners more broadly, but particularly Americans maybe, are suffering from a slew of unfortunate medical conditions. So what I'd like to know from you to begin with is if you had to rank order the magnitude

• 4:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  of the medical problems that presently confront the West, let's say, particularly the US, how would you do that? There's a very specific reason I'm asking. You know, whenever there's a problem, maybe you can, if it's a complex problem, maybe you can point to like a dozen, two dozen causal elements. But if you focus, you'll find that three of those are the major contributors. And you could spend an immense amount of time on all two dozen, or you could focus like hell, maybe on the worst problem, and gain 50% of the ground. If you spread your forces out across the entire panoply of problems, you're not going to get anywhere.

• 5:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, if there are 24 stakeholders in the system that are making America sick, and you take on all 24, all you're going to do is fight endless battles. So I'm curious if you had to zero in, you know, to where you'd get the most bang for the buck. When you look at the health of America, what do you see as the major impediments, the major problems?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, if you look at the top 10 killers, you can actually thematically lump them all into what I call the cardiometabolic crisis, where that encompasses the problems that are overtly metabolic, like type 2 diabetes, which is a top 10 killer. I think it comes in around number 6 or 7. But also number 1, which is heart disease. And now, there are others in the top 10, like Alzheimer's disease, for example, that you wouldn't think, you'd say, okay, well, Ben's not including Alzheimer's disease in the Cardio metabolic killers and yet I actually am even certain forms of cancers are viewed increasingly as a metabolic problem. So it might be that I'm the guy with the hammer and so I see the nail, but the nail

• 6:34Speaker 00

  is poor metabolic health and that's certainly the focus of my efforts. But I like how you framed the question as much as metabolic health is an underlying issue or a common soil from which all of these noxious plants are growing that we call diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, COPD, you know, chronic obstructive pulmonary problems. The, the alternative view isn't that these are each distinct problems. It's just that they're various manifestations of the same problem, namely insulin resistance being the most common disorder. Within the United States, a study published out of University of North Carolina, a number

• 7:13Speaker 00

  of years ago, found that 88% of adults have at least one part of what we call the metabolic syndrome, which is a kind of cluster of complications. Interestingly and tellingly, what we call the metabolic syndrome used to be called the insulin resistance syndrome. And as much as you framed it from a Western view, just to help people appreciate this, we aren't even in, we're maybe around in the U.S. number 20 or so with type 2 diabetes worldwide.

• 7:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  The Middle East, they're, they're experiencing these problems far worse than we are. Even Southeast Asia, these countries where you'd look at the population and think, well, you look healthy, you're only maybe a little overweight.

• 7:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  But there are ethnic differences where body fat, which is so important to this, will predispose people to these metabolic problems at varying levels. But to answer the question succinctly, the problem is a cardio metabolic crisis and at the heart of this is this very poorly understood, well, poorly known, poorly discussed problem called insulin resistance.

• 8:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay. So, so.

• 8:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lay out the relationship between insulin resistance and obesity.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a great question. So insulin resistance, it's the most common problem. It's the most relevant for chronic disease. Naturally, we want to know, all right, well, where did the villain come from? What is the Breaking Bad story? I typically describe and teach that there are two paths. There's fast insulin resistance, which has its own noxious stimuli. That it comes quickly and it can go quickly. But then there is slow insulin resistance. And this touches on your question, so I'll answer it with that one in mind. One of the ways in which insulin resistance develops is by fat cells that get too big.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Now, to really confirm, as much as we have an obsession on fat, on body fat, we actually look at it kind of incorrectly. We would say, okay, Jordan has 20 pounds of fat, whereas Ben has 30 pounds of fat. So Ben's naturally going to be sicker than Jordan. And yet, it's not the mass that matters most. It's actually the size of each individual fat cell. This is why, in that cardiometabolic crisis, the list of what's killing us, men die more from all of those, except Alzheimer's disease. So if you look at the top 10, nine of them go to men. And it's not even close. Men die more from these problems than women by orders of magnitude, almost.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  But women are fatter than men. And so it's clearly not an issue of fat mass.

• 9:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Per se.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so if you look at it as a percent body fat, a woman's going to be fatter than a man, by design. That's supposed to be that way, for reasons that we won't get into. But men have less body fat, but we have bigger fat cells. So I promise I'm answering the question. But as a fat cell gets bigger and bigger, it's almost like a naughty little child who's taken the water balloon to the tap. Now they're filling it, filling it, filling it, filling it. Oh, boy, you better take that balloon off, or it's gonna pop. Now, the fat cell, acting in its own best interests, it has to adapt two ways to ensure that it doesn't pop. It doesn't want to die. In the body, we don't want our fat cells. We don't want any cell to die. That's a very messy, very inflamed process.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  So, one thing, the fat cell, as it gets ever bigger, it can't turn off the fuel coming in. But what it can do is change the fuel coming out. So insulin has an absolute choke hold on fat cells. This is a little outside the question, so I won't quite get around to it yet. But insulin is an absolutely essential signal. As much as we focus on calories, insulin tells a fat cell to grow. And now the fat cell is growing and it's telling insulin, "Insulin, I am about to pop. And so I have to stop listening to you. And so I'm going to become deaf, or I'm going to become resistant to what you're telling me to do." And whereas earlier insulin was telling it to hold on to all of this fat,

• 11:24Speaker 00

  now the fat cell starts leaking out fat, even though insulin was originally telling it not to. This creates a problem that we can refer to as ectopic fat deposition. Because now the fat cell is leaking out these things called free fatty acids. At the same, so blood fat levels are going up. Now, that's not normally a problem necessarily, but that should only happen when insulin is low. Now we have this weird state where insulin is high, which should be telling the fat breakdown to slow down. I'm getting into deep biochemistry actually really quickly. So normally if insulin is up, because we've eaten some carbs and stuff, then fat in the blood would be down, because insulin would be telling the fat to hold on to it.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  But now, or when we're fasting, or low carbohydrate diet, then insulin is down, and now we're mobilizing more fat. So normally the biochemistry and the endocrinology is such that if insulin's high, fats are down. If insulin's low, fats are up. Unless the fat cells are overfilled, or have undergone hypertrophy, or growth expansion. Now you have high insulin and high fats. And so the body can't burn that fat, it has to store it. And so now we start storing fat in tissues that are ill-suited, like the pancreas is getting fat, the liver.

• 12:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why isn't it just excreted?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Wow, that's a great question. So actually, if you'll allow me, I love that you just asked the question "why." I tell my students that when you ask a scientist a "why" question, especially a cell biologist, my answer is "God only knows." So I don't know why God designed the system to work that way. Why not excrete the fat? But I can-

• 13:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe it's because historically, the probability of prolonged-

• 13:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Nutrient availability at that level was like zero.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, we... Yeah, we're living in a very unique day.

• 13:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the rule would have been historically, if you have extra food...

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Hold on to it.

• 13:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hold on to it, because hard times are coming.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  So that is in fact reflective, though, of insulin's effect. It is so determined to store energy that it will literally depress metabolic rate. It will prevent any wasting of energy. So that's the first problem with touching on the question of what's the connection between obesity and insulin resistance, because there is a connection. So the fat cells get big, they get so big that they have to tell insulin, "I'm done. I can't get any bigger, so I'm gonna leak out the fats even though you don't want me to." But then there's a second feature that just compounds the problem, which is as the cells are getting bigger and bigger, and fat cells can grow unlike any cell in the body. No cell in the body is capable of the expansion that a fat cell is capable of, much to our chagrin.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  But as the fat cells getting bigger and bigger, it's, they're pushing each other further and further away from capillaries, from the smallest base unit of the blood vessel and all of its life-giving oxygen. And as it's getting pushed further and further away, the poor chubby fat cell is becoming hypoxic, or it's suffocating. And in an effort to ensure its survival, it starts slowly dripping out these pro-inflammatory proteins called cytokines, basically just hormones that turn on inflammation. And there's a whole bunch of them, dozens of them. But some of them will correct the problem. It's like a trail of breadcrumbs, and rather than Hansel and Gretel coming, it's getting to the capillary and stimulating the growth of a new blood vessel.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  And so it's kind of the fat cell's way of crying out, "Hey, I'm lacking oxygen, come feed me." And so we have that happen. So it, both of these things, the poor, we pity the poor fat cell. It's become so filled because of our lifestyle. Which is a whole other topic worth diving into. But it becomes insulin resistant to ensure its own survival, spreading fat to be stored throughout the body. And then it becomes pro-inflammatory to try to correct its blood supply. And that then, the inflammation is one of the fast causes of insulin resistance that I alluded to a moment ago. That any time inflammation is turned on on the body, yes, that is an immune process.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  But the overlapping of the immune and the metabolic is profound. Just a moment ago, you and I were speculating on the, why the system may be designed the way it is. One thing we know for certain is that of all the systems in the body, the immune and the metabolic are not only essential to survive times of deprivation and to defend the host, but they work hand in hand. After all, what good is it trying to mount an immune response if the warriors don't have any energy to work with? So any time inflammation is up and it's staying up, that's going to cause insulin resistance. And indeed, it is one of the main causes of insulin resistance.

• 16:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay. Okay, so let's, let's, let's walk through this from stage one. And also, let everyone know what the health consequences are. So I'm gonna start the outline. You tell me if I get it wrong and elaborate wherever you want. All right, so we have access to an endless number, an endless array of carbohydrates. And they're very easily converted into sugar.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  So we have access to sugar of various forms and to carbohydrates in absolute plenitude.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so that's easily converted, that's very high energy source, a very dense energy source, and it's easily converted to fat. And so that's what happens. And the reason that happens is because... We're evolved for lean times and we store excess energy like a grizzly bear or a camel. And we do that so we don't starve to death in the winter and

• 17:10Speaker 00

  And thank goodness for it.

• 17:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. And you see this, I guess some of the proof of that is that islanders who tend to be evolved to get through lean times, they're very, very efficient in their metabolism. If they go on a North American high carb diet, they just balloon.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 17:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep. Okay, so, so now, too many carbohydrates and sugars, too much fat. Now, the consequence of the fat is manifold. One of the consequences is, you alluded to two. One is that insulin resistance increases and the other is that inflammation increases.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so I think what we should do first is we should outline the role of insulin in bodily metabolism.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so why don't you do that and then tell everybody why insulin resistance is bad? Because what you've done so far is make a case for why it promotes cellular fat cell function. But it also has catastrophic effects systemically. Okay, so talk about what insulin does and then talk about what insulin resistance does. Okay, because just so everyone's clear, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to zero in on the most egregious of the multitude of health problems that might plague us. And we're making a case for insulin resistance as perhaps the worst. It contributes to all sorts of diseases, but it's also highly associated with obesity, which has a variety of health problems as well. Okay, so let's focus on insulin to begin with.

• 18:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Tell people what insulin does and then what insulin resistance does.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Yeah, insulin is an absolutely essential hormone in the body. As much as I am going to go on in the next few minutes and paint the picture of it being a villain. It's critical. If you don't have it, you have a disease called type 1 diabetes and you will die. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence. In the absence of insulin, the body will not last long. And so, it is here for a purpose. We need it. However, we need it to work in our favor. And to do that, we need it to be generally keeping in a normal range. And so, you just a moment ago framed the question by pointing a finger at carbohydrates. I agree with that completely. That's a whole topic.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  As much as, over the past decades, we vilified dietary fat. Oh, boy, we got it wrong. And wouldn't you know it? You know, in the first time, in history, as far as I know, a government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat and, boy, they got it wrong. No surprise, right? That has happened so often when you take things to that level. So, if we put the blame where it belongs, not only are carbohydrates the only macronutrient that people have an addiction for, no one's addicted to fat, no one's addicted to protein. If only people were sitting around on a Friday night, listening to us chat and thinking, "Oh, I really want a stick of butter." No, no one. They want something sweet and gooey, they want something salty and crunchy. So, we crave carbs. And they have myriad metabolic effects.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  One of which is to spike insulin. So, this is answering the question of what does insulin do? Insulin's most famous effect, but not its only effect, and I would even say not its most important effect. Its most famous effect is to look at that rise in blood sugar or blood glucose and say, "That's beyond homeostasis, this isn't right. If that stays high for long, it's going to start harming the body." Because hyperglycemia alone is pathogenic. And so, insulin acts as a hero and says, "Your problem, I'm going to take care of you." It brings the temperature back down, like a thermostat. You know, the perfect example of homeostasis. Brings the glucose back down to normal. And then insulin, having done its job, retreats back into the background, if you will.

• 20:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's its chemical role in relationship to the conversion of carbohydrate to energy?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, right. That's a great question. So, glucose, you'd mentioned a moment ago. And as you did so, I sort of couldn't help but think of the, kind of a metaphor of like engines, where glucose, the body has two primary fuels.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  At any moment, it's either sugar burning, blood glucose, or fat burning. One is like a kind of race car engine. Boy, it's gonna be really quick. You don't have a lot of fuel and you're gonna get terrible gas mileage. But, boy, it's gonna be a quick ride. The other is like a big diesel engine, rumbling down the roads of Alberta, hauling, going across the Trans-Canada Highway and taking its load. It's gonna go forever. It's never gonna run out of fuel.

• 21:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the fat metabolism.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  That's fat metabolism. And now, the next question is, well, who decides? Insulin decides. Insulin, once again, when it comes to any metabolic effect, you need never go further than insulin. There are other hormones that wanna pretend that they matter. Thyroid kind of matters, cortisol kind of matters. Insulin rules them all. And insulin, if it's up, it dictates it's time for sugar burning. If insulin's down, then the body says, alright, it's time for fat burning. In fact, that's where the whole ketogenic aspect comes from. When insulin's down, it is so incompatible with the body storing energy that it literally begins burning more fat than it knows what to do with. It's met its energy needs already, but it can't stop burning fat.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  And so, it starts burning more than it needs. And that more, if you will, becomes ketones. It's sort of a metabolic release valve, like a pressure release valve, of a way of saying, I'm burning more than I need. And so, I've gone beyond what the cell requires. So, ketones are gonna become a good alternative. But then back to...

• 22:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Would you think that the, like historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, easily digestible, high-sugar carbs would have been essentially nonexistent, right?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Imagine what we would have had to do to get them. We either had to prepare for battle against a hive of bees.

• 23:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. When we could find them.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Yes, when we could find them, or further, when we could find a digestible carbohydrate. You know, maybe berries or something, because people need to...

• 23:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or tubers.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. We have to appreciate that what we eat is either going to defend itself by claw or by chemical. And a plant doesn't have the advantage of running away or attacking back. So if we dropped any number of us in the wilderness, good luck.

• 23:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, we have to

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Even if you're surrounded by plants.

• 23:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  We have to understand too, that like, we might think that historically, human beings existed on the kind of vegetables that we have now, but, or fruits. But all those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension. I mean, if you look at the origin plant of corn.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  I mean, it doesn't look anything like, it looks nothing like corn.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Even look at an apple, like, look at an apple 100 years ago, it was these teeny little crab apples.

• 23:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sour things.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Now they're these big juicy sugar bombs.

• 23:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  But the more we eat these sugar bombs, and they're like, the more glucose is going up, the more insulin has to come up. And now we've come to what I believe is in fact, the main driver of insulin resistance. As I transitioned to insulin resistance, which is too much insulin. And people may hear that and think, hold on, you're talking about insulin resistance? Too much insulin is the main cause of insulin resistance. And it, lest it seem a little unexpected, it is a fundamental biological principle. Too much of something will cause a resistance to that something.

• 24:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Whether it's body or soul, if we are exposed to a stimulus over time, that noxious stimulus is, it becomes noxious and we try to adapt.

• 24:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, dose matters, right? There's lots of things that are

• 24:45Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 24:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  In proportionate dose.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 24:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So now, we're eating carbs continually, let's say.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 24:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  So we're relying on this fast energy source. One consequence of that is storage and fat.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  One consequence of that is if there's too much storage and fat, is that triggers its own form of insulin resistance. But you also alluded to an insulin resistance, I believe, that's merely a consequence of insulin that spikes too high?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 25:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  So there's multiple reasons for insulin resistance in a heavy carb-loaded diet.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, all of them become relevant there. Yeah, so we've now kind of gone to both here. The slow insulin resistance is the slow and steady growth of the fat, so. Which we outlined earlier, and that's a consequence of insulin being up telling the fat cell to grow. And then the fat cell saying, "Okay, insulin, what do you want me to grow with?" Ah, it's the calories. So you have to have both for a fat cell to grow. An insulin stimulus and sufficient calories to fuel the growth. Then we have the fast insulin resistance. I mentioned inflammation, that is one. And then the other one, that is the main one, I argue, is too much insulin itself. And then, once the body becomes insulin resistant, now you really can start going down that list of chronic diseases that are the top 10 killers.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  And to a one, you can see how insulin resistance is either the main contributor or one of the main contributors, like

• 26:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  To all of, yeah, to

• 26:09Speaker 00

  All of them. Like, type 2 diabetes is entirely a disease of insulin resistance. Where, over time, if you have two variables, the insulin and the glucose, one of the great tragedies from a metabolic scientist with diabetes, type 2 diabetes, is that we have a glucose-centric paradigm. Just to use this as an example of how insulin resistance contributes to disease. The conventionally-trained clinician only looks at the glucose. They may not have even ever measured the insulin. And when I give these kinds of talks to physicians, they can't even wrap their head around insulin being a marker that matters. And yet, the irony is it's the one that matters most. Because over the life of the person with type 2 diabetes, their insulin has been going higher and higher and higher.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  But the glucose is staying normal.

• 26:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Blood glucose.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Blood glucose. And so, when they come in for their annual checkup, the physician just says, "Well, glucose is normal, so you're good. But you have high blood pressure." Well, guess what the leading cause of high blood pressure is? Insulin resistance. Or they may say, "You have fatty liver disease."

• 27:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Guess what the leading cause of fatty liver disease is? You have early signs of cognitive decline or dementia.

• 27:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  None of those are glucose

• 27:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Diabetes type 3.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 27:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Yes. Where now, the brain's becoming insulin resistant. And if we could shift the paradigm to an insulin-centric paradigm, they would have detected, and then it's 20 years later, where they finally see, "Oh, your glucose is high." Well, now, let's

• 27:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, but it's worse than that, I think, if I remember correctly. Because, so you said that one of the ways that physicians are marking whether you're healthy is to look at your blood glucose levels. But they age correct those. So that the norms for you at 50,

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would be normal at 50 is diabetic at 20. But that, that makes no sense, because if your blood sugar levels are as high at 50 as they would have been in 20, if you would have been diagnosed diabetic, it's just as bad for you at 50.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Oh, in fact, it's even-

• 28:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's, it's an insane correction.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  In fact, it's even more pernicious. If you look over time at what the diabetic cutoff used to be,

• 28:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  over the past 70 or so years, since that became a marker.

• 28:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's been gerrymandered as well.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  It's been slowly coming down, and you would say, "Well, why bring it down?" It's because the easier it is for people to stumble over, the easier it is to diagnose, and then the easier it is to say, "I need to give you a drug." And that is what I believe is partly at the heart of the glucose-centric paradigm. You can't drug insulin. It's too stubborn. There's no drug that's gonna push your insulin down. But there are drugs that will push your glucose down. And so it's a hell of a way to diagnose someone with a problem sooner and give them a drug prescription, multiple drug prescriptions. But the great irony, or I would say irony as if it's an innocent mistake.

• 29:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Murderous irony.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yes. The more the clinician is pushing the glucose down, indeed with some medications that push the insulin up even higher, they actually kill the patient more. Even though you've corrected their blood glucose problem,

• 29:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, it's the wrong marker.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Just the absolute proof, it's not the marker that matters. It's certainly not the marker that's causing disease. So the more aggressively you're giving the diabetic more and more insulin, type 2 diabetic, more and more insulin to push the glucose down, they become three times more likely to die from heart disease. You're literally tripling their risk-

• 29:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which drugs do that?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. That will be drugs like a class of drug called sulfonylurea, which is what's called an insulin secretogog. It basically takes the beta cells and says, of the pancreas that make insulin, say, "Hey, we know you're already working overtime. It's not enough. We need to put you in the Golog. You gotta work double shifts, and we've bumped up-"

• 29:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it drives the insulin levels up. That drives the sugar levels down.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so again-

• 29:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  But it increases insulin resistance across time.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. So they get fatter and they die faster. Cancer risk doubles, Alzheimer's risk doubles, because those aren't glucose-

• 30:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  How common are those drugs?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Oh, extremely common. Even more common is just giving the type 2 diabetic insulin directly. You're literally giving them more of the very thing that's killing them.

• 30:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes before we go on.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Bueno, tú y yo podemos... No hay mucho para algunos canadienses que orgullos de, pero Banting y Best, dos científicos legales de Ontario, fueron los primeros a descubrir el hormona que estaba ausente en el tipo 1 diabetes. Al tiempo, se llamaba "iniciación juvenil", porque era algo que se manifestaría alrededor de la edad de 10 años o así. Pero en el tipo 1 diabetes, es cuando el cuerpo mata sus propias células beta.

• 30:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Es un problema inmune?

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Una enfermedad autoinmune.

• 30:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Es una enfermedad autoinmune.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Sí, así que el cuerpo, por alguna razón, dijo a las células beta del pancreas: "No te ves familiar, así que te vamos a matar". Y así la persona no tiene células beta, no tiene insulina, no hay forma de controlar el metabolismo, y se queman hasta la muerte, si se quiere, de alguna manera.

• 31:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Qué pasa con los tipo 1 diabeticos si no comen nada más que grasa?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Sí, bueno, esa es una gran pregunta. De hecho, esto permite pasar a la dinámica real de las células grasas. Así que si... De hecho, si miras el dieto más temprano que se daba a los diabeticos, tipo 1 diabeticos, antes de que empezaran a usar insulina, era casi completamente carnívora.

• 31:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sí.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Miras estas prescripciones de antigua, era "tanta carne grasas", y decía "carne grasas". "No coma carne que es demasiado débil".

• 31:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Correcto, correcto.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Es porque estos son combustibles, la grasa es un combustible que no necesita insulina para decirle qué hacer. Puede entrar en las células del cuerpo, el cerebro, que no usa grasa, fácilmente usa ketones, que harás mucho si estás quemando mucha grasa. Y así sería la mejor manera de asegurarse de que el tipo 1 diabético viviera lo más largo posible. Pero la gran tragedia, cuando descubrimos lo que estaba faltando, profesores Banting y Best, al dar a estas pacientes insulina, cambió las cosas. Ahora estas personas podrían vivir una vida larga y feliz, pero cambió el paradigma, que era: "Coma lo que quieras y cubre con tu insulina". Este es un término, cualquier padre que esté escuchando esto, que tenga un hijo con tipo 1 diabetes, habrá oído esto. "Asinine consejo".

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Esta es una enfermedad de no metabolizar glucosa muy bien.

• 32:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Correcto, correcto.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  ¿Por qué les decimos esto?

• 32:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Y eso incluye carbohidratos.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Oh, sí.

• 32:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Porque se convierten en glucosa.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Exacto, sí, gracias. Así que todos los carbohidratos dietéticos se van a convertir en glucosa del sangre, de cierta manera o de otra. Algunos mucho, como la nata de la Sugar Bomb, algunos muy poco, como una verdura crucifera, como el brócoli o algo así.

• 32:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Las verduras inedibles.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Sí, exacto, las que pones delante de un bebé joven, un niño pequeño, y van a sacarla del plato porque inherentemente saben: "No quiero esto". Sí, así que el tipo 1 diabético... What used to be a carnivore diet basically became the same standard high carb diet. But you look at these poor kids with type 1 diabetes. It is a life of constant fluctuations. The constant anxiety. And yet, now we know, in human studies, what happens if you control the carbs? Get them off the roller coaster? Sure enough.

• 33:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  It flattens.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  It's a flat line. And their insulin dose just plummets.

• 33:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  And depending on how much you have to pay for insulin, that's a wallet-saving therapy.

• 33:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Let me summarize. So, human beings have two metabolic pathways. The one that we relied on until very recently wasn't the carb pathway. That's really an emergency and windfall metabolic system.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Quick burning, limited supply.

• 33:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we have enough carbs to fast. Like truly, if a human was just relying on their... Even, you don't even have to go that dramatic. You have someone fast for 24 hours? They've essentially burned through all of their mobilized carbohydrate storage, their glucose storage. That's done, it's gone. And in fact, that's going to coincide perfectly with ketogenesis, with the ramping up of ketones in the blood.

• 33:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, there's an additional, we'll go sideways here for a second. Well, there's an additional issue there that isn't well-understood.

• 34:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  As I understand it, that historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, there would have been lots of times when we had access to like no carbohydrates. Okay, so now, and maybe some of those times as well, to not much protein and fat. So, just not much food.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so what happens then? Well, you go into autophagy, right? So, what happens is your body starts to digest its own tissues. Now, those could be fat. The fat, which would be fine, because that's what it's there for. But if you go past that, then there are more... There are tissues that are starting to be digested, autodigested, that aren't merely for storage. But the body has a hierarchy of self-consuming. So, it consumes damaged tissue first, which is of course what it would do. Because if it digested healthy tissue first, you would just die. So, that's a stupid solution. Now, the advantage to digesting damaged tissue is that...

• 35:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  When you have access to food again, you regenerate. And so, one of the consequences of being reliant on an emergency food supply continually, carbohydrates, is that you never enter an autophagy condition. And so, you don't repair yourself very well. Well, first of all, do you think that's true?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  I've looked into this, and that, it looks to me like a carnivore diet mimics autophagy, and maybe that's why they're effective.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  In fact, not only mimics, it enables it. Like, just to be clear, but you're, you're touching on like this topic of longevity.

• 35:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Which I have, I have followed the, the modern, I don't want to hijack the question.

• 35:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, no, no, go ahead, hijack away.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Okay, well, yeah, with longevity, you'd think, well, what is a metabolism scientist going to say? Everything, I have everything to say about longevity, because it is this process of the cell constantly wondering, how am I doing? Is it time to build, or is it time to break? And, and one of the quirks of longevity or aging is that a cell actually needs to go through both, that I have looked, I have looked with, and guess who decides whether it's building or breaking? Hormones.

• 36:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Yeah, well, life is optimized death, right?

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Well said.

• 36:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  You have to die continually. The excess and the, what, what do you, everything excess about you and everything is malfunctioning has to die in order for you to propagate yourself across time. So, life isn't life, it's, life is a balance between growth and death. Right? So, you want to optimize death.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you optimize death with autophagy, as far as I can tell, and the carbohydrate diet, or a carnivore diet optimizes that, or can optimize it.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Takes you out of this emergency food supply.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  That makes you fat. I want to ask you about insulin resistance now. Now, your insulin levels are chronically too high because you're eating too many carbohydrates. What? And tell me the mechanism for insulin resistance, and then tell me about its cascading effects, so that we can understand the relationship between insulin resistance and diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease, and obesity, and heart disease, and cancer, and pretty much everything is aging for that matter.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, blindness, diabetic neuropathy, et cetera, et cetera. So let's walk through that. Eat too many carbohydrates, your insulin levels are chronically high.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Insulin resistance follows.

• 37:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then you get ins... Okay, how? How does it follow? What happens?

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, well, in fact, depending on it... So, everything you just asked is so substantial that not only did I want to put it into a book, but even in a Peterson Academy course. It is an answer of about seven hours or so.

• 37:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  But it is so relevant, because again, it's the most common problem. So when insulin is elevated for too long, it literally starts to... Certain cells, not all cells. And this is one of the reasons why insulin resistance is so pathogenic. It's because some cells become deaf, some cells don't. And so as you have insulin going up higher and higher, to the deaf cells, that's not so much a problem, but to the cells who are as acutely sensitive as they were before, now it's stimulating too much. So one interesting example that we haven't even mentioned is infertility. As a Bible-believing fellow, I feel very strongly that it is in our... It is a commandment to reproduce. So anything that compromises reproduction, as a scientist, I'm quite fascinated by.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  The most common forms of infertility in men is a problem called erectile dysfunction. The most common problem in women, that's a problem of infertility, is polycystic ovary syndrome. Both of them are caused by insulin resistance. But it's a perfect example of the kind of two-sided problem, where insulin resistance is on one side of the coin. Insulin isn't working very well, but you always have the other, which is that insulin is elevated. So these are two sides of the same coin. And these two problems of infertility, which again, we hadn't even mentioned yet.

• 39:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Are both a reflection of one or the other. So in the case of polycystic ovary syndrome, most common infertility in women. People don't appreciate that all estrogens, or maybe I'll back up. In order for a woman to have a normal ovulatory cycle, she has to have a big spike in estrogens. So there has to be a big estrogen spike, and then that enables, it facilitates ovulation. If she doesn't have this big spike in estrogens, the eggs in her ovaries are able to grow, but one never becomes the dominant and actually ovulates. And if one doesn't ovulate, all of those eggs stick around, so they become cysts. That is the heart of the problem here. Well, it's the manifestation of the problem.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Most people don't appreciate that most, all estrogens were once testosterone. That in men and women, all of the estrogens circulating through the body, and in the women, critical to ovulation, have to be converted from testosterone. Well, there is an enzyme called aromatase. And her ovaries have a lot of aromatase, whereas the testes in her male counterpart have relatively little aromatase. He's still converting some of his testosterone to estrogens, but not as much. She's doing it a lot more. Insulin inhibits aromatase. So in her body, her ovaries, which maintain an exquisite insulin sensitivity, are looking at all of this insulin and responding, saying, "Okay, insulin, among the many things you're telling me to do,

• 40:34Speaker 00

  you're inhibiting the aromatase, which means I have all this testosterone, and I can't convert it to estrogens." So not only will she not have the estrogen spike, thereby not ovulating, but she will also have too much testosterone, giving her some of the other symptoms of PCOS, like male pattern baldness, or more hair on her body, and acne and other problems.

• 40:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Have people been using low-carb diets to treat infertility?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. There are case reports published, the most common medication that is given to a woman with PCOS, even if the physician doesn't know to test for insulin resistance, they give a prescription for a drug called metformin, which is the most widely-used insulin-sensitizing drug. And it will help, although it's not solving the problem, it's just sort of masking it.

• 41:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you said erectile dysfunction.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Well, so that's the male counterpart.

• 41:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So listen to that, men who are listening to this program, because erectile dysfunction obviously doesn't only

• 41:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  affect reproduction, it affects sex.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so if you're not able to get it up anymore...

• 41:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  One of the ways, in principle, you could treat that is by reducing your carbohydrate intake dramatically.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 41:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Which would also stop you from dying, which is like a good side effect.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, not only will be more attractive, but more capable of taking advantage of that physical attraction now.

• 41:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  By not suffering from erectile dysfunction.

• 41:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  So really what's happened is we've really, because we've become so, a society of such insane abundance, we've deviated from our normal diet to an emergency, rare diet.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  So now we can just eat the diet we would eat in an emergency that was rare all the time. And it turns out that that's, that's not a good idea.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  No, I mean.

• 42:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not for, in the long run.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, for the sake of the species. Yeah, and then with erectile dysfunction, it's not a problem of the insulin being high, but normal physiology in a man and women in various locations of the body is such that when insulin flows through a blood vessel, if the blood vessel is insulin sensitive, the endothelial cells that line the blood vessel wall, they will see the insulin and it will stimulate the production of a molecule called nitric oxide, which will induce vasodilation, an absolutely critical process for erectile function. But those blood vessels become insulin resistant. And now the normal process of vasodilation in a man having normal erectile function is compromised.

• 43:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's step back now. So you said insulin levels rise, and then a variety of tissues in the body become insulin resistant because they don't, they can't tolerate being overstimulated.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  But some of them don't, and so they are overstimulated. Okay, and then you, you.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Ovaries included.

• 43:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. And we talked about the reproductive consequences. But what other tissues become hyper, are in a hyperreactive state because of too much insulin?

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, so there are not many. Most of them go the way of the insulin resistance, like the man's side of things. And that's like, for example, what causes Alzheimer's disease, where the brain's becoming insulin resistant. But the insulin-sensitive side would be a tissue like the liver, where one of insulin's effects at the liver is to tell the liver to make fat. Now, the liver's more complicated. I kind of joke with my students that when it comes to metabolism, the liver's the soccer mom. It is sort of giving, it knows what to do with everything. You have a problem, the liver can solve it. It is the ultimate handler. It is the nexus of all nutrient metabolism, whether it's lactate, or ketones, or fats, or glucose, or proteins, amino acids, the liver handles all of them.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  It is the soccer mom, it does everything. And when it comes to insulin, one of the many responses to insulin is to tell the liver to make fat. That effect is as insulin-sensitive as ever. And so now, in the high-insulin, insulin-resistant body, the liver is seeing all of that insulin, and one of its effects is to tell the liver to make more fat.

• 44:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is that when you get fatty liver?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Then you have the most common liver problem.

• 44:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  We also now are seeing signs of fatty liver in children, which is historically unprecedented. Alcohol does that.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Alcohol does, too much fructose, another pointing the finger.

• 44:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like in high-fructose corn syrup, and that kind of fructose, which is subsidized to a degree that's absolutely stunning, and which is in virtually every processed food.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yes, so much of what I outrage against when it comes to the government getting involved is it's subsidizing the most problematic things, like high-fructose corn syrup. But even if you and I were drinking orange juice right now, that's a straight shot of glucose, or apple juice. You know, if we were meant to drink that fructose, then we wouldn't even have to eat it with the apple. You know, you and I could drink four apples' worth of fructose and not even think about it. And yet, we'd never want to sit there and eat four apples, because the fiber and things would want to slow it down, and we'd feel a little more full, and so we just, we naturally wouldn't focus as much on it. But...

• 45:43Speaker 00

  This environment that we live in, it's almost like we, we are eating for winter all the time.

• 45:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  All the time, yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Because fall used to be the time of abundance. It was fall when we would reap the harvest, it was fall when the fruits, when the plants would be kinda coming into season. And boy, let's get ready.

• 46:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, like let's lay on some fat, like a bear, because winter's coming.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  But winter never comes anymore. Winter never comes. And so, anyway, as we go from top to bottom, you can find insulin resistance, you know, the brain, just to find point on it. The brain is one of the high metabolic rate organs in the body. Right now, we're having a stimulating conversation, it is entirely possible. I bet our brain is number two, or probably number two, highest metabolic rate at the moment. Because it's so hungry, it's so demanding. Even when we're sleeping, it's busy, so it needs to be fed constantly. The brain doesn't burn fat for energy, for reasons that we don't really understand, actually. The brain is its own hybrid, though, burning glucose, blood sugar, or ketones.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Now, there is in fact, a man whom I love and admire, is a scientist in Northern Ontario. And it's Stephen Cunane, he presented this idea of a shore-based evolution. Suggesting that the reasons humans departed, in part, we are the only land-based mammal born obese.

• 47:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mr. Fuller pushed that theory too, by the way.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Really?

• 47:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, it counts for lots of things, like female fat distribution. Kind of webbed hands and feet, our ability to swim, hairlessness.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Omega 3, the value of omega 3 fats, you know, eating these kinda short.

• 47:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, where else would you live, if you could?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Not in the parries of Alberta, that's for sure.

• 47:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  On a warm beach where there were lots of shell food, shellfish, obviously, that's pretty straightforward.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  It would be a good way to do it. So the brain has these two fuels, glucose and ketones, ketones are utterly unregulated. If they're going up, in fact, one of the things I love disabusing my students of is the false idea that glucose is the preferred fuel for the brain.

• 47:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Every sort of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing professor will just spout that off without actually knowing a thing about brain metabolism. The reality is, if someone has glucose levels at 5 to 6 millimolar, in a normal range, and they're fasted or on a ketogenic diet. Even when their ketones get to 1 or 2 millimolar, so over here, the brain has already shifted so that up to 60% plus of its energy is coming from the ketone.

• 48:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  So when it has a choice, it'll pick ketones.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Indeed, and when the moment ketones come online, the brain switches. Even if there's still way more glucose than ketones, don't tell me this is the preferred fuel, when this one, even at a fraction of the level, is already the dominant source.

• 48:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. That's so cool. We've been talking to this, my daughter in particular, this guy here in Arizona, who runs an old folks home. And he's been, so it's like a palliative care old folks home. And he's been putting his charges on a ketogenic diet. And people are leaving his home.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is one of the great sort of swept under the rug.

• 48:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So do you know, like, if you have someone who's suffering, especially from early-stage Alzheimer's, which we've discussed as type 3 diabetes already, if you switch them to a ketone diet, have there been studies done already showing what the consequences of that, the short-term consequences for cognitive function? Because that'd be the fastest way to test whether that was helpful.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so as a clinician, you'll appreciate this. But as a biomedical scientist, I sort of am frustrated by the lack of other studies. But the number of case reports that are being published just keeps climbing, climbing, climbing, that the brain, as it becomes insulin resistant and it can't get as much glucose, it's like the rhyme of the ancient mariner. It's this sort of metabolic, this version of it, where even if the body's hyperglycemic, if the brain is insulin resistant, it's basically, you know, saying, crying out, glucose, glucose everywhere, nor not a drop to drink. It can't use that glucose because it's insulin resistant and it needs insulin to help open the doors to get the glucose in. But the ketones are unregulated. So to the case reports, yes, there are documented, peer-reviewed instances where you can take

• 49:52Speaker 00

  a patient whose cognition is so compromised, they can't tie their shoelaces, or they can't draw out the face of an analog clock. You know, you'll give them a piece of paper and a pen, draw out the clock, 1, 2, 3, and so on. Put them into ketosis, have them do those tests again, they can tie their shoes, they can draw the face.

• 50:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  That quickly.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  It's still a little, well, within hours, within hours.

• 50:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  I wonder if anybody's tried that with 45-year-olds for fluid IQ tests?

• 50:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because that'd be a quick test, right?

• 50:22Speaker 00

  I would think so.

• 50:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Take the same people, I should talk to Michaela about that because we could do that study really quick. Take 50-year-old people, ah, take obese 50-year-old people.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Now you're talking.

• 50:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do a fluid IQ test, put them in ketosis, which would take like 48 hours. Yeah, about that?

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Or nowadays, you can drink ketones, for goodness sakes. They've become so obviously beneficial. My university just won the cross-country national championship.

• 50:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  So how fast could you put someone into ketosis?

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Within an hour, depending on what you're drinking.

• 50:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you can bring them in for one day, you could give them fluid IQ test, put them into ketosis, and give the test again?

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could even swap, do it sort of placebo.

• 50:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  One day after another, you're drinking something, then you're drinking ketones. Let's do it. That's the beauty of basic science.

• 51:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  We could fund that.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Well, the brain thrives on ketones. My own lab, we've published reports documenting how when a person's in ketosis, we actually had people, we were pulling fat biopsies from their belly, little pieces of fat, taking it to my lab and testing the metabolic rate. The metabolic rate went up, it went up three times.

• 51:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  As soon as they're in ketosis?

• 51:23Speaker 00

  As soon as they're in ketosis, the fat tissue just starts, it basically signals, when ketones are up, insulin's down, it's sort of party time with metabolism. It's let's just get moving, stuff, metabolic rate goes up, autophagy turns on, things.

• 51:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  That quickly?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so how would you put someone in a state of ketosis with a drink?

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 51:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  How do you do that?

• 51:44Speaker 00

  There are multiple different, now ketones have become so obviously beneficial. It increases metabolic rate, it helps people physically perform better. Race car drivers to it, take it, Tour de France athletes, take it, cross-country athletes, take it. It's a viable fuel. So as ketones have become more and more accepted for all their benefits, there's been a bit of a race to say, alright, well, how can we do this best? And there are multiple different versions, from the lesser effective, but much cheaper, things called ketone salts. Then you go through the ketone esters and then you get the bio-identical ketones. And they're all of kind of varying efficacy. As they get more effective, the price goes up.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  But I'll say, having seen my beloved Baba, my grandma, up in Alberta, die from Alzheimer's disease, it is so terrifying that one of the reasons I adhere to my own low carbohydrate diet is because I want to keep my brain as healthy as possible.

• 52:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  The fact that I stay lean and healthy, well, that's just a plus. That's, well, even my fear of cancer. Cancer cells don't use ketones, they use glucose. And so all the more reason to keep my glucose in check.

• 52:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Again, so with regards to that specifically, so are there studies indicating a decrease in the rate of cancer propagation on zero carb diets?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  And are they case studies?

• 53:10Speaker 00

  So that's a really good question, and I'm going to respect how you framed it, which is, can you prevent the cancer? That's not been, there's no paper on that. What there are papers on is looking at untreatable, particularly brain tumors. This is where most of the research is at the moment. At Boston University, they are absolutely leading the charge on this. One of the most effective therapies they're doing is putting them into deep ketosis.

• 53:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  If they have an inoperable brain tumor.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  And it can take an inoperable brain tumor and not only stop it in its tracks, but literally start to shrink it.

• 53:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  And is the shrinkage a consequence of autophagy?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so coming back to a topic you mentioned earlier, certainly it's part of autophagy and probably just good old fashioned necrosis. You simply are dying because you can't survive. Cancer cells will metabolize, they rely on glucose as their main fuel.

• 53:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And they propagate rapidly. Right, so they're more dependent on glucose than ordinary cells.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  And they don't want to have to rely on blood flow, where they basically are growing so quick that they outpace the blood flow. And glucose doesn't need oxygen to burn, it can be fermented. But just to really elaborate how clever this area of research is. This group at Boston, they took a tumor cell. And the whole theory of cancer is that it's genes, it's from your nucleus.

• 54:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  It's a nuclear genetic disease. And yet, they took the nucleus from a tumor cell and put it into a healthy cell. And the cell was totally normal, it didn't do anything. They literally transplanted the genetics. Now, what they also did was take the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. That's where you're burning the ketones and the fats. Then they put the mitochondria from the tumor cell into a healthy cell. It had cancer. It became a cancer cell. So they're changing the entire paradigm of cancer, saying that it's not a genetic problem.

• 54:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  So are the cells adapted to glucose metabolism?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 55:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Are cancer cells adapted to glucose metabolism?

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yes, and if you force them to rely on something other than glucose, they die. It's incompatible with their rate of growth and they can't sustain it. So ketones are at the front.

• 55:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  See, I've also read that if you're undergoing radiation therapy, for example, or or, um, what's the chemical treatment?

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Chemotherapy.

• 55:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Chemotherapy. More specifically, chemotherapy, that if you put yourself into ketosis, you have much less, you have much modified negative reaction to the chemotherapy.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yep, in fact, that is...

• 55:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Much less, um...

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Yes, the negative side effects.

• 55:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  I mean, you think about chemotherapy, it really is a matter of the oncologist, the cancer physician saying, "How much poison can I give you?"

• 55:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Can I give you, yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  So that you, enough of you survives, but I kill what we don't want, namely the cancer. So chemotherapy is a miserable way to go. And I have my own strong thoughts on the very field of oncology and the use of chemotherapeutics. I think by and large, most of them are not worth...

• 56:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  The trouble.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Not worth the trouble.

• 56:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  You maybe will live another week, if anything, and you will have bankrupted your entire family doing so.

• 56:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  But even back to the glioblastoma, the inoperable brain tumor area, part of what they've shown is that ketogenic diets can act as a kind of adjuvant therapy.

• 56:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  That the actual amount of dose of the chemotherapy required

• 56:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Can be much lower.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Is much, much lower.

• 56:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because you're already compromising the tissue.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  You're already killing them.

• 56:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Now you're just pushing them over the edge. I mean, this is so much, this is why I beat this drum so loudly, that you look at, like, we, at the end of this conversation, to, one of my great hopes is that someone listening opens up their morning medicine cabinet, and they take out their two medications for their diabetes, they take out their medication for their blood pressure, they take out their medication for their PCOS or their erectile dysfunction, thinking, because there's different pills, these are different problems.

• 56:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  And yet, if they start to institute just the simplest, albeit not easy, but the simplest lifestyle changes, to start correcting the glucose, correcting the insulin, they'll find, much to their delight, that those medications can just stay in the medicine cabinet.

• 57:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  They're correcting their problem one at a time.

• 57:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of the conversation and just summarize. So, what we were attempting to do, right off the bat, with regards to the Maha movement, was to focus on the Pareto distribution, bang for the buck, it's right. Where's the biggest criminal? Let's stop that. And maybe we don't have to worry about anything else. And maybe we could stop one thing. And what would that be? Right, well, you talked about insulin resistance, and then we tied that to diet. That's high carb, high sugar diets.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Cause insulin resistance. Well, then what does that cause? Well, causes insulin resistance. Causes obesity, which also causes insulin resistance. And then insulin resistance has a cascade of effects. One of them, well, erectile dysfunction is one of them. Alzheimer's is one of them. Cancer is one of them. High blood pressure, heart disease.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, these are very bad things.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, the biggest of the bad.

• 58:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, right. So we're really, we're really at the root of the cause of the so-called multiplicity

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  of negative consequences.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you said root. In so much of, so conventional medicine is giving medications, which is trimming at the branches.

• 58:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Only to have them grow back. Well, let's just chop the damn tree down. And to do so, you've got to go right to the soil, which is lifestyle. Yeah, so you said, go to the root. There is a root problem, and no medication is going to address it.

• 58:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, right. Well, the medication is going to work if you keep consuming exactly what's causing the multitude of problems. And even if it addresses one of your symptoms, like erectile dysfunction pill, that doesn't mean it's going to address the fact that your diet is making you prone to Alzheimer's.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 59:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, okay.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  And it's only treating, it's only putting a Band-Aid on.

• 59:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Like any medication, when it comes to metabolic problems, no medication can solve the problem. It will just mask it, which is why something as reversible as

• 59:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mask one dimension of it.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, one aspect. So something as easily reversible as type 2 diabetes, a disease of too much insulin, bring your insulin down, eat less carbs. The traditional view would be to say, and the clinician will say this, type 2 diabetes is irreversible.

• 59:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Because if you treat it with conventional means, it is. You will never get off those drugs. The dose will go up, you'll have more drugs, more and more drugs, because you're not actually solving the problem. Type 2 diabetes is absolutely reversible. It's just you have to respect that it's food. The food we eat is the culprit or the cure.

• 59:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's talk about lifestyle modification.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so, I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about government subsidy, let's say, and the food pyramid, the original food pyramid, and how it was developed, because there's a story that'll curl your hair. Oh, it's so, it's so appalling.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Oh, it's vile.

• 1:00:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's so appalling. It's just, you can't read that without, what would you say? It's like a traumatic loss of naivety to believe that something that catastrophic could have been consciously perpetrated, yet it was.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  It was.

• 1:00:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's unbelievable, it's unbelievable. Okay, so.

• 1:00:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lifestyle change. So we think of the typical supermarket, okay?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, people have often been counseled to eat around the edges, right? Don't go in the middle of the supermarket.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why? Because that's where all the processed food is. Well, is the problem processing? I don't think the problem is processing. The problem is all processed foods are emergency, hyper-caloric, glucose-centric foods. Right, so they should be they're there like when you come across a beehive. They're not to eat every day. So you, you go around the edges and you eat. Well, you tell me if you disagree with any of this, because we want to make it simple for people, right? So you stay away from the processed foods because they're too high in concentrated carbohydrate and sugar.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:01:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Fundamentally. Now, there may be other reasons to avoid them as well.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  The chemicals that are in them, the fact that they've been designed to be addictive, et cetera.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 1:01:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  To me, that's trivial compared to the fact that no, mostly they're just the equivalent of sugar.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:01:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now you, you, you graze around the edges. That means the kinds of vegetables you don't really like, right?

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Dairy, including butter, including yogurt, all of that. So that's, that's food that people actually like.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not, not sweetened yogurt, no sugar. Stay away from the damn sugar.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Meat. And that's about that fundamentally, right? And definitely don't drink soft drinks.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  No, no, it's, absolutely, yeah. I mean, you, you don't want your food to come from the less you are able to formulate a diet where your food isn't coming from bags and boxes with barcodes, the better off you're going to be. And the way you just described it, you've done it. Yeah, to me, I mean, first and foremost, we are, we have more in common with a wolf, digestively speaking, than we do our closest, closest animal relative like chimpanzees or apes or any other primate. If you look at the digestive system of a human.

• 1:02:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Chimps spend eight hours a day chewing.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have to.

• 1:02:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  A lot of hell of a life.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Because they have, it is such a nutrient-deficient diet. Their colon, their large intestine is substantially bigger than the humans because they have to ferment so much. More.

• 1:02:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  And brain comparatively smaller.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Very small brain, very big intestines.

• 1:02:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  And even still.

• 1:02:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the vegan evolutionary pathway, by the way, yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you want to shrink your brain, remove animal sourced foods from it, and you'll, yes, you'll be like your other primate cousins and start to shrink your brain. But unfortunately, you don't have the colon to ferment as much as they do. Moreover, you're probably not prepared to eat your own feces, which is what they'll do to get vitamin B12. A purely plant-based diet is so deficient in nutrients, it is utterly incompatible with the human survival, let alone human reproduction. I consider it, in fact, I feel so strongly about this that I actually consider it to be quite devilish or overtly satanic, that I think of, if you'll allow me to invoke some scripture, we often talk about Christ's great commandments, "Love God, love your neighbor."

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  And yet, there was a commandment that preceded those, which was God's commandment to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth." That was the first commandment. And the older I'm getting, as both a man of religion and of science, I sort of use that commandment as my litmus test. If this is an ideology, or a principle, or a practice that is going to make it harder for people to reproduce...

• 1:03:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's something fundamentally wrong with it.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Then there's something wrong with it, and I must reject it. And so, even when it comes to diet...

• 1:03:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, reproductive capacity is species health across generations, right? It's the equivalent of health, except across generations. So obviously, anything that's anti-reproduction in its essence is... There isn't anything more pathological than that.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Whether you invoke God, whether the commandment to Adam and Eve, or whether you invoke evolution, whose great design is to just have an advantage to reproduce, you all come back to reproduction.

• 1:04:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  See, one of the things I'm seeing on the Maha side is that it's difficult to bring unity... To the field of preventative medicine. I mean, many people are concentrating on the panoply of chemicals that are in like Fruit Loops, and fair enough, like, fair enough. But, but, for me, the problem with a Fruit Loop is that it's basically just a sugar love.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Oh, you and I are totally aligned on this. You have to manage your macros. All the other micro stuff, yeah, that matters a little, but if your macronutrients aren't aligned, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and I have rules for each of them, then all that other stuff is fluff.

• 1:04:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, it's noise, essentially.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  It's noise. It'll lose the needle a little, but not enough to do anything.

• 1:05:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, so, and then the thing is, if you, if you're only able to fight one battle at a time, you better fight the right battle.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:05:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it seems to me, now, it's also the case that there's no recommended daily allowance for carbohydrates.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, oddly enough.

• 1:05:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  I know, that's very odd, so expand on what that means.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  So it's odd for multiple reasons, including, I consider it the most pathogenic because of everything we've been describing, but it's also the one that is utterly unessential. You appreciate this, but most people don't. Even the, within, within the United States, the Department of Agriculture years ago had a statement where it says something like, I'm going to loosely quote it, "The lower limit of dietary carbohydrates is zero."

• 1:05:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, zero's a low limit, man.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a pretty low number.

• 1:05:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's for sure.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  And yet, that's the one you tell me to eat the most of, born from the food guide pyramid and its ill-fated ideology, or, or born from the modern obsession, sort of a pseudo-religious view that we can't kill anything, and what a naive view, life is death, everything that is alive benefits because something died before it, and we benefit from all of that stuff. So, we have this kind of perverse, shifted view of, of nutrition where we, we focus on carbohydrates, the one thing we don't, we literally don't need to eat it. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, and yet 70% of all calories globally come from carbohydrates.

• 1:06:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  They, they do have the advantage of being cheap in the short run.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, especially if it's subsidized, it's cheap for the person who's purchasing it.

• 1:06:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a separate issue, like, because you could imagine, you know, humanity's been solving a sequence of problems, and once, one problem, and it was real, was there just wasn't enough calories. Okay, so you probably want to address that, so people don't starve, and fair enough, and maybe you can address that. More cheaply with corn than with beef. Okay, and so there, we've given the devil his due, but that doesn't mean that that constitutes an optimized diet. And that's where I think the people who created the food pyramid were criminal.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Oh, criminal.

• 1:07:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. Because the, the story, and, and this is a story you're fleshing out, is that the base of the pyramid, so that's where you get the bulk of your calories.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  According to the hypothetically scientific guidelines of the government, which were never scientific in the least, right from the beginning, is that that's where you should derive the bulk of your calories.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then fats and meat are a tiny,

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  tiny element of that.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:07:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's, it's, they knew from what I've been able to, from what I've seen in my investigations, is that the people who designed that bloody pyramid were told by their own scientists that they were going to produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, Dr. Dr. Philip Handler was the president of one of the leading scientific societies in the United States at the time. And I'm going to loosely quote him, but he says, "What right has the federal government to conduct such a grand experiment?"

• 1:07:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  "With the, with the population of the United States as its test subjects."

• 1:07:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  That it had never been done.

• 1:08:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  With no control.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  No, that's right.

• 1:08:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  It had never been done.

• 1:08:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  And no consent.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  And, and look at what's happened. People want to blame meat for all what ills us, which talk about an insane ideology. But you look at red meat consumption from the early 1900s till now, it's been a steady decline. And yet what's happened to heart disease, even at the superficial 30,000-foot view, blaming meat for the ills of the, these diseases of civilization, these plagues of prosperity? It makes no sense.

• 1:08:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, now we've got the bloody greens who are doing the same thing. And, you know, the, the, the globalist utopian vision. This is the C40 vision. This is a consortium of municipalities all around the world, including many of the world's biggest cities. They want a 95% reduction in meat consumption. That's not, that's not all. 95% reduction in private automobile ownership.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:08:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  A one short haul flight per person every three years.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Oh, my.

• 1:08:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Three items of clothing per year.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  That sounds like a perfect way to enslave people.

• 1:09:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, it's just beyond comprehension. But, but the meat element is particularly egregious as far as I'm concerned. Because there are forms of agriculture that are meat-intensive, that revivify soil. And the idea that that's contributing to something like a climate catastrophe, that I can't imagine a stupider lie than that one. Although there are some.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  It is, it is tragic because for multiple reasons, just as a fun aside, when men, studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat, saturated fats in particular, his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets. Like this is antithetical to human production.

• 1:09:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wouldn't you think that that's an evolution, that's a biological sign of scarcity?

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:09:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's no bloody wonder that you're...

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  Don't reproduce.

• 1:09:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Don't reproduce now because all you have to eat is broccoli.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right?

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. It's a sobering view, which is, when you look at the food guide pyramid, one of the like literal authors of the food guide pyramid, wrote this and proposed it heavily influenced by his religious creed, where he is an adherent, for the sake of being respectful, I don't want to cast stones here, whose religious view is that meat is bad in part because it elicits carnal desires. And so it's a literal function of this individual's religion at the time. Again, in opposition...

• 1:10:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Didn't Kellogg believe that as well?

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Oh, in fact, Kellogg was one of the adherents. He was one of the adherents of this...

• 1:10:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  He was completely...

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  So, so this is, the Seventh Day Adventists were the ones who helped write the food guide pyramid and then helped create some of these, guess who is the main origin of the American Dietetics Association? The Seventh Day Adventists. And so no wonder it's part of this. To literally get licensed as a dietitian, you have to play the game and say meat is bad. Because it's, and as a religious man again, I can't help but just have a grim humor, where in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who I love because he was so, he was like a lion, in some of his writings to Timothy, in 1 Timothy, chapter 4, anyone go read this, he's prophesying of the latter days. And so it's just an irony that it's religious ideology that helped give birth to these ridiculous ideas,

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  when if you actually scrutinize the text... It doesn't support it. So Paul, prophesying of the latter days, says, "In the latter days, people will be seduced." Now, he is quite bold and says, "Seduced by the spirits of devils." Now, I'm not saying every person who believes this is devilish, but he says there will be two things that will kind of identify them. They will command to abstain from marriage, which is directly opposed to God's commandment to Adam and Eve. And then, two, command to abstain from eating meat. And then he goes on to say which God has ordained for the use of man. And so, ironic to me that religion is invoked to create these terrible ideas. And yet, a sort of studious view of religious text would never support such a thing, and indeed, directly oppose it.

• 1:11:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's sum up, before we move to the Daily Wire side. So, there's a fervor in America at the moment with regards to health. And I think, really, that's probably a consequence of the fact that everyone's fat. And it's like, what the hell? Like, how did this happen? It's...

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  And we spend so much on healthcare.

• 1:12:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that as well. These ballooning healthcare costs that aren't helping the problem.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Not helping.

• 1:12:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and a growing distrust of the pharmaceutical Band-Aid treatment to the problem. And of government policy in general, especially policy related to such travesties as the food guide. Okay, so everybody's kind of woken up and gone, "Well, this isn't working." All right, so what's the fundamental problem? Well, we've walked through it. The fundamental problem is that carbohydrates are too cheap, plentiful, and promoted. And that's making everyone insulin resistant. And fat, and promoting Alzheimer's, and cancer, and heart disease, and erectile dysfunction, and other reproductive malfunctions, and cognitive decline.

• 1:13:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  We didn't even talk about depression and anxiety. Depression is often, and this has been known for three decades, that... There are variants of depression that are immunologically related. They're inflammatory. It's an inflammatory condition.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. And so that's a huge problem because depression per se is probably 75% of mental health problem, all things considered, right?

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, with case studies finding ketogenic diets are once again therapeutic.

• 1:13:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, Chris Palmer.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  You can look across, yes, exactly. You can look across a span of neurological disorders that seemingly are unrelated. Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, migraines, depression, and yet all of them have been documented to have what's called a brain glucose hypometabolism, where in each of those instances, if you're actually measuring the degree to which these people are able to take in and metabolize glucose in the brain, it's significantly lower than their counterpart who isn't suffering from that neurological disorder. All the more reason to give the brain a fuel that it can get, namely ketones.

• 1:14:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So, so one of the suggestions that might emerge from a discussion like this is that if you are unhealthy, why wouldn't the first thing you try be a ketogenic diet?

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Control carbs.

• 1:14:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Always that is my rule number one.

• 1:14:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. Start with that.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Kind of no matter what's wrong with you.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  Yes, control carbs.

• 1:14:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  If it's chronic and you're having a hard time treating it and the direction isn't good.

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:14:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  You should give some seriously, serious consideration to radically decreasing your carb intake.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's no downside.

• 1:14:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe just zero.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  Yes, there's no, I mean, people have to appreciate, well, what's the downside? There is none.

• 1:14:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because there's no recommended daily allowance.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. This is the one, there are such things as essential fats. You better get them. There are such things as essential proteins or amino acids. You better get them. Crickets chirping. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So lest it seem like you and I are being just crazy, no, rule number one, control carbs. They are the one that is the main contributor to your disease in the first place and to, you literally do not need them.

• 1:15:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So the consequent, the negative consequences are zero.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 1:15:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So you have a broadly applicable medical intervention that's dietary based.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's very likely to be successful in treating a whole variety of diseases, including ones that will kill you in ways you do not want to die, which would be Alzheimer's and diabetes, let's say, or any degenerative neurological condition. And the side effect profile is nil, except that you get thinner and better looking, and your sex life improves.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, that's a good place to end.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sold. I've convinced myself again.

• 1:15:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. So I think what we should do on the Daily Wire side is talk a little bit more about how this came about, right, and delve into that for everybody's edification, hypothetically, including our own. For all of you watching and listening, you can hear my guests' lectures on Peterson Academy. Tell me the lectures that you've done so far for us. You've done three, I believe.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  I've done three, yeah. And this is so orchestrated by Michaela, who's just been such a champion for this message. So the first one, at Michaela's explicit invitation, was Why We Get Sick, which was essentially a longer version of everything we've been talking about. Six or seven hours of what is insulin resistance? Why does it matter? Where does it come from? And what to do about it? And then after that, I was invited back to just say, they sort of thought, we need a little more kind of basic science in biology. So I have two other courses, and I have an affection for alliteration. Basics in Biology and Fundamentals of Physiology. So those are the three. Why We Get Sick, Basics in Biology, and Fundamentals in Physiology.

• 1:16:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you can dig more. People who are watching those can start at the surface and get the bulk of the information like we did today. But then they can dig down for deeper understanding.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  As a professor, it really is sort of a seven-hour version of what I would take a semester to do. Which I appreciate the point of this. As much as you and I both rail against traditional higher education, anyone who's curious and thinking, you know what, I kind of liked my high school biology, and I wouldn't mind a little more. Well, I got the class for you. Or they want to go a little further and understand how the systems of the body, how's the heart working? How's the brain functioning? How are the lungs being dynamic? The muscles, well, that's physiology. And then the last part of it is when things start to go wrong, if you will. But a version of everything we've been talking about, which is basically the metabolic origins of chronic disease, that's why we get sick.

• 1:17:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, okay. Okay, well, I think that's what we'll focus on, on the Daily Wire side. But I want to... Tilt the conversation again, or focus the conversation more with regards to pathological policy in the past, why that emerged, because it really is a story that'll just, ah, it just curdles your heart to understand what was done to the American population with the food pyramid, it's beyond comprehension. But, more importantly perhaps, to understand and to investigate how that might be put right, because the Maha people are trying to figure out how to communicate directly with the American population to reverse this as rapidly as possible and as sustainably as possible,

• 1:18:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  without a heavy-handed sort of top-down approach. So we could discuss that practically on the Daily Wear side. So all of you who are watching and listening, join us for that.