Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Insulin Resistance

Yeah and I think it important too to understand when you say low diet what are we even meaning Because depending on your perspective that could be a few different things Some people it could be ketogenic diet standard ketogenic Some could be cyclical. Some people could be, oh, I'm going to do a negative carbohydrate diet, just eat all celery. And in most of the research, at least up to the last 10 years, most of the research, low-carb dieting was 30% or 40% carbohydrate diet. That doesn't sound like low-carb for most people, but when you appeal to extremes in any study, when you look at the, when you look at the evidence, if you go extremely low fat or extremely low carb, people tend to gravitate back towards 30 to 40% naturally, right? Most of the people, you know, I personally think for most gen pop, a low carbohydrate diet is probably best for them. They just don't have the output to need a lot of carbohydrates, but what's low for them. If I have a guy that comes in and he's six foot tall and he's fricking 130 pounds, what's low carb for him, right the low carb for him might be 60 carbohydrates so maybe that's where i start him and maybe high carb for him is freaking nine i've had guys on 90 carbohydrates this is the only way i could keep weight on them right you know it's it's crazy and uh i remember a few years ago i wrote a post essentially along those lines i think it was something like is low carbohydrate dieting effective my low carb isn't your low carb or something like that was kind of a sub headline in there and it was essentially the idea of that when we asked that question is a low carb diet effective for weight loss first what do we mean by low carbohydrate like that's just an arbitrary label that we're putting on it and then secondly what do we mean by effective because that could be a number of things whether that's compared to like isocaloric diets or in practice just telling someone to eat low carb so i think the idea of yeah low carbohydrate diets can be all over the place particularly like you say when you look at research like it can go all the way from ketogenic diet up to 40 or less depending on the study and we're still using that term low carbohydrate yeah and it's low it should be low carb not no carb right and because it's impossible to eat no carb and it's you just there's nothing you can do in this world where you're going to eat no carb right but like for me i my low carb it seems to be around like 80 to 120 grams of carbs like i've i've got guys that their low carb is 700 grams of carbs a day and their high carbs like 12 to 1500. You know, my high carb is like three to 400. That's just what I feel best, you know, and, you know, one of the one of the new theories that I think is probably the most plausible of why people get insulin resistant, it's a protection measurement for the body. And so if we look at the mitochondria, and we look at energy production, where do you make the majority of your free radicals of complex one and three in the electron transport chain. so if i'm really stressed out stress inherently makes your body want to break down and utilize more energy right so if i start shoveling a lot of a lot of glucose which is a really good that's your preferred energy source and states of stress and sympathetic drive and i'm shoveling all of this into my mitochondria i can only make so much atp and then i can make heat but then it's also dependent on cofactors and enzymes and i can only make those so quickly and if i'm not taking like a good multivitamin, if I'm not eating a lot of phytonutrients, a lot of plant matter, if I'm running out of those things, the body can't use some of these things and they can't just stick around. They have to be turned into something else. So then the body says, okay, I have, I've got all of this oxidation going on. I can't reduce any of this stuff because people are really anti-antioxidants because they think it's going to kill their muscle gains, which is ridiculous. And, um, so they're eating all this food. They're trying to make all this energy. They're also stressed out because they're beasting their life. Now their redox is off. So the mitochondria goes, okay, what's the easiest way to stop this? Okay. I'll just make, I'll just become resistant to pyruvate. So then I'll just kick pyruvate out as lactate. We'll just make that back into glucose and we'll just keep getting recycled over here. Right. Then eventually the mitochondria won't allow you to put fatty acids in. Right. So at the end of the day, what, what is the, what is the chemical we run on? If you bottleneck it into one thing, when you break amino acids down, glucose down, fat down, there's one thing that's entering the mitochondria and and in Krebs cycle. Acetyl-CoA. If I get to a point where I can't get that in the mitochondria efficiently because the mitochondria is shutting itself down, now that has to be recycled into something else. So in the case of glucose, yeah, we can make more glycogen, but if you're stressed out, glycogen synthase goes down, glycolysis goes up. So now you can't store glycogen effectively. So that gets kicked out of something else. What does fat get kicked out as? Well, it can get kicked out as cholesterol. And if you can't get that cholesterol back in the mitochondria, you can't make male and female sex hormones. So now you've got low testosterone, you've got low progesterone, you've got all these other hormonal issues. And then people focus on the hormonal stuff instead of working on what's really the problem, which is your mitochondria is probably a bit dysfunctional. Then you get steatosis, you get elevation of ceramides, ATP goes up, AMP goes down, AMPK goes down. So now you don't even have the metabolic switch to keep recycling. So it's just a big clusterfuck of things that happen.