The Role of Adrenaline and Insulin in Metabolism

the thing is i i hate i hate saying cortisol because if you say that, then it kind of demonizes cortisol. And cortisol, what it's doing is it's actually protecting you. It's actually keeping you alive because of what you're doing to yourself. So in a lot of cases, probably the main thing that's really screwing people up, if we want to blame something, it's probably going to be adrenaline. Okay, because adrenaline, if you think about listening to that, listening to that talk that I had with Alex Fajita and with Mike T. Nelson. Mike T. Nelson said something very, very important. Insulin is kind of like a master switch for your metabolism, okay? Well, the real opponent of insulin is adrenaline, okay? So if we think about what they do, insulin tells things to basically be anabolic. It tells you to take little things and build big things out of them. So like taking sugar and turning it into stored glycogen, right? Taking fat out of the bloodstream and putting it in adipocytes where it's in a much safer area in a fat cell than it is in your bloodstream, right? So at this point, insulin's doing a very good job of protecting you. If you get more and more stressed out and you have an adrenaline load, adrenaline does the opposite. It tells things to break down because if your brain thinks that you're being threatened, you're wanting a lot of energy to be pushed out into the bloodstream and also to be broken down into the cell. So you get at this point when people are very stressed out that they're breaking things down faster than they can build them back up. Okay. So if I'm breaking down glycogen really quickly to make glucose and I'm shoving tons of glucose into the cell, it's going to overwhelm the mitochondria. If the mitochondria gets overwhelmed, it's going to shut down the enzymes that's going to allow things to go into the mitochondria. Then it's going to shut the cell down. So you become insulin resistant and you can become insulin resistant. And then later you can become fatty acid resistant. Now you take somebody to do bloods and they have high triglycerides, high cholesterol or high LDL, low HDL, high levels of inflammation, high blood sugar. This is all basically a cell danger response where you probably have too much energy trying to be pushed into the cell because you're too stressed out. So, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately when I look into the biochemistry of it, is it really a caloric toxicity that's causing the issues or is it something deeper? And one of those main regulators is going to be something called acetyl-CoA that's in your mitochondria. When it gets to a level of high, it's going to shut the mitochondria down until I don't, it's going to say I'm overwhelmed. I don't need any more of these substrates. So that's what's going to shut the cell down to stop accepting things. Well, if it shuts that down, then things like glucose and fatty acids are going to get higher in the bloodstream, which can create a level of glucotoxicity and lipotoxicity. Well, where's a really good garbage dump for those things? Fat cells. So we use fat cells as kind of a garbage disposal for excessive things like environmental toxins or like fuel substrates that can't be used initially. And I suppose the outcome of that is things like heading towards type 2 diabetes. Absolutely. Absolutely.