Pradip Jamnadas: Most Replayed Moment: Insulin Is The Reason You're Gaining Fat! How To Lower It Now

The host starts by asking the guest, a physician, to explain glucose and insulin for listeners who know little about either. The guest calls the relationship between sugar (glucose) and insulin something "everybody needs to understand." His starting point is that glucose, while it is the body's fuel, has to be cleared from the blood quickly because, in his words, it is harmful when it stays there.

glucose actually is toxic inside the bloodstream.

The mechanism he gives is glycation. Glucose attaches to blood vessel walls, blood components and hemoglobin, and a molecule with glucose attached "can't work properly." From this he draws a broad claim: the higher your blood glucose, the worse your enzymes and hormones work, and you "age prematurely." He does not cite measurements or studies for this in the excerpt.

He then lays out the clearance pathway. A signal goes to the pancreas, the pancreas releases insulin, and insulin pushes glucose into the liver, the muscles and "every cell in the body." He closes this part with the question the rest of the discussion hangs on: "Now how much insulin is the question?"

The guest's core argument is about timing as well as food choice. If someone eats glucose, starchy foods or carbohydrates every two to three hours, insulin rises and then starts to fall, but "before it even gets a chance to come down, it goes up again." He says insulin outlasts glucose in the blood. Glucose comes down "in about two to three hours," while insulin "stays higher for about four hours." So frequent eating keeps insulin elevated all the time.

After a few years of this, he says, the body becomes insulin resistant. He presents this as a general rule about hormones: "Any hormone that stays in your body for a long time, the body becomes immune to it." The result is that the same amount of sugar needs more insulin to have the same effect.

He defines processed foods by how fast they are absorbed: "products without fiber," which reach the bloodstream quickly and force the pancreas to react "just like that" with a large insulin release. In his account, two things drive resistance together: fast-absorbing foods and how often people eat. The host sums it up as "Wrong foods and eating too frequently," and the guest agrees, stressing "it's also the frequency of eating."

The guest raises a likely objection himself. If extra insulin keeps blood sugar in range, and "your A1C is still good, you're not diabetic," where is the harm? His answer is that the problem is the raised insulin in the background, not the glucose reading.

it's that background high insulin that is destroying your metabolism.

He links two specific outcomes to this. First, insulin pushes glucose into the liver, causing fatty liver. Second, it turns calories into new fat around the viscera, which he explains as in the belly and around the pancreas. He also claims that fat made from glucose is "a different kind of fat." A generally high-calorie diet, he says, adds weight everywhere, but glucose adds it "mostly in your stomach," which then protrudes. He describes visceral fat as fat you "can't pinch," sitting "around your organs," and calls it "very detrimental fat" and "the epidemic that we have today." He offers no comparative data for the glucose-versus-calories distinction in this excerpt.

The guest describes diabetes as the end of a long process. It is diagnosed only once even very high insulin can no longer hold blood sugar down. By then, he says, "you've already had 10 years of hyper insulin in you," and that is the window for prevention that was missed.