Wonderful to see you.
I am delighted to be here.
It is my great privilege.
And I’m always so thrilled when unicity wants scientists to come speak.
And that really is reflective of how much unicity cares about how, what you know about health.
Well, as I’ve spoken about before, every time you’ve ever heard me speak, I always speak about the body and metabolism and metabolic health, because that’s my forte as a scientist.
That’s what I study every day.
I think about how the body can be healthier with metabolic function.
And so today I’m going to talk about how the body uses energy.
And within all of our bodies, there are countless millions of chemical reactions happening all the time.
The sum or the combined, the combination of all of these reactions is what we call metabolism.
And of course, if these reactions are more active, then your metabolic rate is higher.
If there are fewer reactions, then the metabolic rate is lower.
But suffice it to say, whatever’s happening in the body, the body needs energy to get this stuff done, whatever the body needs to do in order to get that energy, we eat.
And we have three main parts of our diet.
These main parts are called the three macronutrients.
And feel free to take notes in case I give you a test at the end.
So these three macronutrients, you’ve seen them before.
Carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
These are the main parts of our diet.
Now, to be fair, only two of these are really used as fuel, carbohydrate and fat.
Protein, on the other hand, is really more of a building block.
We’re made of protein.
It’s what’s giving our body the structure that it needs to work to move.
So I don’t want to talk more about protein at the moment.
We’re going to talk more about that this afternoon.
And because I only want to talk about fuel for the body, let’s put protein to the side of for now and focus on carbohydrate and fat, the two sources of energy that our body uses all the time.
Whether we use fat or carbohydrate for fuel in our bodies depends on the hormone insulin.
And insulin is a small little hormone that flows through our blood, and it determines what energy the body is using.
And so how does the food we eat affect insulin?
If insulin determines what kind of energy we use?
Well, we want to know what happens to insulin levels when we eat.
When someone eats pure carbohydrate, this could be something like bread or cereal or rice.
We have a substantial increase in insulin.
Where insulin can climb ten times higher than normal, and it can stay elevated for up to 4 hours.
In contrast, if someone eats fat in their diet, fat alone has a negligible effect on insulin.
If insulin is low and the person were to eat a source of pure fat, the insulin won’t even change.
It just keeps moving along.
Now we have the two fuels, fat and carbohydrate.
When insulin is elevated, the body makes a decision, and at this point, it shifts, and it starts to use most of its or get more of its energy from carbohydrate.
So, basically, the body goes into sugar burning mode.
It starts to burn sugar or blood sugar.
In contrast, if insulin levels are low now the body switches, and then it starts to burn more fat for fuel.
It has shifted its energy source.
It’s kind of like the body is a hybrid sonata.
It has an option.
The engine can use two fuels.
And so, in this case, again, if insulin is low, it shifts our metabolic engines to use fat for fuel and less carbohydrate or less blood sugar.
Now, within the body.
Again, to really bring this together, elevated insulin means carbohydrate burning, or sugar burning.
And if we’re burning more sugar, that means we’re burning less fat.
And if we aren’t burning fat, then the amount of fat that we have on our bodies goes up, because insulin won’t let us burn fat for fuel if it’s elevated.
And so, high insulin means a shift to carbohydrate burning and less fat burning.
But, of course, the solution is quite simple.
If we want to burn more fat, if we have more fat than we want, if we want to use this fat for fuel that is on our body, if we can lower our insulin levels, well, then we start using fat for fuel.
It becomes the main source of energy for the body, and then the fat that we have stored starts to be used.
And, of course, that means our fat tissue starts to shrink, which is something we all want, right?
We never want to have too much fat.
Now.
So here’s the overall perspective.
Low insulin, or high insulin, means high carbohydrate use.
The body starts to burn sugar.
And if insulin is too high for too long, it creates something called insulin resistance.
You’ve heard me speak of this before.
I’ve talked about it at a previous global convention.
It’s the topic that I focus on the most.
The reason I care about insulin resistance and the reason I want you to care about it, even though you might not care about insulin resistance right now, it’s because you don’t know it like I do.
Insulin resistance can cause almost every chronic disease.
If you know someone who has high blood pressure, hypertension, it’s probably because they’re insulin resistant.
If you know someone who has Alzheimer’s disease, dementia.
When the brain doesn’t work as well, it could be that the brain has become insulin resistant.
If you know someone who has infertility.
The most common form of infertility in women is a disease called polycystic ovarian syndrome, and that’s because of insulin resistance.
The insulin disrupts the normal hormones that allow a woman to be fertile.
And there are many other disorders that are all a result, including some cancers that are connected.
Insulin resistance.
So here, insulin resistance is either the cause or making every one of these disorders worse.
So if you fear chronic disease, you should be fearing insulin resistance.
Now, what happens when someone eats carbohydrate?
Of course, insulin climbs, and that means the body starts to burn carbohydrate for fuel.
That makes sense.
If you eat the carbohydrate, the body wants to use carbohydrate, and insulin is what tells the body to do that.
In contrast, if someone eats fat in their diet, fat alone helps insulin stay low.
And so what fuel does the body use?
Well, in the body, we’ll use fat for fuel.
This concept of being able to switch between fuel sources is a situation that we scientists call metabolic flexibility.
The metabolic engine in our body is able to switch between these two fuel sources.
If it’s getting carbohydrate, it burns it.
If it’s eating fat, it burns the fat.
Now, unfortunately, metabolic flexibility is the goal.
We all want to be able to use fat and switch between them, just like a hybrid engine in a car.
Unfortunately, what happens more and more today is that a person eats more than a little bit of carbohydrate.
They eat so much refined starch and sugar all the time that it pushes the insulin levels up all the time.
And insulin essentially gets stuck in a high position.
And if we keep insulin high, it’s stuck.
We’re eating carbohydrate the moment the person wakes up, and every 2 hours later, they eat more refined starch and more sugar.
So insulin is elevated almost every moment of the day.
So insulin gets stuck in a high situation.
That means the body gets stuck in sugar burning mode.
Because insulin is chronically elevated, we’re never letting the body switch to burning fat for fuel.
We’re stuck as sugar burners where we don’t want to be.
And, of course, if we’re only burning sugar in our blood for fuel or mostly sugar.
That means our body fat is never getting used for fuel.
And so what starts to happen?
Well, it starts to climb.
We aren’t able to use this fat for fuel.
So this situation, when the body can’t switch to burning fat, is metabolic inflexibility.
We’ve lost the ability to switch between sugar burning or carbohydrate burning and fat burning.
We need that flexibility to be healthy.
Then, of course, the solution in this case is simply to start to reduce the carbohydrate.
So if we take away some of the carbohydrate, we allow the insulin to come down, and that means we can start using body fat for fuel.
Now, one thing I’ve learned as a professor, and I teach 20 year olds, and so I have to find clever ways to teach my students at my university.
One of the ways I teach my students effectively is that I use analogies.
So let’s look at this lesson in a slightly different way.
Let’s pretend that our bodies are like this big fuel truck.
Doesn’t matter which country you’re in, you can find some kind of truck like this.
It’s rumbling down the road and it’s hauling fuel.
Now, this truck actually has two fuel sources, or two areas of fuel.
Can you see them?
One is very big and obvious, and one is not.
Now, when this truck is driving down the road, when it starts to run out of fuel, it has to stop and fill up.
But, of course, it is only getting its fuel from that small little tank underneath the cab of the truck, the main part of the truck.
But can you see the problem?
It’s relying on that small little fuel tank, but it has all of that fuel that it’s carrying around, but the truck can never access it.
It can’t use that fuel even though it’s hauling it around.
This is just like our bodies.
We have a little bit of fuel in our bodies stored as carbohydrate.
Not too much, enough to get through about a day.
But we have, even in a person who’s lean and is not overweight, we have about 100 times more energy in our body stored as fat.
All that stuff that we can jiggle and pinch.
We are carrying this fuel around, but we never use it.
Just like this truck.
He can’t use that big tank of fuel.
He can only use the fuel that’s in that small tank at the front.
So what would happen here?
We need to put some new connections in this truck so that he could not just use the fuel from the small tank, but start to use the big fuel, and insulin is the key.
If insulin is low, that means this truck can stop only ever burning the fuel from the small tank, and it can start using all of the fuel that it’s hauling around.
This is just like our bodies.
Lower insulin means we can use the big source of fuel.
Now, like I’d said a moment ago, as a professor, I like to show this in different ways.
I want to teach you this concept, this lesson, in one different way.
And to do this, let’s watch a video.
The human body is an amazing and complicated system that requires energy to function.
The food we eat provides this energy for us to go about our daily activities.
Our food is made up of three primary macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate, and fat.
Our bodies are designed to use both carbohydrate and fat for energy.
We call this ability to switch between these macronutrients metabolic flexibility.
This ability has elegantly served us throughout history, in times of surplus, when food was plentiful, and in times of famine, when food was scarce.
However, today, because of the way we eat, most of us find ourselves perpetually in surplus.
We’ve become better at storing energy than using energy.
This reality has changed the way our bodies function, leading to an astronomical increase in poor metabolic health around the world.
So, how does this happen, and how do we stop it?
After consuming carbohydrates, our bodies convert that food into glucose, a simple sugar that travels through our bloodstream.
As glucose enters our bloodstream, the hormone insulin increases and acts as a gatekeeper to our cells, opening the cellular door, allowing glucose to enter and be used either for immediate energy or stored for later use.
This combination of glucose and insulin results in quick energy delivery throughout our bodies.
If there is extra glucose in our bloodstream, insulin helps our bodies store this excess glucose in our fat cells so we can access it later.
When our bodies need energy and don’t have any food handy, it tries to turn to these fat cells for energy.
As long as insulin levels are higher, the stored energy is locked in fat cells.
As insulin comes down, the cells are unlocked, and we can start using our stored fat as energy.
Healthy metabolic flexibility is based on our body’s ability to use glucose for energy at certain times and using fat for energy at other times.
When we have increased levels of insulin, more often than not, we prevent switching from glucose burning to fat burning.
This is where our natural metabolic flexibility breaks down.
Our bodies need constant fuel.
After all, the glucose in our bloodstream has been distributed and the energy from stored fat is not easily accessible because of the presence of insulin.
We begin to feel sluggish, hungry and start craving more food.
So we eat again, and if the food is high in carbohydrates, more insulin is released, restarting the cycle of energy consumption and storage all over again.
Our bodies remain constantly saturated in insulin.
Insulin takes a toll on our bodies.
We age faster and can begin to develop insulin resistance, which can lead to metabolic disorder and weight gain.
So how do we stop this cycle and return to our natural state of burning both carbohydrate and stored fat?
Unicity has studied and created products to help us achieve better metabolic health.
By following a few simple principles, we can better activate the ability to access the extra fat we carry around and use it for energy and to improve our overall metabolic health.
The unicity principles include prioritize protein fuel with fat and control carbohydrates.
Protein is critical in building and maintaining healthy muscle and bone, and most people don’t get enough.
Often, hunger and cravings sabotage the most well intentioned health plans.
Fat also has no insulin response and digests more slowly than carbohydrate, helping us feel fuller longer.
By limiting carbohydrate consumption and focusing on less refined carbohydrates, we allow insulin levels to fall, which enables metabolic flexibility, allowing our bodies to access fat stores to provide the energy required to function.
In addition to following these principles, our bodies need time to allow insulin levels to recede.
Unicity recommends a form of intermittent fasting we refer to as 4412.
By waiting four to 6 hours between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner, and waiting twelve to 16 hours between dinner and breakfast with no snacking in between, we can give our bodies the time needed to get into what we call the fat burning zone.
The fat burning zone, or FBZ, is the time when insulin is low and our bodies use stored fat, not glucose, as energy.
People report a number of benefits from maximizing their time in the fat burning zone, including reduced cravings for unhealthy foods, improved focus and concentration, more mental and physical energy, improved skin appearance.
In addition to healthy weight and body composition, unicity has created several products that reinforce and support these principles, making it easier than ever to activate optimal health.
So now you know our bodies are amazing and complex metabolic machines.
And now that we are equipped with the right activating principles, we can be on our way to returning to a healthier, metabolically flexible state.
I hope you enjoyed that video.
I just think it is spectacular.
It is.
It conveys all of these ideas in a lovely, accurate way.
Now, let me introduce one new concept in this talk, and I hope that you’re still taking notes.
Stay off your phones, pay attention.
If the body has low insulin for a prolonged period of time, that means it’s really burning high levels of fat.
You know that by now.
Low insulin means high fat burning.
Now, within the body, something very interesting starts to happen.
When it’s been burning a lot of fat for a long time, the body starts to make these small little things in the blood called ketones.
And this is from all of the fat burning.
So when the liver in particular is burning a lot of fat, it starts to turn some of this into these small little pieces of fat that we call ketones.
Now, ketones in and of themselves are very beneficial molecules.
When someone’s eating a diet that follows those three nutritional principles, they can expect to have some ketones being produced.
And ketones have been found to benefit numerous aspects of the body.
We know from evidence, from multiple published studies that ketones can help the brain, the heart, our muscles, our body fat, and even something called inflammation that you’ve all heard of in the brain.
There are studies in humans with Alzheimer’s disease that when the brain is fed some ketones, the brain starts to work better.
Immediate memory gets better, the brain starts to think more clearly.
In the case of the heart, we know that when humans start to have heart failure, when the heart isn’t beating as well, it will shift and start to use ketones more, because ketones help the heart beat more blood every time it contracts, so it helps the heart work more efficiently.
Muscle also is benefited by ketones.
My laboratory at my university published a paper just last year finding that ketones help the muscle work in a way that produces less oxidative stress.
We’re also just about to publish a paper that finds that ketones actually help our body fat have a higher metabolic rate.
So, did you know that your fat tissue has its own metabolic rate and ketones help it be about three times higher than normal?
And then lastly, inflammation is relevant to numerous chronic diseases, including insulin resistance and diabetes.
And ketones help turn down the inflammation.
So, from top to bottom, ketones are known to help the body be a little better.
Now, in the video, you were reminded of the three nutritional principles within unicity, and this guides the way we think about what we eat.
And I hope you remember these.
Prioritize protein, make sure you eat enough.
Third, our second, fuel with fat.
Help the body use fat for fuel by eating it and then the other principle, control carbohydrates.
This just means be smart about your choices of carbohydrate.
Now, these three principles are very deliberate.
We came up with these ideas because of what they each do to insulin.
As I mentioned a moment ago, if you eat a pure carbohydrate source, insulin will spike up to ten times and stay higher for up to maybe 4 hours, depending on the person.
If you eat pure protein, then you’ll get a modest insulin spike.
It’s small, usually.
And then if you eat pure fat, well, there’s no insulin response whatsoever.
Now, let’s look at how this matters.
In a day.
Someone wakes up in the morning, and you’ll see that we’re going to look at someone’s insulin levels over time.
When we wake up in the morning, our insulin is low, but then we immediately eat a starchy, sugary, processed breakfast cereal or toast or a bagel or a bowl of rice, and insulin climbs, and then it comes down.
And right about when it’s coming down, a few hours later, well, then it’s time for lunch.
And we eat a starchy or sugary lunch, a sandwich or yogurt, something with too much sugar in it or starch, and we bump insulin up again.
And then right when insulin’s coming back down, we bump it up again with a starchy or sugary dinner.
Now, what happens, of course, when insulin is low is that the body has these brief moments of fat burning, because, remember, the body can only burn fat if insulin is low.
And so we have these brief moments of fat burning, and you’ll see that it’s a little bigger in the morning.
And of course, that’s because insulin has had more time while we sleep to come down.
And so we wake up in the morning and we’re in a little higher fat burning than we will be for the rest of the day.
Now, this is in a good situation.
This is assuming that the person is waiting 4 hours between breakfast and lunch, 4 hours between lunch and dinner, and then waiting twelve to 16 hours between dinner and breakfast the next day.
That’s the good way to do it, to give your body periods of time in the day to burn fat.
Now, let’s mix things up a little bit.
Rather than start the day with a high carbohydrate breakfast, what if someone instead, were to focus on the two other macronutrients rather than eating a high carbohydrate?
What if they were focusing more on fat and protein, the two macronutrients that have little or no effect on insulin, well, that would mean the low insulin, when the person woke up, gets to stay low all morning.
And that, of course, means that that little bit of fat burning that was happening in the morning, well, it’s bigger than it was before.
We’re giving the body more time to have low insulin.
And, of course, that means the fat burning flame just gets a little bigger.
Now, let’s take it one step further.
What if, in addition to breakfast, we also swap out a lunch, and we mix both breakfast and lunch to follow the three nutritional principles within unicity science?
Well, now, in this case, when insulin was low in the morning, when they woke up, insulin can stay low all day until maybe the carbohydrate heavy breakfast or dinner, rather, that we eat with our family or our friends.
Of course, what that means is all day, from the moment we wake up, we’re fanning the flames of fat burning.
So that little bit of fat burning, that’s happening.
When we wake up, it gets bigger and bigger, and I bigger.
Every hour of the day that we allow insulin to stay low, we keep turning on the fat burning, we let it just keep raging, which is a great way to help our body fat stay at a healthy level or get to a healthy level.
Now, let’s look at that last meal for just a second.
This is how I live my life, as a father, husband, scientist, professor.
I do this every day.
Dinner time is the most social meal for me, because I sit with my family and I eat dinner with my wife and my beautiful children, who are sometimes very naughty, but they’re always very cute.
So we’re eating our dinner, maybe more carbohydrate.
Well, we look at that insulin bump, and can you think of a nice way to help that insulin bump be a little smaller?
Well, unicity has some good ways with the bios life, or bios seven, if you precede the carbohydrate meal with the fiber.
Well, then you take that big insulin curve, that insulin bump, and you just bring it down.
You help that insulin spike be smaller than it would be otherwise, and so you just help the fat burning keep going.
Now, in conclusion, as your temporary teacher and professor, I hope that you’ve learned a couple things.
One, when you eat refined carbohydrates and sugar, your insulin levels will spike.
That will mean the body must switch to sugar burning mode.
That’s the fuel you will use.
Eat refined starches and sugars, you become a sugar burner because of insulin.
In contrast, when you focus on fat as a fuel source in your diet, insulin comes down.
And now you can start burning fat for fuel.
And remember the key, the critical component in helping the body learn to burn fat for fuel and glucose, or sugar for fuel, is what insulin is doing.
High insulin means sugar burning.
High fat or low insulin, rather means fat burning.
I hope you’ve been able to learn something useful on metabolic fuel and how to be the healthiest you can.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you.