When I was a kid, I loved going to the arcade, and one of my favorite games was Whac-A-Mole. When you play Whac-A-Mole, you’re given a toy hammer, and several holes in the play area in front of you are filled with small plastic cartoonish moles, or other characters, which pop up at random. Points are scored by, as the name suggests, whacking each mole as it appears. The faster the reaction, the higher the score. I was always going for the top score in my arcade!
Unfortunately, most people treat their health like a game of Whac-A-Mole. They experience a symptom popping up like a cartoon mole, and they use toy hammers such as medication, fad diets, surgery, and other extreme measures to whack it down. This might work in the interim, but you know what happens next: Another mole (symptom) shows up. In this never-ending world of symptom chasing, you’ll find yourself exhausted with 23 hammers for 23 moles. In the game of life, the faster the reaction, the worse off you’ll actually be.
As we discussed earlier in the book, your symptoms are not the same as your problems. In fact, most of the time symptoms are far removed from their causes. It isn’t until you find out where the moles are coming from that you’ll become successful at the game of your health.
Let’s start with one of the peskiest moles to whack: constant glucose and insulin spikes.
When your metabolism is stuck burning glucose, you become a sugar burner. Life is not fun for sugar burners—they create a lot of oxidative stress inside of their bodies, leading to a shortened health span and lifespan. In other words, if your goal is to age faster than anyone you know, burn sugar all the time.
I put together a six-question quiz to determine whether you’re burning sugar or fat right now. If you answer yes to three or more of these questions, there’s a high probability you’re a sugar burner:
If you scored as a sugar burner, it’s not your fault; years of outdated information have led you down this path.
Your red blood cells keep a record of your blood sugar behavior. If you want to know for sure what’s going on in your body, you can test your blood sugar levels by measuring hemoglobin A1C. Hemoglobin A1C (hbA1c) measures your average blood sugar from the past three months by detecting the glucose stuck to the hemoglobin protein. Your red blood cells carry oxygen to your tissues using a protein called hemoglobin A. The higher your blood glucose, the more glucose sticks to the hemoglobin A1C protein. A healthy hemoglobin A1C (hbA1c) is 5.2 percent or less, the prediabetic range is 5.7 to 6.4 percent, and the diabetic range is 6.5 percent or higher.
How glycated is your hemoglobin? Glycation is a spontaneous non-enzymatic reaction of free-reducing sugars with free amino groups of proteins, DNA, and lipids that form glycated residues. Sugar is sticky (think of cotton candy sticking to your fingers), and this sugar can gunk up your arteries and cells. The higher the A1C, the more glucose is glycated your protein.
A study from 2020 estimates that for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, one year with HbA1c >7.5 percent loses around 100 life days. Linking glycemic control to mortality has the potential to focus minds on effective engagement with therapy and lifestyle recommendation adherence. I did the math for you: This means if your HbA1c levels are >7.5 percent for 15 years, you lose 4 years off your lifespan.1 The great news is that you are going to master your blood sugar levels and add years to your life!
When you’re a sugar burner, there are five major ways it disrupts your metabolism:
Let’s dive in to each one of these now.
Insulin is the body’s main hormone switch. It determines which fuel you will use: fat or sugar. If insulin is high, no fat will be burned—only sugar. If insulin is low, fat will be used exclusively as fuel.
Insulin has a bad public relations person because it gets blamed for many things. But insulin production is actually a beautiful process that was designed by our creator; if we didn’t have this process, humans wouldn’t exist today. When we eat carbohydrates, our bodies convert them into sugar (glucose), which raises blood sugar levels. The body calls in the insulin troops to grab that sugar in the blood, and then insulin acts as a key to unlock your cells so that sugar can be moved into the trillions of cells.
If your blood sugar is normal, it means that you have roughly 1 teaspoon of dissolved sugar in your blood. An average person has about one gallon of blood in their body. So, you’d think that over the course of a day, you’d need very little sugar. But the average American consumes as much as 30 teaspoons of sugar every day! (This sugar typically comes from processed foods and carbohydrates.) Faced with this high amount of ingested sugar, the body needs to bring the blood back to homeostasis (its normal resting state), so anytime there’s more than 1 teaspoon of sugar in the blood, insulin gets pumped into your blood to shuttle that glucose out of the blood and into your cells.
Just imagine how hard insulin must work to remove this massively excessive amount of sugar from the blood! It has to work 30 times harder. That’s insane.
The Lancet reported back in 2009 via the White Hall II study that fasting glucose remains unchanged for about 14 years; at this point the average person’s pancreas has become fatigued from producing massive amounts of insulin over the years. The average doctor then diagnoses this person with diabetes, even though it has been developing for the last 14 years.2 This is why the single most important lab test you can have to assess the health (or lack thereof) of your metabolism is a fasting insulin test. Albert Einstein said, “Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them,” and it’s a lot easier to work on preventing disease than trying to reverse it.
Elevated levels of insulin, hyperinsulinemia, evolve into type 2 diabetes. Conventional medicine treats the symptom (too much glucose), when the root cause is excessive insulin and cell membrane inflammation. By taking insulin, you are making the root cause and the type 2 diabetes worse. You can’t superficially treat only the symptoms and expect the disease to get better. Insulin resistance (hyperinsulinemia) occurs years before diabetes. It’s rare to die from diabetes, but many people die from the degenerative diseases connected to it: cancer, heart disease, infections, kidney failures, and so on. It all began with high levels of insulin. (In Chapter 12, you’ll find that the 30-Day Metabolic Freedom Reset outlines the exact steps needed to lower insulin, so your cells can become sensitive to its messages.)
Your metabolism has a tightly controlled system for sugar in your bloodstream. Again, a healthy, thriving metabolism has only 1 teaspoon of sugar in the entire bloodstream. This equates to 80 mg/dL if you test your fasting blood sugar. Anything more is considered a toxic state.
We do have extra stores for sugar inside our liver and muscle cells called glycogen stores. On average, liver cells can store 25 to 30 teaspoons of sugar, and skeletal muscle cells can store about 100 teaspoons.
I love the analogy from my friend Dr. Jason Fung: Think of your glycogen stores (sugar reserves) as the refrigerator in your kitchen, and your stored body fat as the freezers in your basement. The benefit of using your refrigerator instead of a freezer is that it provides easy, quick access for food energy. You simply walk to your kitchen, open the fridge, and have available energy. The drawback is that it has limited storage capacity. You’d have to constantly put new groceries inside the fridge to maintain this balance. In other words, when you’re burning stored sugar, you have to continually eat carbohydrates and snack every few hours to maintain energy; otherwise your stores decrease, and you crash.
The freezers in your basement are a smart choice because you can keep dozens of them full of energy. The drawback is that you’d have to wait a little longer to access the food inside any of those freezers, because it takes a few hours for the food to thaw before you can use it. In this example, the freezers represent your body fat. You might have hundreds of freezers’ worth of energy, and a healthy metabolism flips the switch to start using this stored energy from body fat as a fuel source.
If you’re like most people, though, you’ve continued to refill your glycogen stores in the refrigerator, never allowing a shift to burning stored body fat. When you consume 300 grams of carbohydrates or more per day, like the average American, and consume meals and snacks throughout the day, you are constantly raising glucose and insulin levels, keeping your metabolism burning sugar instead of fat. But don’t worry—when we discuss ketosis and IF later in this book, you’ll learn the most efficient way to tap into body fat for fuel.
When cells rely solely on sugar for fuel, it creates oxidative stress and leads to weight gain, as sugar is an inefficient energy source. Burning sugar generates toxic by-products that cause inflammation around cells, disrupting hormone function and slowing metabolism. In contrast, fat is a cleaner, more efficient energy source, reducing cellular stress.
Phospholipase A2 (PLA2) is an enzyme that plays a crucial role in membrane lipid metabolism by hydrolyzing the sn-2 acyl bond of phospholipids, releasing free fatty acids and lysophospholipids. This enzyme is known to be involved in various cellular processes, including the inflammatory response and membrane remodeling. Think of PLA2 as a specialized pair of scissors for cell membranes. Just as scissors cut along a specific line, PLA2 snips the bond in membrane phospholipids at a precise spot, releasing free fatty acids and lysophospholipids. This “cutting” action is crucial for maintaining the balance and function of cell membranes, much like how trimming a plant helps it grow in a much healthier way.
Studies have indicated that spikes in sugar and insulin levels can influence the activity of PLA2, leading to potential membrane damage.3 Imagine the cell membrane as a sturdy brick wall protecting a house. PLA2 acts like a demolition crew that removes specific bricks (phospholipids) from this wall. Normally, this process is controlled and helps with maintenance and remodeling. However, when sugar and insulin levels spike, it’s like giving the demolition crew unchecked orders to remove bricks rapidly and randomly. This excessive activity weakens the wall, creating gaps and vulnerabilities. As a result, the house (cell) becomes more exposed to external threats and internal instability, leading to potential damage and dysfunction.
As discussed in Chapter 2, your mitochondria are the battery packs within your cells responsible for energy production and fat burning. Which car would you prefer, an old beat-up Ford Pinto or a brand-new Porsche, upgraded to the max? You’d want the Porsche, wouldn’t you? Well, when you’re in ketosis, your cells and mitochondria are that turbocharged Porsche.
Out of the trillion cells inside your body, you essentially have two main energy sources: sugar (glucose) and fat (ketones). When your body breaks down carbohydrates (sugar) for energy, it doesn’t produce as much energy as when it breaks down fats. When your body breaks down fats for energy, it’s like driving a sleek Porsche compared to burning sugar, which is more like driving a beat-up Pinto.4, 5, 6, 7, 8
In healthy humans, the body can easily produce ketones to be used for energy whenever it needs it. In times of fasting, and even overnight while sleeping on an empty stomach, the liver creates more ketones, and the amount of ketone bodies in the blood increases. When insulin is low enough, the body shifts into fat oxidation. These fatty acids are shuttled to the liver, and the liver uses them to produce ketones.
This means keto is a metabolic process more than a diet. Ketosis has been around for as long as humans have existed. If our ancestors couldn’t use fatty acids for fuel and have the liver turn them into ketones, we wouldn’t be here today! Our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to focus enough to find food and would not have survived.
When you’re using ketones instead of glucose, your mitochondria produce 400 percent more energy through mitochondrial biogenesis. This is because short-term ketosis is a beneficial stress (hormesis) on your mitochondria, which forces them to adapt and produce more energy. The result is an increase in heat inside your body, which raises your metabolic rate. When this is achieved, your metabolism burns more calories without having to count them, and without having to exercise excessively.
Recent research has begun to categorize Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases as “type 3 diabetes,” highlighting a critical connection between insulin resistance and neurodegenerative disorders.9 This emerging perspective suggests that just as type 2 diabetes is characterized by insulin resistance in the body, these brain disorders may stem from a similar resistance to insulin within the brain.
Insulin is essential not only for regulating blood sugar but also for neuronal health and function. When brain cells become resistant to insulin, it disrupts normal cellular processes, leading to cognitive decline and neurodegeneration. Understanding this link opens new avenues for treatment and prevention, emphasizing the importance of metabolic health in maintaining brain function and preventing these debilitating diseases.
In certain brain disorders, there can be a problem with transporting glucose into the neurons and/or other brain and nerve cells, and they essentially starve and die. Diseases/conditions with decreased glucose uptake into brain/nerve cells include:
Ketones can be taken up by neurons that cannot use glucose. Therefore, ketones may ameliorate the energy crisis in neurodegenerative diseases, which are characterized by a deterioration of the brain’s glucose metabolism, providing a therapeutic advantage in these diseases. Most clinical studies examining the neuroprotective role of ketone bodies have been conducted in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, where brain imaging studies support the notion of enhancing brain energy metabolism with ketones.11 Likewise, a few studies show modest functional improvements in patients with Parkinson’s disease and cognitive benefits in patients with—or at risk of—Alzheimer’s disease after ketogenic interventions.
We’ve already established that ketones signal to the mitochondria to create more mitochondria by stressing them, and the brain has the highest concentration of mitochondria per cell than anywhere else in the body.12 This is why so many people report clarity and mental resilience when they’re in ketosis. This helps tremendously with the following conditions:
The ketogenic diet helps with mood disorders by stabilizing blood sugar levels and reducing inflammation, which are key contributors to mood fluctuations. By shifting the body’s primary fuel source from glucose to ketones, the brain receives a steady supply of energy, which can enhance mental clarity and emotional stability. Additionally, the keto diet promotes the production of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that has calming effects, potentially reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression. This metabolic shift can lead to improved mood regulation and overall mental well-being.13, 14
Research reveals that cancer cells heavily rely on glycolysis for energy, a phenomenon termed the Warburg effect.16 Ketogenic diets present a promising avenue for cancer therapy by capitalizing on the metabolic vulnerabilities of cancer cells. According to the National Library of Medicine, keto works by starving tumors of their primary energy source—glucose—while providing alternative fuel for healthy cells.17 By limiting carbohydrates and boosting ketone production, keto induces a metabolic state akin to fasting, effectively targeting cancer cells while preserving normal tissue. As succinctly stated by the National Library of Medicine, “Keto selectively starves tumors by providing the fat and protein that otherwise could not be used by glucose-dependent tumor cells.”18
Keto further exerts its anti-cancer effects through various mechanisms, including inhibiting insulin/IGF pathways, prompting tumor cell death, and curbing tumor growth and spread. This comprehensive approach is bolstered by evidence showing keto’s ability to alter gene expression, chromatin structure (controlling genetic expression), and crucial metabolic enzymes within tumor cells. Ongoing clinical trials further underscore the potential of keto in cancer treatment, aiming to validate its effectiveness and safety across different cancer types. In essence, by targeting the metabolic vulnerabilities of cancer cells, ketogenic diets offer a promising adjunct to conventional cancer therapies, potentially improving patient outcomes.
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As you can see, there are a variety of dangers when you continue as a sugar burner. It’s not just about feeling tired and gaining weight: the elevated insulin levels, increased oxidative stress, and diminished mitochondria place you at risk for neurogenerative diseases and cancer. Now that you have a solid understanding of how these high levels of glucose and insulin destroy your metabolism, let’s discuss the next cause of metabolic dysfunction: processed foods.