BiteSize - How to Boost Energy and Longevity with Mitochondrial Uncoupling: Insights from Dr. Stephen Gundry.

Are you curious about boosting your energy levels and extending your longevity? What if you could tap into your body's natural ability to burn fat more efficiently? If you're interested in optimizing your health and reducing the risk of chronic diseases, this episode is for you.

Welcome to this episode of "It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays," where we delve into a conversation with Dr. Stephen Gundry, the New York Times best-selling author of "Unlocking the Keto Code." Dr. Gundry explores the concept of mitochondrial uncoupling, providing practical dietary advice to help you enhance your energy levels and overall well-being.:

Imagine learning from a renowned expert how to optimize your health through dietary changes and understanding your body's energy processes. 

By listening to this episode, you can:

• Enhance Energy Levels: Discover how mitochondrial uncoupling can boost your energy and extend your longevity.
• Achieve Metabolic Flexibility: Learn to transition smoothly between burning glucose and fat for energy.
• Support Cognitive Health: Understand the role of ketones in brain function and how they can reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

Three Benefits You'll Gain:

1. Optimized Health: Gain insights into incorporating essential nutrients into your diet to enhance metabolic flexibility.
2. Improved Fat Metabolism: Learn how to manage insulin levels and promote fat burning for sustained energy.
3. Cognitive Support: Understand the significance of ketones as an alternative energy source for the brain, especially during fasting periods.

Are you ready to unlock the secrets to better health and longevity? Scroll up and click play to join our enlightening conversation with Dr. Stephen Gundry. Learn how to optimise your diet, manage your energy levels, and support your cognitive health. 

Exploring Key Concepts and Issues:

Mitochondrial Uncoupling and Energy Levels:

• Dr. Gundry explains the concept of mitochondrial uncoupling and its role in boosting energy levels and extending longevity.
• Practical dietary advice is provided to incorporate essential nutrients into meals for optimized health and reduced risk of chronic diseases.

Metabolic Flexibility and Insulin Regulation:

• The challenge of transitioning from burning sugar to burning fat is discussed, highlighting the importance of metabolic flexibility.
• Dr. Gundry emphasizes the role of insulin in fat storage and the significance of measuring fasting insulin levels for metabolic health.

Prolonged Eating and Fat Storage:

• The impact of prolonged eating on mitochondrial function is explored, leading to fat storage.
• The connection between insulin levels and fat accumulation is elucidated, stressing the need for managing insulin to promote fat burning.

Ketones and Brain Function:

• Dr. Gundry discusses the role of ketones as an alternative fuel source for the brain when glucose levels are low.
• Ketone bodies generated in the liver are highlighted as essential energy substrates for brain function, particularly during fasting or sleep cycles.

Full Episode from S1 E8:
Building Resilience through Nutritio

Chapters

• 0:35 Introduction to Dr. Gundry's Insights on Nutrition
• 3:50 Role of Insulin in Fat Storage
• 6:31 Hormone-sensitive Lipase and Fat Storage
• 8:28 Transition to Ketones and Brain Fuel
• 12:03 Closing Remarks and Subscribe for More

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:08] Well, welcome to It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays, your weekly dose of resilience, optimism, and well-being to get you ready for the weekend. Now, each week, I'll bring you insightful tips and uplifting stories to help you navigate life's challenges and embrace a more positive mindset. And so with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:27] Music.

[0:36] Hey folks welcome back to another bite-sized friday i'm your host jason lim this week i've brought up season one episode eight from the archives and it's a conversation with new york times best-selling author of unlocking the keto code with dr stephen gundry and so in this bite side of this episode, Dr. Gundry dives deep into the science of mitochondrial uncoupling, explaining its pivotal role in boosting our energy levels and extending longevity. You'll also hear practical dietary advice on how to incorporate key nutrients in foods to optimize your health and to reduce the risk of chronic diseases. And so on the other side of this introduction, you'll learn valuable insights that can transform your approach to nutrition and wellness. If you look at overweight people, and sadly in the West, most people are overweight or obese, and the numbers get staggeringly high. 88% of overweight people can't shift from burning sugar to burning fat.

[1:41] And 99.5% of obese people can't make the shift between burning sugar and burning fat. That number is staggering because that's what you mean by flexibility in our metabolism. It's the ability to sort of cycle through glucose and free fatty acids as an energy source.

[2:03] We're beginning to realize now that so many of our disease processes, for instance, dementia, even heart disease, even diabetes, pre-diabetes, are because our mitochondria no longer can shift between burning glucose and burning fat as a fuel. And I go into the minutiae of why that is, and it is pretty interesting, but the end game is that so many people who are fat think that the minute they stop eating carbohydrates.

[2:41] They'll start burning fat. But in fact, it can be weeks to months, as I profile in the book, one of my patients, Miranda, who is eating a perfect ketogenic diet, and yet she was gaining weight, and she had no metabolic flexibility. And she was just apoplectic on why that could possibly be following a ketogenic diet. And yet, you know, I see it all the time in my clinics. I consider myself a pretty fit guy. I mean, I train quite often and I, you know, definitely follow your diet, your recommendation. So I know I have a pretty good healthy diet right from the man himself. But as I understand it, when we eat our insulin levels go up and those insulin acts as a, as it helps to transport glucose and amino acids, which are broken down for proteins into our cells. And then if we have a no metabolism or as you call it, the flexibility, then the insulin levels drop, and then the free fatty acids come out. But could you explain why certain individuals, because they lack that flexibility in their metabolism, how insulin acts as a preventative measure from burning fat?

[3:51] Yeah. And, you know, and I've profiled this in my earlier books, particularly the last one called The Energy Paradox. Most of us literally kind of eat all the time. Americans, the average American eats 16 hours a day. I mean, it's just, it's hard to believe, but we, you know, when we get out of bed and we continue to eat one way or another until we go to bed. And as the book points out, that's really dumb. But what happens, what happens is that we literally overload our mitochondria's ability to handle all this. It's, you know, I live in the LA area, Los Angeles, and it's, it's, it's anyone who lives in LA. We have rush hour, 24 hours a day. Um, nothing moves in our traffic. I've seen the highways there. Yeah. Even in the middle of the night on what we call the 405, you could be in a traffic jam and you go, what the heck? So, so when mitochondria are overwhelmed, overwhelmed. They shift production.

[5:05] They shift from making energy into making fat. And they do this. Insulin is actually a fat storage hormone. And it actually makes great sense. Back when we were hunter-gatherers, when we killed an antelope or we found a great big big fruit tree, we would eat our fill until it was gone. And we would store, using insulin, whatever was left over that we didn't need for energy as fat. Why? Because pretty soon, we weren't going to have an antelope to kill, or there wasn't going to be a fruit tree. And so we could live on our fat stores. Now, the problem is, the higher your insulin level is, the easier it is to actually make fat. That's number one. But so the higher your insulin is, the more you store fat.

[6:03] Now, insulin usually rises when you find food. When food disappears, normally insulin would fall. And insulin being elevated actually keeps fat in fat stores, which makes sense. Because if you're trying to store fat, why would you try to bring it out? That would be dumb.

[6:26] So elevated insulin levels prevent fat from being released from fat stores. And there's an enzyme that brings fat out of fat stores called hormone-sensitive lipase. And there won't be a test for your listeners, I promise. But hormone-sensitive lipase is sensitive to a hormone called insulin. So when insulin's up, hormone-sensitive lipase can't work. So what's frustrating is we may have a ton of fat, and yet we can't get to it because of our elevated insulin level. And it's kind of like water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. And so when you think about it, uh, 88% of overweight people have elevated insulin levels, 99.5% of obese people have elevated insulin levels. And the really sad thing is that 50% of normal weight individuals like you and me, uh, do not have actually elevated insulin levels. And it's, it's, you know, it's actually shocking. I wanted to stay on that subject for a second. I see, I train a third year family practice residents in my clinic. They rotate through my clinic for a month at a time. They're in the final year before they go out and be GPs.

[7:48] General practitioners. Exactly. So not one of these individuals yet, and I've been doing this for a number of years now, have ever heard of measuring a fasting insulin level in their training. And they're just shocked when I show them the data and show them why it would be really important to know your fasting insulin level. And that's the sad part, at least of training in the United States. And I suspect it's true in other places as well.

[8:29] So elevated insulin levels keep us from being able to shift from burning sugar to burning fat. Now, why that's important is, Getting back to ketones, normally, if you stop eating, after about eight hours of not eating, we essentially run out of sugar to burn as fuel, and then insulin should fall, free fatty acids should come out of our fat cells, and we should start burning free fatty acids to make ATP. So far, so good. So this is glucose and also the glycogen stores in cells. So is it eight hours or is it between eight to 12 hours? That just depends. It's a flexible window. Yeah. Normally, most of us with metabolic flexibility, we start to produce ketones, a small amount after about eight hours after we're not eating. By 12 hours, we've pretty much started to really rev up ketone production. And that becomes important as we talk about intermittent fasting.

[9:41] So all of our cells can burn free fatty acids as a fuel. In fact, as a heart surgeon, I can tell you that the heart actually prefers free fatty acids as a fuel, loves them. And I developed, along with other people, methods of protecting the heart by giving them infusions of free fatty acids when we operate on the heart. But that's another story. There's only one problem. Free fatty acids can't get into the brain because they're too big and fat. And they can't get past this membrane called the blood-brain barrier. So now here come ketones. So free fatty acids, if we can get them out of fat cells, can go to the liver.

[10:28] The liver takes free fatty acids and converts them into these water-soluble short fatty acids called ketones or ketone bodies. Yeah, short chain fatty acids. Yeah, and the liver can't use these ketone bodies. So liver throws them out into the bloodstream. And it just so happens that these ketones can go to the brain and serve, if you will, as an emergency backup fuel for neurons in the brain until such time we eat again. And so ketones really exist as a temporary holding pattern for the brain. And it's actually very important because if you think about it, if we're not eating and we're running low on glucose, your brain, you're not eating when you're asleep and your brain should be supplied with ketones as a way to make it through the night. Sure. Most of us can't generate ketones when we stop eating. And so the vast majority of individuals, their brain begins to starve to death every night.

[11:49] And we wonder where this literal epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer's comes from. And it's literally the brain starves every night.

[12:04] If you want more why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest you will find the link in the episode in the show notes so make sure you hit that subscribe button and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational episodes on monday and the latest bite sites episode on friday and have yourself a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend.

[12:24] Music.