520. Is Your Diet Killing You? | Dr. Benjamin Bikman

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Episode 520: "Is Your Diet Killing You?" | Dr. Benjamin Bikman
Release Date: February 10, 2025

Join Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. Benjamin Bikman in this enlightening episode as they delve deep into the profound impact of diet on overall health, focusing primarily on the perils of excessive carbohydrate intake and insulin resistance. This comprehensive discussion uncovers the metabolic underpinnings of numerous chronic diseases and offers insights into effective lifestyle modifications.

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Introduction

[00:00] Dr. Benjamin Bikman opens the conversation by critiquing the prevalent craving for carbohydrates and their metabolic effects, notably the spike in insulin levels.

[00:42] Jordan Peterson introduces Dr. Bikman, highlighting his expertise in cell biology and his contributions to the Peterson Academy. He frames the discussion around the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, emphasizing the need to identify and address the primary causes of America's health crises efficiently.

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Cardiometabolic Crisis: The Root of Chronic Diseases

[05:17] Jordan Peterson poses a strategic question: "If you had to zero in...what are the major problems?" This leads to a focused discussion on the Cardiometabolic Crisis, which Dr. Bikman identifies as the central issue contributing to numerous top chronic diseases.

[05:50] Dr. Benjamin Bikman explains that many leading health issues—type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, certain cancers, COPD, chronic high blood pressure, immunological diseases, depression, and anxiety—can be traced back to insulin resistance and poor metabolic health. He emphasizes that insulin resistance is the linchpin in this crisis.

Notable Quote:
[05:17] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "The problem is a cardio metabolic crisis. And at the heart of this is... insulin resistance."

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Insulin Resistance and Obesity

[08:19] Jordan Peterson seeks clarity on the relationship between insulin resistance and obesity.

[08:26] Dr. Bikman elaborates on how insulin resistance develops, distinguishing between fast and slow insulin resistance. He explains that as fat cells expand, they become resistant to insulin, leading to ectopic fat deposition and systemic inflammation.

Notable Quotes:
[09:43] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Insulin tells a fat cell to grow... but the fat cell has to adapt, becoming insulin resistant to survive."
[16:11] Jordan Peterson: "What's the fundamental problem?"

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The Role of Insulin in Metabolism

[18:58] Jordan Peterson prompts a deeper exploration of insulin's role and the consequences of insulin resistance.

[19:47] Dr. Bikman underscores insulin as a critical hormone essential for survival, regulating blood glucose levels, and facilitating fat storage. He contrasts the glucose-burning pathways with fat-burning mechanisms, highlighting insulin's dominance in dictating metabolic states.

Notable Quote:
[21:59] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Insulin is an absolutely essential hormone in the body. As much as I am going to go on...it's critical."

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Historical and Evolutionary Perspectives on Diet

[23:47] Jordan Peterson raises an evolutionary question about the presence of high-sugar carbohydrates in historical human diets.

[24:33] Dr. Bikman responds by emphasizing that historically, easily digestible high-sugar foods were scarce, necessitating a diet rich in fats and proteins to survive lean times. He criticizes modern agricultural practices that heavily subsidize carbohydrates like high-fructose corn syrup, which are now ubiquitous in processed foods.

Notable Quote:
[24:33] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "A purely plant-based diet is so deficient in nutrients it is utterly incompatible with human survival."

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Impact of Diet on Reproductive Health

[43:29] Jordan Peterson highlights the connection between insulin resistance and reproductive issues.

[43:31] Dr. Bikman discusses how insulin resistance leads to conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in women and erectile dysfunction in men. He explains the biochemical pathways where excess insulin inhibits enzymes critical for hormone balance, thereby disrupting reproductive functions.

Notable Quote:
[43:29] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "The most common forms of infertility... are caused by insulin resistance."

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Insulin Resistance and Neurological Disorders

[50:05] Jordan Peterson connects insulin resistance to neurological conditions.

[51:24] Dr. Bikman elaborates on Alzheimer's disease, referring to it as "type 3 diabetes." He presents case studies where ketogenic diets improved cognitive functions in patients by providing an alternative energy source—ketones—which the insulin-resistant brain can utilize more effectively than glucose.

Notable Quote:
[51:24] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Alzheimer's disease... the brain is becoming insulin resistant."

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Lifestyle Modifications: Embracing Ketogenic Diets

[78:38] Jordan Peterson suggests that adopting a ketogenic diet might be a fundamental solution to the discussed health issues.

[78:43] Dr. Bikman agrees, advocating for carbohydrate control as the primary intervention. He emphasizes that unlike essential fats and proteins, carbohydrates are non-essential and their excess is detrimental. Transitioning to a low-carb or ketogenic diet can reverse insulin resistance and mitigate numerous chronic diseases.

Notable Quote:
[78:37] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Control carbs. They are the main contributor to your disease."

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Critique of Government Policies and the Food Pyramid

[64:05] Jordan Peterson and Dr. Bikman delve into the historical development of the Food Guide Pyramid, criticizing its carbohydrate-heavy foundation. They argue that the pyramid was influenced by religious ideologies and led to increased obesity and diabetes rates by promoting excessive carbohydrate consumption.

Notable Quote:
[71:02] Jordan Peterson: "The people who designed that bloody pyramid were told by their own scientists that they were going to produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes."

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Cancer and Metabolism: A Paradigm Shift

[55:45] Dr. Bikman discusses emerging research on the relationship between metabolism and cancer. He cites studies where ketogenic diets have been shown to reduce tumor growth by depriving cancer cells of their preferred glucose fuel.

Notable Quote:
[56:10] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Cancer cells don't use ketones, they use glucose."

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Conclusion: Addressing the Root Cause

[63:00] Jordan Peterson and Dr. Bikman summarize the discussion by reiterating that excessive carbohydrate intake leads to insulin resistance, which in turn triggers a cascade of chronic diseases. They advocate for dietary changes—primarily reducing carbohydrate consumption—as the most effective strategy to combat these health issues.

Notable Quote:
[63:12] Dr. Benjamin Bikman: "Type 2 diabetes is absolutely reversible. It's just that you have to respect that. It's food. The food we eat is the culprit or the cure."

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Recommendations and Further Resources

Dr. Bikman encourages listeners to explore his Peterson Academy courses, which offer in-depth knowledge on biology and physiology related to metabolic health. He also emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in dietary choices to improve health outcomes.

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Key Takeaways:

• Insulin Resistance is identified as the central factor contributing to a multitude of chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, and reproductive issues.
• Excessive Carbohydrate Intake, driven by modern dietary guidelines and government subsidies, is the primary cause of insulin resistance.
• Ketogenic and Low-Carb Diets are presented as effective interventions to reverse insulin resistance and mitigate associated health problems.
• Government Policies, particularly the Food Guide Pyramid, are criticized for promoting carbohydrate-heavy diets that have led to widespread health crises.
• Lifestyle Modifications focusing on diet, especially reducing carbohydrate consumption, are advocated as essential for improving public health.

For those interested in a deeper exploration of these topics, Dr. Benjamin Bikman's lectures on the Peterson Academy platform are highly recommended.

Transcript

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

If only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking, oh, I really want a stick of butter. They want something sweet and gooey. We crave carbs. And they have myriad metabolic effects, one of which is to spike insulin.

[Jordan Peterson]

What happens to type 1 diabetics if they eat nothing but fat?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

The fat cells get big. They get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'm done. A government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat and boy, they got it wrong.

[Jordan Peterson]

All those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

A purely plant based diet is so deficient in nutrients, it is utterly incompatible with human survival. Studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat, his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets.

[Jordan Peterson]

Listen to that man. Hello everybody. The first thing I think I'll tell you is that I'm on tour again from February through June through the out the United States, in Canada and in Europe. And if you want more information about that, go to jordanb peterson.com and check it out so that you can come and see me and my wife. And if you're inclined to do that, I'm talking today to Dr. Benjamin Bickman, who's a professor of cell biology at Brigham Young University and a lecturer at Peterson Academy. He's done three courses for us. And we are talking today primarily because I'm interested in, and not me only obviously in the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. And I've been talking to the people who are integrally involved in that movement and trying to determine, strategize about the direction. And that's very complicated thing to do. And one of the things I want to do is figure out where the most bang for the buck might be had with the least amount of trouble. Almost every problem's like that. There's lots of causes of a given problem, but there's one or two causes that are 90% of the problem. And you want to focus there and maybe have a chance then. And so I talked to Dr. Bickman today about insulin resistance and really, to put that in more simple terms, excess carbohydrate intake. And that's the carbohydrates that are rapidly transmuted metabolically into sugar. And that's pretty much all carbohydrates, by the way. And the fundamental problem with America's health is an abundance of carbohydrates. And so we discussed insulin resistance, which is a metabolic condition that arises as a consequence of too much carbohydrate. Intake. And then we discuss the multiplicity of cascading catastrophic health effects that produces type 2 diabetes being particularly well known, let's say, as a secondary consequence. But cancer, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, reproductive dysfunction, more generally, high blood pressure, you name it, immunological disease, depression, anxiety. There's almost no serious medical condition that's widespread, that can't be traced to excess of carbohydrate intake. And so obviously, it seems to me, that's where the focus should be. And so we walk through the biology, we walk through the practicalities, we walk through some hypotheses about how that problem might be redressed at the government level, but also at the level of individual behavior. And so this is very important. There's likely nothing you can do that will improve your life more, both in the short run, but even more importantly in the long run than to modify your diet away from high carbohydrate intake. And so we walk through why that is. So join us. So, Dr. Bickman, I've been talking to the Maha people about their plans, and it's clearly the case that Americans, Westerners, more broadly, but particularly Americans maybe, are suffering from a slew of unfortunate medical conditions. So what I'd like to know from you to begin with is if you had to rank order the magnitude of the medical problems that presently confront the west, let's say, particularly the U.S. how would you do that? There's a very specific reason I'm asking.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, whenever there's a problem, maybe you can. If it's complex problem, maybe you can point to, like, a dozen, two dozen causal elements. But if you focus, you'll find that three of those are the major contributors, and you could spend an immense amount of time on all two dozen. Or you could focus like hell, maybe on the worst problem.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And gain 50% of the ground. If you spread your forces out across the entire panoply of problems, you're not going to get anywhere. Like, if there are 24 stakeholders in the system that are making America sick and you take on all 24, all you're gonna do is fight endless battles. So I'm curious, if you had to zero in, you know, to where you'd get the most bang for the buck. When you look at the health of America, what do you see as the major impediments? The major problems?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. Yeah. By. If you look at the top 10 killers, you can actually thematically lump them all into what I call the cardiometabolic crisis, where that encompasses the problems that are Overtly metabolic, like type 2 diabetes, which is a top 10 killer. I think it comes in around number six or seven, but also number one, which is heart disease. And now there are others in the top 10, like Alzheimer's disease, for example, that you wouldn't think. You'd say, okay, well, Ben's not including Alzheimer's disease in these cardiometabolic killers. And yet I actually am. Even certain forms of cancers are viewed increasingly as a metabolic problem. So it might be that I'm the guy with the hammer, and so I see the nail, but the nail is poor metabolic health. And that's certainly the focus of my efforts. But I like how you framed the question. As much as metabolic health is an underlying issue or a common soil from which all of these noxious plants are growing that we call diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, copd, you know, chronic obstructive pulmonary problems. The alternative view isn't that these are each distinct problems. It's just that there are various manifestations of the same problem, namely, insulin resistance being the most common disorder within the United States. A study published out of University of North Carolina a number of years ago found that 88% of adults have at least one part of what we call the metabolic syndrome, which is a kind of cluster of complications. Interestingly and tellingly, what we call the metabolic syndrome used to be called the insulin resistance syndrome. And as much as you framed it from a Western view, just to help people appreciate this, we aren't even in. We're maybe around in the US number 20 or so with type 2 diabetes worldwide, the Middle east, they're experiencing these problems far worse than we are. Even Southeast Asia, these countries where you'd look at the population and think, well, you look healthy, you're only maybe a little overweight. But there are ethnic differences where body fat, which is so important to this, will predispose people to these metabolic problems at varying levels. But to answer the question succinctly, the problem is a cardio metabolic crisis. And at the heart of this is this very poorly understood, well, poorly known, poorly discussed problem called insulin resistance.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So lay out the relationship between insulin resistance and obesity.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a great question. So insulin resistance is the most common problem. It's the most relevant for chronic disease, naturally. We want to know, all right, well, where did the villain come from? What is the Breaking Bad story? I typically describe and teach that there are two paths. There's fast insulin resistance, which has its own noxious stimuli, that it comes quickly and it can go quickly, but then there is slow insulin resistance. And this touches on your question, so I'll answer it with that one in mind. One of the ways in which insulin resistance develops is by fat cells that get too big. Now, to really confirm as much as we have an obsession on fat, on body fat, we actually look at it kind of incorrectly. We would say, okay, Jordan has 20 pounds of fat, whereas Ben has 30 pounds of fat. So Ben's naturally going to be sicker than Jordan. And yet it's not the mass that matters most. It's actually the size of each individual fat cell. This is why, in that cardiometabolic crisis, the list of what's killing us, men die more from all of those, except Alzheimer's disease. So if you look at the top 10, nine of them go to men, and it's not even close. Men die more from these problems than women by orders of magnitude, almost. But women are fatter than men, so it's clearly not an issue of fat mass, per se. Yeah, yeah. So if you look at it as a percent body fat, a woman's going to be fatter than a man by design. That's supposed to be that way for reasons that we won't get into. But men have less body fat, but we have bigger fat cells. So I promise I'm answering the question. But as a fat cell gets bigger and bigger, it's almost like a naughty little child who's taken the water balloon to the tap. Now they're filling it, filling it, filling it, filling it. Oh, boy. You better take that balloon off or it's going to pop. Now, the fat cell, acting in its own best interests, it has to adapt two ways to ensure that it doesn't pop. It doesn't want to die in the body. We don't want our fat cells. We don't want any cell to die. That's a very messy, very inflamed process. So one thing, the fat cell, as it gets ever bigger, it can't turn off the fuel coming in, but what it can do is change the fuel coming out. So insulin has an absolute choke hold on fat cells. This is a little outside the question, so I won't quite get around to it yet. But insulin is an absolutely essential signal. As much as we focus on calories, insulin tells a fat cell to grow. And now the fat cell is growing, and it's telling, insulin, Insulin, I am about to pop. And so I have to stop listening to you. And so I'm going to become deaf or I'm going to become resistant to what you're telling me to do. And whereas earlier insulin was telling it to hold on to all of this fat, now the fat cell starts leaking out fat, even though insulin was originally telling it not to. This creates a problem that we can refer to as ectopic fat deposition. Because now the fat cell is leaking out these things called free fatty acids at the same. So blood fat levels are going up. Now, that's not normally a problem necessarily, but that should only happen when insulin is low. Now we have this weird state where insulin is high, which should be telling the fat breakdown to slow down. I'm getting into deep biochemistry actually really quickly. So normally if insulin is, is up because we've eaten some carbs and stuff, then fat in the blood would be down. Cause insulin would be telling the fats to hold onto it. But now, or when we're fasting or low carbohydrate diet, then insulin is down and now we're mobilizing more fat. So normally the biochemistry in the endocrinology is such that if insulin's high fats are down, if insulin's low fats are up, unless the fat cells are overfilled or have undergone hypertrophy or growth expansion, now you have high insulin and high fats. And so the body can't burn that fat, it has to store it. And so now we start storing fat in tissues that are ill suited. Like the pancreas is getting fat.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why is it just excreted?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Wow, that's a great question. So actually, if you'll allow me, I love that you just asked the question why? I tell my students that when you ask a scientist a why question, especially a cell biologist, my answer is God only knows. So I don't know why God designed the system to work that way. Why not excrete the fat? But I can.

[Jordan Peterson]

Maybe it's because historically the probability of prolonged nutrient availability at that level was like zero.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh yeah, for sure, right? I mean, yeah, we're living in a very unique day.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So the rule would have been, historically, if you have extra food, hold onto it, hold onto it, because hard times are coming.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

So that is in fact reflective though, of insulin's effect. It is so determined to store energy that it will literally depress metabolic rate. It will prevent any wasting of energy. So that's the first problem with touching on the question of what's the connection between obesity and insulin resistance? Because there is a connection. So the fat cells get big. They get so big that they have to tell insulin, I'M done, I can't get any bigger, so I'm going to leak out the fats, even though you don't want me to. But then there's a second feature that just compounds the problem, which is as the cells are getting bigger and bigger and fat cells can grow unlike any cell in the body, no cell in the body is capable of the expansion that a fat cell is capable of, much to our chagrin. But as the fat cell's getting bigger and bigger, they're pushing each other further and further away from capillaries, from the smallest base unit of the blood vessel and all of its life giving oxygen. And as it's getting pushed further and further away, the pore chubby fat cell is becoming hypoxic, or it's suffocating. And in an effort to ensure its survival, it starts slowly dripping out these pro inflammatory proteins called cytokines, basically just hormones that turn on inflammation. And there's a whole bunch of them, dozens of them, but some of them will correct the problem. It's like a trail of breadcrumbs. And rather than Hansel and Gretel coming, it's getting to the capillary and stimulating the growth of a new blood vessel. And so it's kind of the fat cell's way of crying out, hey, I'm lacking oxygen, come feed me. And so we have that happen. So both of these things, the poor, we pity the poor fat cell, it's become so filled because of our lifestyle, which is a whole other topic worth diving into. But it becomes insulin resistant to ensure its own survival, spreading fat to be stored throughout the body, and then it becomes pro inflammatory to try to correct its blood supply, and that then the inflammation is one of the fast causes of insulin resistance that I alluded to a moment ago, that anytime inflammation is turned on on the body, yes, that is an immune process. But the overlapping of the immune and the metabolic is profound. Just a moment ago, you and I were speculating on why the system may be designed the way it is. One thing we know for certain is that of all the systems in the body, the immune and the metabolic are not only essential to survive times of deprivation and to defend the host, but they work hand in hand. After all, what good is it trying to mount an immune response if the warriors don't have any energy to work with? So anytime inflammation is up and it's staying up, that's going to cause insulin resistance. And indeed it is one of the main causes of insulin resistance.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's, let's, let's walk through this from stage one and also let everyone know what the health consequences are. So I'm going to start the outline. You tell me if I get it wrong and elaborate wherever you want. All right, so we have access to an endless number, an endless array of carbohydrates, and they're very easily converted into sugar. Yes. So we have access to sugar of various forms and to carbohydrates in absolute plenitude.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so that's easily converted, that's very high energy source, very dense energy source, and it's easily converted to fat. And so that's what happens. And the reason that happens is because we're evolved for lean times and we store excess energy like a grizzly bear or a camel. And we do that so we don't starve to death in the winter.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And, and thank goodness for it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. And you see this. I guess some of the proof of that is that islanders who tend to be evolved to get through lean times, they're very, very efficient in their metabolism. If they go on a North American hike, high carb diet, they just balloon.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Okay, so, so now too many carbohydrates and sugars, too much fat. Now the consequence of the fat is manifold. One of the consequences is you, you alluded to two. One is that insulin resistance increases, and the other is that inflammation increases.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so I think what we should do first is we should outline the role of insulin in bodily metabolism.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so why don't you do that and then tell everybody why insulin resistance is bad? Because what you've done so far is make a case for why it promotes cellular fat cell function, but it also has catastrophic effects systemically. Okay, so talk about what insulin does and then talk about what insulin resistance does. Okay. Because just so everyone's clear, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to zero in on the most egregious of the multitude of health problems that might plague us, and we're making a case for insulin resistance as perhaps the worst. It contributes to all sorts of diseases, but it's also highly associated with obesity, which has a variety of health problems as well. Okay, so let's focus on insulin to begin with. Tell people what insulin does and then what insulin resistance does.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. Yeah. Insulin is an absolutely essential hormone in the body. As much as I am going to go on in the next few minutes and paint the picture of it being a villain, it's critical. If you don't have it, you have a disease called type 1 diabetes, and you will die. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence. In the absence of insulin, the body will not last long, and so think so. It is here for a purpose. We need it. However, we need it to work in our favor. And to do that, we need it to be generally keeping in a normal range. And so you, just a moment ago, framed the question by pointing a finger at carbohydrates. I agree with that completely. That's a whole topic. As much as over the past decades, we vilified dietary fat. Oh, boy, we got it wrong. And wouldn't you know it, and the first time in history, as far as I know, a government issues a mandate telling its people what to eat. And, boy, they got it wrong. No surprise, right? That has happened so often when you take things to that level. So if we put the blame where it belongs, not only are carbohydrates the only macronutrient that people have an addiction for. No one's addicted to fat. No one's addicted to protein. If only people were sitting around on a Friday night listening to us chat and thinking, oh, I really want a stick of butter. No, no one. They want something sweet and gooey. They want something salty and crunchy. So we crave carbs and they have Myriad metabolic effects, one of which is to spike insulin. So this is answering the question of what does insulin do? Insulin's most famous effect, but not its only effect, and I would even say not its most important effect, Its most famous effect is to look at that rise in blood sugar or blood glucose and say, that's beyond homeostasis. This isn't right. If that stays high for long, it's going to start harming the body. Cause hyperglycemia alone is pathogenic. And so insulin acts as a hero and says, your problem, I'm going to take care of you. It brings the temperature back down like a thermostat. You know, the perfect example of homeostasis brings the glucose back down to normal. And then insulin, having done its job, retreats back into the background, if you will.

[Jordan Peterson]

What's its chemical role in relationship to the conversion of carbohydrate to energy?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yeah, yeah, right. That's great question. So glucose you'd mentioned a moment ago, and as you did so, I sort of couldn't help but think of the kind of a metaphor of like engines where the body has two primary fuels. @ any moment, it's either sugar burning blood glucose or fat burning. One is like a kind of race car engine. Boy, it's going to be really quick. You don't have a lot of fuel and you're going to get terrible gas mileage, but boy, it's going to be a quick ride. The other is like a big diesel engine rumbling down the roads of Alberta, hauling, going across the Trans Canada highway and taking its load. It's going to go forever. It's never going to run out of fat.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's the fat metabolism.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's fat metabolism. And now the next question is, well, who decides? Insulin decides Insulin. Once again, when it comes to any metabolic effect, you need never go further than insulin. There are other hormones that want to pretend that they matter. Thyroid kind of matters. Cortisol kind of matters. Insulin rules them all. And insulin, if it's up, it dictates it's time for sugar burning. If insulin's down, then the body says, all right, it's time for fat burning. In fact, that's where the whole ketogenic aspect comes from. When insulin's down, it is so incompatible with the body storing energy that it literally begins burning more fat than it knows what to do with. It's met its energy needs already, but it can't stop burning fat. And so it starts burning more than it needs. And that more, if you will, becomes ketone. It's sort of a metabolic release valve, like a pressure release valve of a way of saying, I'm burning more than I need. And so I've gone beyond what the cell requires. So ketones are gonna become a good alternative, but then back to. Or transition.

[Jordan Peterson]

Would you think that the. Like, historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, easily digestible high sugar carbs would have been essentially non. Existent. Right?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

They would have been. Imagine what we would have had to do to get them. We either had to prepare for battle against a. H. Bees.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. When we could find them.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes, when we could find them. Or further when we could find a digestible carbohydrate, you know, maybe berries or something. Because people need more tubers. Yeah, that's right. We have to appreciate that what we eat is either going to defend itself by claw or by chemical. And a plant doesn't have the advantage of running away or attacking back. So if we dropped any number of us in the wilderness, good luck.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Well, we have to.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Even if you're surrounded by plants.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we have to understand too, that like we might think that historically human beings existed on the kind of vegetables that we have now, but. Or fruits. But all those vegetables and fruits have been genetically altered to a degree that's just beyond comprehension. I mean, if you look at the origin plant of corn.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, it doesn't look anything like. Looks nothing like corn even.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Look at an apple. Like, look at an apple. 100 years ago, it was these. These teeny little crab apples, sour things. Now they're these big juicy sugar bombs.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

But the more we eat these sugar bombs, and they're like, the more glucose is going up, the more insulin has to come up. And now we've come to what I believe is in fact, the main driver of insulin resistance. As I transition to insulin resistance, which is too much insulin. And people may hear that and think, hold on, you're talking about insulin resistance. Too much insulin is the main cause of insulin resistance. And lest it seem a little unexpected, it is a fundamental biological principle. Too much of something will cause a resistance to that something, whether it's body or soul. If we are exposed to a stimulus, over time, that noxious stimulus, it becomes noxious and we try to adapt.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, dose matters, right? There's lots of things that are healthy.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's exactly right.

[Jordan Peterson]

In proportionate dose. That's exactly right. Okay, so now we're eating carbs continually.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Let'S say all the time.

[Jordan Peterson]

So we're relying on this fast energy source One consequence of that is storage in fat.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

One consequence of that is if there's too much storage in fat is that triggers its own form of insulin resistance. But you also alluded to an insulin resistance. I believe that's merely a consequence of insulin that spikes too high.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there's multiple reasons for insulin resistance in a heavy carb loaded diet.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yes. All of them become relevant. There's. Yeah. So we've now kind of gone to both here. The slow insulin resistance is the slow and steady growth of the fat cell, which we outlined earlier. And that's a consequence of insulin being up, telling the fat cell to grow, and then the fat cell saying, okay, insulin, what do you want me to grow with? It's the calories. So you have to have both for a fat cell to grow, an insulin stimulus and sufficient calories to fuel the growth. Then we have the fast insulin resistance. I mentioned inflammation, that is one. And then the other one, that is the main one I argue is too much insulin itself. And then once the body becomes insulin resistant, now you really can start going down that list of chronic diseases that are the top 10 killers and to a one, you can see how insulin resistance is either the main contributor or one of the main contributors. Like all of them, like type 2 diabetes is entirely a disease of insulin resistance, where over time, if you have two variables, the insulin and the glucose. One of the great tragedies from a metabolic scientist with diabetes, type 2 diabetes, is that we have a glucose centric paradigm. Just to use this as an example of how insulin resistance contributes to disease, the conventionally trained clinician only looks at the glucose. They may not have even ever measured the insulin. And when I give these kinds of talks to physicians, they can't even wrap their head around insulin being a marker that matters. And yet the irony is it's the one that matters most. Because over the life of the person with type 2 diabetes, their insulin has been coming, been going higher and higher and higher, but the glucose is staying normal. Blood glucose, blood glucose. And so when they come in for their annual checkup, the physician just says, well, glucose is normal, so you're good, but you have high blood pressure. Well, guess what the leading cause of high blood pressure is insulin resistance. Or they may say you have fatty liver disease. Guess what the leading cause of fatty liver disease is. You have early signs of cognitive decline or dementia.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

None of those are glucose. Exactly. Yes. Where now the brain's becoming insulin resistant. And if we could shift the paradigm to an insulin centric paradigm, they would have detected. And then it's 20 years later where they finally see, oh, your glucose is high. Well, now, yeah, but it's worse than.

[Jordan Peterson]

That, I think, if I remember correctly, because. So you said that one of the ways that physicians are marking whether you're healthy is to look at your blood glucose levels. But they age, correct those so that the norms for you at 50.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What would be normal at 50 is diabetic at 20. But that makes no sense because if your blood sugar levels are as high at 50 as they would have been in 20 if you would have been diagnosed diabetic, it's just as bad for you at 50.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

In fact, it's an insane correction. In fact, it's even more pernicious if you look over time at what the diabetic cutoff used to be over the past 70 or so years since that became a marker.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's been gerrymandered as well.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's slowly coming down. And you would say, well, why bring it down? It's because the easier it is for people to stumble over, the easier it is to diagnose, and then the easier it is to say, I need to give you a drug. And that is what I believe is partly at the heart of the glucose centric paradigm. You can't drug insulin. It's too stubborn. There's no drug that's going to push your insulin down, but there are drugs that will push your glucose down. And so it's a hell of a way to diagnose someone with a problem sooner and give them a drug prescription, multiple drug prescriptions. But the great irony, or I would say irony, as if it's an innocent mistake, murderous irony. Yes. The more the clinician is pushing the glucose down. Indeed, with some medications that push the insulin up even higher, they actually kill the patient more, even though you've corrected their blood glucose problem. Just the wrong proof. It's not the marker that matters. It's certainly not the marker that's causing disease. So the more aggressively you're giving the diabetic more and more insulin, type 2 diabetic more and more insulin to push the glucose down, they become three times more likely to die from heart disease. You're literally tripling their risk.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which drugs do that?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, that will be drugs like a class of drug called sulfonylurea, which is what's called an insulin secretagogue. It basically takes the beta cells and says of the pancreas that make insulin, say, hey, we know you're already working overtime. It's not enough. We need to put you in the gulag. You gotta work double shifts and we've bumped up.

[Jordan Peterson]

That drives the insulin levels up. That drives the sugar levels down.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So again, but it increases insulin resistance across time.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's exactly right. So they get fatter and they die faster. Cancer risk doubles, Alzheimer's risk doubles. It's because those aren't.

[Jordan Peterson]

How common are those drugs?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, extremely common. Even more common is just giving the type 2 diabetic insulin directly. You're literally giving them more of the very thing that's killing them.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Before we go on.

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[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Well, you and I can both. There aren't a lot for some Canadians to be proud of. But Banting and Best, two legendary scientists from Ontario were the first to discover the one hormone that was absent in type 1 diabetes at the time. It was called juvenile onset because it was something that would manifest around the age of 10 years old or so. But in type 1 diabetes, that is when the body has killed its own beta cells.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is that an immune problem?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

An autoimmune disease?

[Jordan Peterson]

It's an autoimmune disease.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

So the body has for some reason said to the beta cells of the pancreas, you don't look familiar, so we're going to kill you. And so the person has no beta cells, no insulin, no way to control metabolism and they kind of burn to death, if you will, in a way.

[Jordan Peterson]

What happens to type 1 diabetics if they eat nothing but fat?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, well, that's a great question. In fact, this allows a transition into the actual dynamics of fat cells. So if you had a. In fact, if you look at the earliest diet that was given to diabetic type 1 diabetics before they started using insulin, it was almost entirely carnivore.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

You look at these old fashioned prescriptions, it was this much fatty meat and it would say, fatty meat, don't eat meat that is too lean.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

It's because these are fuels. Fat is a fuel that doesn't need insulin to tell it what to do. It can get into the cells of the body, the brain, which doesn't use fat. It readily uses ketones, which you'll make plenty of if you're burning a lot of fat. And so that would be the best way to ensure the type 1 diabetic lived as long as possible. But the great tragedy, when we discovered what was missing. Professors Banting and best by giving these patients insulin, that changed things. Now these people could live a long, happy life, but it shifted the paradigm, which was eat whatever you want and cover it with your insulin. This is a term, any parent listening to this who has a child with type 1 diabetes will have heard this asinine advice. This is a disease of not metabolizing glucose Very well. Why would we tell them?

[Jordan Peterson]

And that includes carbohydrates.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh yes, they're converted to glucose. That's exactly. Yes, thank you. Yes. So all dietary carbohydrates are going to be converted to blood glucose to some degree or another. Some, a lot like the sugar bomb apple, some very little, like a cruciferous vegetable like broccoli or something.

[Jordan Peterson]

The inedible vegetables. Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

The ones that you put in front of a newborn, a young little toddler, and they're going to push it off the plate because they inherently know I don't want this. Yeah. So the type 1 diabetic, what used to be a carnivore diet basically became the same standard high carb diet. But you look at these poor kids with type 1 diabetes. It is a life of constant fluctuations, the constant anxiety. And yet now we know in human studies what happens if you control the carbs, get them off the roller coaster. Sure enough, it flattens, it's a flat line and their insulin dose just plummets. And depending on how much you have to pay for insulin. That's a wallet saving therapy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let me summarize. So human beings have two metabolic pathways. The one that we relied on until very recently wasn't the carb pathway. That's really an emergency. And windfall metabolic system, quick burning, limited supply. Yep.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, I mean we have, we have enough carbs to fast. Like truly, if a human was just relying on their. Even you wouldn't even have to go that dramatic. You have someone fast for 24 hours, they've essentially burned through all of their mobilized carbohydrate storage, their glucose storage, that's done, it's gone. And in fact that's going to coincide perfectly with ketogenesis, with the ramping up of ketones in the blood.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there's an additional. We'll go sideways here for a second. While there's an additional issue there that isn't well understood as I understand it, that historically, again, over an evolutionary time span, there would have been lots of times when we had access to like no carbohydrates. Okay. So now, and maybe some of those times as well, to not much protein and fat. So just not much food.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so what happens then? Well, you go into autophagy, right. So what happens is your body starts to digest its own tissues. Now those could be fat, the fat, which would be fine because that's what it's there for. But if you go past that, then there are more. There are tissues that are starting to be digested, auto digested, that aren't merely for storage, but the body has a hierarchy of self consuming, so it consumes damaged tissue first, which is of course what it would do because if you digested healthy tissue first, you would just die. So that's a stupid solution. Now the advantage to digesting damaged tissue is that when you have access to food again, you regenerate. And so one of the consequences of being reliant on an emergency food supply, continually carbohydrates, is that you never enter an autophagy condition and so you don't repair yourself very well. Well, first of all, do you think that's true? I mean. Oh yeah, I've looked into this and that it looks to me like a carnivore diet mimics autophagy and maybe that's why they're effective.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

In fact, not only mimics, it enables it. Like just to be clear, but you're, you're touching on like this topic of longevity. Yes. Which I have, I have followed the, the modern. I don't want to hijack the question no, go ahead.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hijack away.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Okay. Well, yeah, with longevity, you'd think, well, what is a metabolism scientist going to say? Everything. I have everything to say about longevity because it is this process of the cell constantly wondering, how am I doing? Is it time to build or is it time to break? And one of the quirks of longevity or aging is that a cell actually needs to go through both. That I have hooked, I have looked with, and guess who decides whether it's building or breaking? Hormones. Hormones. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, life is optimized death. Right. You have to die continually. The excess and the what? You. Everything. Excess about you and everything is malfunctioning, has to die in order for you to propagate yourself across time. So life isn't life. It's. Life is a balance between growth and death. Right. So you want to optimize death, and you optimize death with autophagy, as far as I can tell. And the carbohydrates diet or a carnivore diet optimizes that or can optimize it.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it takes you out of this emergency food supply.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

That makes you fat. I want to ask you about insulin resistance now. Now your insulin levels are chronically too high because you're eating too many carbohydrates. What? And tell me the mechanism for insulin resistance, and then tell me about its cascading effects so that we can understand the relationship between insulin resistance and diabetes and Alzheimer's disease and obesity and heart disease and cancer, and pretty much everything is aging, for that matter. Yes, yeah, yeah. Blindness, diabetic neuropathy, et cetera, et cetera. So let's walk through that. Eat too many carbohydrates, your insulin levels are chronically high.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Insulin resistance follows, then you get ins.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, how. How does it follow? What happens?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, yeah. Well, in fact, depending on. So everything you just asked is so substantial that not only did I want to put it into a book, but even a Peterson Academy course, it is an answer of about seven hours or so. But it is so relevant because, again, it's the most common problem. So when insulin is elevated for too long, it literally starts to certain cells, not all cells. And this is one of the reasons why insulin resistance is so pathogenic. It's because some cells become deaf, some cells don't. And so as you have insulin going up higher and higher, to the deaf cells, that's not so much a problem. But to the cells who are as acutely sensitive as they were before, now it's stimulating too much. So one interesting example that we haven't even mentioned is infertility. As a bible believing fellow, I feel very strongly that it is in our. It is a commandment to reproduce. So anything that compromises reproduction. As a scientist, I'm quite fascinated by the most common forms of infertility in men is a problem called erectile dysfunction. The most common problem in women that's a problem of infertility is polycystic ovary syndrome. Both of them are caused by insulin resistance. But it's a perfect example of the kind of two sided problem where insulin resistance is on one side of the coin, insulin isn't working very well, but you always have the other, which is that insulin is elevated. So these are two sides of the same coin. And these two problems of infertility, which again we hadn't even mentioned yet, are both a reflection of one or the other. So in the case of polycystic ovary syndrome, most common infertility in women, people don't appreciate that all estrogens. Or maybe I'll back up. In order for a woman to have a normal ovulatory cycle, she has to have a big spike in estrogens. So there has to be a big estrogen spike and then that enables, it facilitates ovulation. If she doesn't have this big spike in estrogens, the eggs in her ovaries are able to grow, but one never becomes the dominant and actually ovulates. And if one doesn't ovulate, all of those eggs stick around. So they become cysts. That is the heart of the problem here. Well, it's the manifestation of the problem. Most people don't appreciate that most all estrogens were once testosterone. That in men and women, all of the estrogens circulating through the body and in the women critical to ovulation have to be converted from testosterone. Well, there is an enzyme called aromatase, and her ovaries have a lot of aromatase. Whereas the testes in her male counterpart have relatively little aromatase. He's still converting some of his testosterone to estrogens, but not as much. She's doing it a lot more. Insulin inhibits aromatase. So in her body, her ovaries, which maintain an exquisite insulin sensitivity, are looking at all of this insulin and responding, saying, okay, insulin, among the many things you're telling me to do, you're inhibiting the aromatase, which means I have all this testosterone and I can't convert it to estrogens. So not only will she not have the estrogen spike, thereby not ovulating, but she will also have too much testosterone giving her some of the other symptoms of pcos, like male pattern baldness or more hair on her body and acne and other problems.

[Jordan Peterson]

Have people been using low carb diets.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

To treat in particular? Oh, yes, There are case reports published. The most common medication that is given to a woman with pcos, even if the physician doesn't know, to test for insulin resistance, they give a prescription for a drug called metformin, which is the most widely used insulin sensitizing drug. And it will help, although it's not solving the problem, it's just sort of masking it.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you said erectile dysfunction.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Well, so that's the male counterpart, right? Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So listen to that. Men who are listening to this program, because erectile dysfunction obviously doesn't only affect reproduction, it affects sex.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so if you're not able to get it up anymore, one of the ways, in principle, you could treat that is by reducing your carbohydrate intake dramatically.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which would also stop you from dying, which is.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. Not only will be more attractive, but more capable of taking advantage of that physical attraction.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

By not suffering from erectile dysfunction.

[Jordan Peterson]

So really what's happened is we've really. Because we've become so a society of such insane abundance, we've deviated from our normal diet to an emergency rare diet. So now we can just eat the diet we would eat in an emergency. That was rare all the time. And it turns out that that's. That's not a good idea. No, I mean, not for. In the long run.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. For the sake of the species. Yeah. And then with erectile dysfunction, it's not a problem of the insulin being high, but normal physiology in the man and women in various locations of the body is such that when insulin flows through a blood vessel, if the blood vessel is insulin sensitive, the endothelial cells that line the blood vessel wall, they will see the insulin and it will stimulate the production of a molecule called nitric oxide, which will induce vasodilation, an absolutely critical process for erectile function. But those blood vessels become insulin resistant. And now the normal process of vasodilation in the man having normal erectile function is compromised.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's step back now. So you said insulin levels rise and then a variety of tissues in the body become insulin resistant because they don't. They can't tolerate being overstimulated, but some of them don't. And so they are overstimulated. Okay.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And then you, you, you, ovaries included Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And we talked about the reproductive consequences. But what other tissues become hyper, are in a hyper reactive state because of too much insulin?

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[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, right. So there are not many. Most of them go the way of the insulin resistance, like the man's side of things. And that's like, for example, what causes Alzheimer's disease, where the brain's becoming insulin resistant. But the insulin sensitive side would be a tissue like the liver, where one of insulin's effects at the liver is to tell the liver to make fat. Now the liver is more complicated. I kind of joke with my students that when it comes to metabolism, the liver is the soccer mom. It is sort of giving. It knows what to do with everything. You have a problem, the liver can solve it. It is the ultimate handler. It is the nexus of all nutrient metabolism. Whether it's lactate or ketones or fats or glucose or proteins, amino acids, the liver handles all of them. It is the soccer mom. It does everything. And when it comes to insulin, one of the many responses to insulin is to tell the liver to make fat. That effect is as insulin sensitive as ever. And so now in the high insulin, insulin resistant body, the liver is seeing all of that insulin. And one of its effects is to tell the liver to make more fat.

[Jordan Peterson]

Thus that when you get fatty liver.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Then you have fatty liver with a common liver problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

We also now are seeing signs of fatty liver in children.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which is historically unprecedented. Not only alcohol does that.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Alcohol does, right? But too much fructose Another pointing the.

[Jordan Peterson]

Finger, like in high, in high fructose corn syrup and even fruit, which is subsidized to a degree that's absolutely stunning and which is in virtually every processed food.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes, yes. So much of what I rage against when it comes to the government getting involved is it's happened, it's subsidizing the most problematic things like high fructose corn syrup. But even if you and I, we're drinking orange juice right now, that's a straight shot of glucose or apple juice. You know, if we were meant to drink that fructose, then we wouldn't even have to eat it with the apple. You know, you think you and I could drink four apples worth of fructose and not even think about it?

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And yet we'd never want to sit there and eat four apples because the fiber and things would want to slow it down and we'd feel a little more full and so we just, we naturally wouldn't focus as much on it. But this environment that we live in, it's almost like we are eating for winter all the time. Because fall used to be the time of abundance. It was fall when we would reap the harvest. It was fall when the fruits, when the plants would be kind of coming into season and boy, let's get ready.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, like let's lay on some fat like a bear because winter's coming and in the north that was not good. Right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Winter never comes. And so anyway, as we go from top to bottom, you can find insulin resistance. You know, the brain, just to fine point on it. The brain is one of the high metabolic rate organs in the body. Right now we're having a stimulating conversation. It is entirely possible. I bet our brain is number two, or probably number two, highest metabolic rate at the moment because it's so hungry, it's so demanding. Even when we're sleeping, it's busy, so it needs to be fed constantly. The brain doesn't burn fat for energy for reasons that we don't really understand. Actually the brain is its own hybrid though. Burning glucose, blood sugar or ketone. Now there is in fact a man whom I love and admire is a scientist in northern Ontario and Stephen Cunnane. He presented this idea of a shore based evolution suggesting that the reasons humans departed in part, we are the only land based mammal born obese.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fuller pushed that theory too, by the way.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it accounts for lots of things like female fat distribution.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Kind of webbed hands and feet, our ability to swim, hairlessness, omega 3, the.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Value of omega 3 fats. You know, eating these kind of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, where else would you live if you could on.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Not in the prairies of the beach.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where there were lots of shell food. Shellfish obviously. That's pretty straightforward.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

It would be a good way to do it. So the brain has these two fuels, glucose and ketones. Ketones are utterly unregulated if they're going up. In fact, one of the things I love disabusing my students of is the false idea that glucose is the preferred fuel for the brain. Yeah, right. Every sort of knuckle dragging, mouth breathing professor will just spout that off without actually knowing a thing about brain metabolism. The reality is if someone has glucose levels at 5 to 6 millimolar in a normal range and they're fasted or on a ketogenic diet, even when their ketones get to 1 or 2 millimolar. So over here the brain has already shifted so that up to 60 plus percent of its energy is coming from the ketone.

[Jordan Peterson]

So don't tell me it's a choice. It'll pick ketones.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Indeed. And the moment ketones come online, the brain switches. Even if there's still way more glucose than ketones. Don't tell me this is the preferred fuel when this one, even at a fraction of the level, is already the dominant source. Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's so cool. We've been talking to this, my daughter in particular, this guy here in, in Arizona who runs an old folks home and he's been. So it's like a palliative care old folks home and he's been putting his charges on a ketogenic diet and people are leaving his home.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, it's one of the great. Swept under the rug.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So do you, do you know like if you have someone who's suffering especially on from early stage Alzheimer's, which we've discussed as type 3 diabetes already. If you switch them to a ketone diet, have there been studies done already showing what the consequences of that, the short term consequences for cognitive function? Because that'd be the fastest way to test whether that was helpful.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. So as a clinician you'll appreciate this, but as a biomedical scientist I sort of am frustrated by the lack of other studies. But the number of case reports that are being published just keeps climbing, climbing, climbing. That the brain as it becomes insulin resistant and it can't get as much glucose. It's like the rhyme of the ancient mariner. It's this sort of metabolic, this version of it where even if the body's hyperglycemic. If the brain is insulin resistant, it's basically, you know, saying crying out, glucose, glucose everywhere, nor not a drop to drink. It can't use that glucose because it's insulin resistant and it needs insulin to help open the doors to get the glucose in. But the ketones are unregulated. So to the case reports. Yes, there are documented peer reviewed instances where you can take a patient whose cognition is so compromised they can't tie their shoelaces or they can't draw out the face of an analog clock. You'll give them a piece of paper and a pen, draw out the clock, 1, 2, 3 and so on, put them into ketosis, have them do those tests again. They can tie their shoes, they can draw the face that quickly, it's still alive within hours. Within hours.

[Jordan Peterson]

I wonder if anybody's tried that with 45 year olds for fluid IQ tests, because that'd be a quick test, right? Take the same people. I should talk to Michaela about that because we could do that study really quick. Take 50 year old people. Ah, take obese 50 year old people.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Now you're talking.

[Jordan Peterson]

Do a fluid IQ test, put them in ketosis, which would take like 48 hours. Yeah, about that.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Or nowadays you can drink ketones, for goodness sakes. They've become so obviously beneficial. My university just won the cross country national championship.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how fast could you put someone into ketosis?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Within an hour, depending on what you're doing.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you can bring them in for one day. You could give them fluid IQ test, put them into ketosis and give the test again.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, you could even swap. Do it. Sort of placebo.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Right.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

One day after another, you're drinking something, then you're drinking something.

[Jordan Peterson]

You want to do that?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Let's do it. That's the beauty of basic science.

[Jordan Peterson]

We could fund that.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Well, the brain thrives on ketones. My own labor. We've published reports documenting how when a person's in ketosis, we actually had people and we were pulling fat biopsies from their belly, little pieces of fat, taking it to my lab and testing the metabolic rate. The metabolic rate went up three times.

[Jordan Peterson]

As soon as they're in ketosis, as.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Soon as they're in ketosis, the fat tissue just starts. It basically signals when ketones are up. Insulin's down. It's sort of party time with metabolism. It's, let's just get moving stuff. Metabolic rate goes up, autophagy turns on things that quickly. Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how would you put someone In a state of ketosis with a drink. Yeah. So how do you do that?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

There are multiple different. Now ketones have become so obviously beneficial. It increases metabolic rate, it helps people physically perform better. Race car drivers take it. Tour de France athletes take it. Cross country athletes take it. It's a viable fuel. So as ketones have become more and more accepted for all their benefits, there's been a bit of a race to say, all right, well, how can we do this best? And there are multiple different versions from the lesser effective, but much cheaper things called ketone salts. Then you go through the ketone esters and then you get the bioidentical ketones, and they're all of kind of varying efficacy. As they get more effective, the price goes up. But I'll say, having seen my beloved baba, my grandma up in Alberta, die from Alzheimer's disease. Disease. It is so terrifying that one of the reasons I adhere to my own low carbohydrate diet is because I want to keep my brain as healthy as possible.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

The fact that I stay lean and healthy, well, that's just a plus. Well, even my fear of cancer. Cancer cells don't use ketones, they use glucose. And so all the more reason to keep my glucose in check.

[Jordan Peterson]

So with regards to that specifically, so are there studies indicating a decrease in the rate of cancer propagation on zero carb diets?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And are they case studies?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

So that's a really good question. And I'm gonna respect how you framed it, which is, can you prevent the cancer that's not been. There's no paper on that. What there are papers on is looking at untreatable, particularly brain tumors. This is where most of the research is at the moment at Boston University. They are absolutely leading the charge on this. One of the most effective therapies they're doing is putting them into deep ketosis.

[Jordan Peterson]

If they have inoperable brain tumor, it.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Can take an inoperable brain tumor and not only stop it in its tracks, but literally start to shrink.

[Jordan Peterson]

And is the shrinkage a consequence of autophagy?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Well, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. So coming back to a topic you mentioned earlier, certainly it's part of autophagy and probably just good old fashioned necrosis. You simply are dying because you can't survive. Cancer cells will metabolize. They rely on glucose as their main.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fuel because it's a quick burnt and they propagate rapidly. Right. So they're more dependent on glucose than.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Ordinary cells and they don't want to have to rely on blood flow where they basically are growing so quick that they outpace the blood flow. And glucose doesn't need oxygen to burn. It can be fermented. But just to really elaborate how clever this area of research is, this group at Boston, they took a tumor cell, and the whole theory of cancer is that it's genes, it's from your nucleus, it's a nuclear, genetic disease. And yet they took the nucleus from a tumor cell and put it into a healthy cell, and the cell was totally normal. It didn't do anything. They literally transplanted the genetics. Now, what they also did was take the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. That's where you're burning the ketones and the fats. Then they put the mitochondria from the tumor cell into a healthy cell. It had cancer, it became a cancer cell. So they're changing the entire paradigm of cancer, saying that it's not a genetic.

[Jordan Peterson]

So are the cells adapted to glucose or cancer cells adapted to glucose metabolism?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And if you force them to rely on something other than glucose, they die. It's incompatible with their rate of growth and they can't sustain it. So ketones are at the.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, I've also read that if you're undergoing radiation therapy, for example, or what's the chemical treatment?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Chemotherapy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Chemotherapy, More specifically chemotherapy. That if you put yourself into ketosis, you have much less. You have much modified negative reaction to the chemotherapy.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

In fact, that is much less. Yes, the negative side effects. When you think about chemotherapy, it really is a matter of the oncologist, the cancer physician, saying, how much poison can I give you?

[Jordan Peterson]

Can I give you so that you.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Enough of you survives? But I kill what we don't want, namely the cancer. So chemotherapy is a miserable way to go. And I have my own strong thoughts on the very field of oncology and the use of chemotherapeutics. I think, by and large, most of them are not worth the trouble. Not worth the trouble. You maybe will live another week, if anything, and you will have bankrupted your entire family doing so. But even back to the glioblastoma, the inoperable brain tumor area, part of what they've shown is that ketogenic diets can act as a kind of adjuvant therapy, that the actual amount of dose of the chemotherapy required. Much lower, is much, much lower, because you're already compromising, you're already killing them. Now you're just pushing them over the edge. I mean, this is so much. This is why I beat this drum so loudly that you look at like at the end of this conversation, one of my great hopes is that someone listening opens up their morning medicine cabinet and they take out their two medications for their diabetes. They take out their medication for their blood pressure. They take out their medication for their PCOS or their erectile dysfunction thinking. Because there's different pills, these are different problems. And yet, if they start to institute just the simplest, albeit not easy, but the simplest, lifestyle changes to start correcting the glucose, correcting the insulin, they'll find, much to their delight, that those medications can just stay in the medicine. They're correcting their problem one at a time.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of the conversation and just summarize. So what we were attempting to do right off the bat with regards to the Maha movement was to focus on the Prito distribution. Bang for the buck. It's right. Where's the biggest criminal? Let's stop that and maybe we don't have to worry about anything else. And maybe we could stop one thing. And what would that be? Well, you talked about insulin resistance, and then we tied that to diet. That's high carb, high sugar diets cause insulin resistance. Well, then what does that cause? Well, causes insulin resistance, causes obesity, which also causes insulin resistance. And then insulin resistance has a cascade of effects. One of them, well, erectile dysfunction is one of them. Alzheimer's, high blood pressure, cancer is One of them, high blood pressure, heart disease.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

These are very bad things.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yeah. The biggest of the bad.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right, right. So we're really at the root of the cause of the so called multiplicity of negative consequences.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. And you said root in so much of. So conventional medicine is giving medications which is trimming at the branches, only to have them grow back. Well, let's just chop the damn tree down. And to do so you've got to go right to the soil, which is lifestyle. Yeah. So you said go to the root. There is a root problem and no medication's going to address it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right, right. Well, the medication is going to work if you keep consuming exactly what's causing the multitude of problems. And even if it addresses one of your symptoms, like erectile dysfunction pill, that doesn't mean it's going to address the fact that your diet is making you prone to Alzheimer's.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's right, right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And it's only, it's only putting a bandaid on like any medication when it comes to metabolic problems. No medication can solve the problem. It will just mask it. Which is why something as reversible as type 2 diabetes.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's one dimension of it.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. One aspect. So something as easily reversible as type 2 diabetes, a disease of too much insulin. Bring your insulin down, eat less carbs. The traditional view would be to say, and the clinician will say this type 2 diabetes is irreversible.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Because if you treat it with conventional means, it is. You will never get off those drugs. The dose will go up, you'll have more drugs, more and more drugs because you're not actually solving the problem. Type 2 diabetes is absolutely reversible. It's just you have to respect that. It's food. The food we eat is the culprit or the cure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's talk about lifestyle modification.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about government subsidy, let's say, and the food pyramid, the original food pyramid, and how it was developed. Because there's a story that'll curl your hair. Oh, it's so. It's so appalling.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, it's vile.

[Jordan Peterson]

So appalling. It's just, you can't read that without. What would you say? It's like a traumatic loss of naivety to believe that something that catastrophic could have been consciously perpetrated. Yet it was, it was unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Okay, so lifestyle change. So we think of the typical supermarket, okay. Now, people have often Been counsel to eat around the edges. Right. Don't go in the middle of the supermarket. Why? Because that's where all the processed food is. Well, is the problem processing? I don't think the problem is processing. The problem is all processed foods are emergency hyper caloric, glucose centric foods. Right. So they should be, they're there like when you come across a beehive, they're not to eat every day. So you, you go around the edges and you eat while you tell me if you disagree with any of this. Because we want to make it simple for people. Right. So you stay away from the processed foods because they're too high in concentrated carbohydrate and sugar. Yes, fundamentally. Now there may be other reasons to avoid them as well.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

The chemicals that are in them, the fact that they've been designed to be addictive, etc.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh, yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

To me that's trivial compared to the fact that now mostly they're just the equivalent of sugar.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, now you, you, you, you graze around the edges. That means the kinds of vegetables you don't really like. Right?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Dairy, including butter, including yogurt, all of that. So that's, that's food that people actually like. Yeah, not, not sweetened yogurt, no sugar. Stay away from the damn sugar. Yeah, Meat. And that's about that fundamentally. Right. And definitely don't drink soft drinks.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

No, no, absolutely, yeah. I mean, you don't want your food to come from. The less you are able to formulate a diet where your food isn't coming from bags and boxes with barcodes, the better off you're going to be. And the way you just described it, you've done it to me. I mean, first and foremost, we have more in common with a wolf, digestively speaking, than we do our closest, closest animal relative, like chimpanzees or apes or any other primate. If you look at the digestive system.

[Jordan Peterson]

Chimps spend eight hours a day chewing.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, they have to eat because they have, it is such a nutrient deficient diet. Their colon, their large intestine is substantially bigger than the humans because they have to ferment so much. Moreover, brain comparatively small, very small brain, very big intestines.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, yes, yes. That's the vegan evolution, evolutionary pathway, by the way.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, yeah. And you want to shrink your brain, remove animal sourced foods from it and yes, you'll be like your other primate cousins and start to shrink your brain, but unfortunately you don't have the colon to ferment as much as they do. Moreover, you're probably not prepared to eat your own feces, which is what they'll do to get vitamin B12. A purely plant based diet is so deficient in nutrients it is utterly incompatible with the human. Human survival, let alone human reproduction. I consider it. In fact I feel so strongly about this that I actually consider it to be quite devilish or overtly satanic that I think of, if you'll allow me to invoke some scripture. We often talk about Christ's great commandments. Love God, love your neighbor. And yet there was a commandment that preceded those which was God's commandment to Adam and Eve. Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth. That was the first commandment. Commandment. And the older I'm getting as both a man of religion and of science, I sort of use that commandment as my litmus test. If this is an ideology or a principle or a practice that is going to make it harder for people to.

[Jordan Peterson]

Reproduce, there's something fundamentally wrong, then there's.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Something wrong with it and I must reject it. And so even when it comes to.

[Jordan Peterson]

Diet, reproductive capacity is species health across generations. Right. It's the equivalent of health, except across generations.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So obviously anything that's anti reproduction in its essence is. There isn't anything more pathological.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Whether you invoke God, whether the commandment to Adam and Eve, or whether you invoke evolution, whose great design is to just have an advantage to reproduce, you all come back to reproduction.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, one of the things I'm seeing on the Maha side is that it's difficult to bring unity to the field of preventative medicine. I mean, many people are concentrating on the panoply of chemicals that are in like fruit loops and. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. But, but for me the problem with a fruit loop is that it's basically just a sugar level.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

You and I are totally aligned on this.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

You have to manage your macros, all the other micro stuff. Yeah, that matters a little. But if your macronutrients aren't aligned, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and I have rules for each of them, then all that other stuff is fluff.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it's noise, essentially.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

It's noise.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

The needle a little, but not enough to do it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, so, and then the thing is, if you, if you're only able to fight one battle at a time, you better fight the right battle.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And it seems to me now it's also the case that there's no recommended daily allowance for carbohydrates yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oddly enough.

[Jordan Peterson]

I know that's very odd. So expand on what.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

So it's odd for multiple reasons including, I consider it the most pathogenic because of everything we've been describing. But it's also the one that is utterly unessential. You appreciate? Yes, but most people don't. Even within the United States. The Department of Agriculture years ago had a statement where it says something like, I'm going to loosely quote it. The lower limit of dietary carbohydrates is zero.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Zero is a low limit.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Okay. Yeah, that's a pretty low number, that's for sure. And yet that's the one you tell me to eat the most of. Born from the food Guide pyramid in its ill fated ideology or born from the modern obsession, sort of a pseudo religious view that we can't kill anything? And what a naive view. Life is death. Everything that is alive benefits because something died before it. And we benefit from all of that stuff. So we have this kind of perverse shifted view of nutrition where we focus on carbohydrates. The one thing we don't, we literally don't need to eat it. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. And yet 70% of all calories globally come from carbohydrates.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they, they do have the advantage of being cheap in the short run.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. You know, and especially if it's subsidized, it's cheap.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that's, that's a separate issue like, because you could imagine, you know, humanity's been solving a sequence of problems and once one problem, and it was real, was there just wasn't enough calories. Okay. So you probably want to address that so people don't starve.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fair enough. And maybe you can address that more cheaply with corn than with beef. Okay. And so there we've given the devil is due. But that doesn't mean that that constitutes an optimized diet. And that's where I think the people who created the food pyramid were criminal or criminal.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because the, the story, and, and this is a story you're fleshing out, is that the base of the pyramid? So that's where you get the bulk of your calories, according to the hypothetically scientific guidelines of the government, which were never scientific in the least right from the beginning, is that that's where you should derive the bulk of your calories.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then fats and meat are a tiny, yeah, tiny element of that. And that's, it's, they knew from What I've been able to, from what I've seen in my investigations, is that the people who designed that bloody pyramid were told by their own scientists that they were going to produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. Dr. Philip Handler was the president of one of the leading scientific societies in the United States at the time. And I'm going to loosely quote him, but he says, what right has the federal government to conduct such a grand experiment.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, dude.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

With the population of the United States as its test subjects. That it had never been done.

[Jordan Peterson]

With no control.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

No, that's right. It had never been done.

[Jordan Peterson]

No consent.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And look at what's happened. People want to blame meat for all what ills us, which talk about an insane ideology. But you look at red meat consumption from the early 1900s till now, it's been a steady decline. And yet what's happened to heart disease, even at the superficial 30,000 foot view, blaming meat for the ills of the modern, these diseases of civilization, these plagues of prosperity, it makes no sense.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, now we've had the Greens who are doing the same thing and you know, the globalist utopian vision. This is the C40 vision. This is a consortium of municipalities all around the world, including many of the world's biggest cities. They want a 95% reduction in meat consumption. That's not all. 95% reduction in private automobile ownership. Of course. A one short haul flight per person every three years.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Oh my.

[Jordan Peterson]

Three items of clothing per year.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That sounds like a perfect way to enslave people.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, it's just beyond comprehension. But, but the meat element is particularly egregious as far as I'm concerned, because there are forms of agriculture that are meat intensive, that revivify soil, and the idea that that's contributing to something like a climate catastrophe, that I can't imagine a stupider lie.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

No, it's.

[Jordan Peterson]

Although there are, are some.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

It is, it is tragic because for multiple reasons. Just as a fun aside, when men, studies in men have shown that if man stops eating meat, saturated fats in particular, his testosterone plummets, his sperm production plummets. Like this is antithetical to human production.

[Jordan Peterson]

You think that that's an evolution, That's a biological sign of scarcity.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's no bloody wonder that you're.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Don't reproduce, don't reproduce now because all.

[Jordan Peterson]

You have to eat is broccoli.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. It's a sobering view, which is when you look at the food guide pyramid, one of the like literal authors of the Food Guide Pyramid wrote this and proposed it heavily influenced by his religious creed, where he is an adherent for the sake of being respectful. I don't want to cast stones here. Whose religious view is that meat is bad in part because it elicits carnal desires, and so it's a literal function of this individual's religion. At the time, again, in opposition, Kellogg.

[Jordan Peterson]

Believed that as well.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Kellogg was one of the adherents. He was just as he was one of the adherents. So this is. The Seventh Day Adventists were the ones who helped write the Food Guide Pyramid and then helped create some of these. Guess who is the main origin of the American Dietetics Association? The Seventh Day Adventists. And so no wonder it's part of this. To literally get licensed as a dietician, you have to play the game and say meat is bad because it's. And as a religious man, again, I can't help but just have a grim humor. Where in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who I love because he was so. He was like a lion in some of his writings to the. To Timothy, in 1 Timothy, chapter 4. Anyone go read this. He's prophesying of the latter days. And so it's just an irony that it's religious ideology that helped give birth to these ridiculous ideas when if you actually scrutinize the text, it doesn't support it. So Paul, prophesying of the latter days, says, in the latter days people will be seduced. Now he is quite bold and says, seduced by the spirits of devils. Now, I'm not saying every person who believes this is devilish, but he says there will be two things that will kind of identify them. They will command to abstain from marriage, which is directly opposed to God's commandment to Adam and Eve, and then two command to abstain from eating meat. And he goes on to say, which God has ordained for the use of man. And so it's ironic to me that religion is invoked to create these terrible ideas. And yet a sort of studious view of religious text would never support such a thing and indeed, directly oppose it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's sum up before we move to the Daily Wire side. So there's a fervor in America at the moment with regards to health. And I think really that's probably a consequence of the fact that everyone's fat. And it's like, what the hell? Like, how did this happen? It's, It's.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

And we spend so much on health care. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And. And that as well. These ballooning.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Health care costs that aren't helping the problem.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Not help.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And a growing distrust of the. Of the pharmaceutical band aid treatment to the problem, and of. And of government policy in general, especially policy related to such travesties as the food guy.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so everybody's kind of woken up and gone, wow, this isn't working. All right, so what's the fundamental problem? Well, we've walked through it. The fundamental problem is that carbohydrates are too cheap, plentiful, and promoted, and that's making everyone insulin resistant and fat and promoting Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and erectile dysfunction and other reproductive malfunctions and cognitive decline. We didn't even talk about depression and anxiety. Depression is a often, and this has been known for three decades, that there are variants of depression that are immunologically related. They're inflammatory. It's an inflammatory condition. Yeah, right, right. And so that's a huge problem because depression per SE is probably 75% of mental health problem, all things considered. Right, yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Elevated with case studies finding ketogenic diets are once again therapeutic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Chris Porter, you can look across. Yes, exactly. You can look across a span of neurological disorders that seemingly are unrelated. Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, migraines, depression. And yet all of them have been documented to have what's called a brain glucose hypometabolism. Where in each of those instances, if you're actually measuring the degree to which these people are able to take in and metabolize glucose in the brain, it's significantly lower than their counterpart who isn't suffering from that neurological disorder. All the more reason to give the brain a fuel that it can get, namely ketones.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So one of the suggestions that might emerge from a discussion like this is that if you are unhealthy, why wouldn't the first thing you try be a ketogenic diet?

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Control carbs.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, always.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That is my rule number one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Start with that.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Kind of. No matter what's wrong with you.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes. Control carbs.

[Jordan Peterson]

If it's chronic and you're having a hard time treating it and the direction isn't good.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

You should give some seriously serious consideration to radically decreasing your carb intake. And there's no down zero.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes. There's no. I mean, people have to appreciate. Well, what's the downside? There is none. This is the one. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because there's no recommended daily allowance.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Exactly. This is the one. There are such things as essential fats. You better get them. There are such things as essential proteins or amino acids. You better get them. CRICKETS CHIRPING there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. So lest it seem like you and I are being just crazy. No. Rule number one, control carbs. They are the one that is the main contributor to your disease in the first place and to you literally do not need them.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right. So the first consequence, the negative consequences are zero.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Zero.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right. So you have a broadly applicable medical intervention that's dietary based, that's very likely to be successful in treating a whole variety of diseases, including ones that will kill you in ways you do not want to die, which would be Alzheimer's and diabetes, let's say, or any degenerative neurological condition. And the side effect profile is nil. Except that you get thinner and better looking and your sex life improves.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, that's a good point.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah, I'm sold. Yeah, I've convinced myself again.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think what we should do on the daily wire side is talk a little bit more about how this came about. Right. And delve into that for everybody's edification, hypothetically including our own. For all of you watching and listening, you can hear my guests lectures on Peterson Academy. Tell me the lectures that you've done so far for us. You've done three, I believe.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

I've done three, yeah. And this is so orchestrated by Michaela, who's just been such a champion for this message. So the first one, at Micaela's explicit invitation, was why we get sick, which was essentially a longer version of everything we've been talking about six or seven hours of what is insulin resistance, why does it matter? Where does it come from and what to do about it? And then after that, I was invited back to just say they sort of thought we need a little more kind of basic science and biology. So I have two other courses, and I have an affection for Basics in Biology and Fundamentals of Physiology. So those are the three why we get sick. Basics in Biology and Fundamentals in physics.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So you can dig more. People who are watching those can start at the surface and get the bulk of the information, like we did today.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But then they can dig down for.

[Dr. Benjamin Bickman]

Yeah. And it really is, as a professor, it really is sort of a seven hour version of what I would take a semester to do, Which I appreciate the point of this as much as you and I both rail against traditional higher education. Anyone who's curious and thinking, you know, What? I kind of liked my high school biology and I wouldn't mind a little more. Well, I got the class for you. Or they want to go a little further and understand how the systems of the body, how's the heart working, how's the brain functioning, how are the lungs being dynamic, the muscles, well, that's the physiology. And then the last part of it is when things start to go wrong, if you will. But a version of everything we've been talking about, which is basically the metabolic origins of chronic disease. That's why we get sick.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right, right, right. Okay. Okay. Well, I think that's what we'll focus on on the daily wire side. But I want to tilt the conversation again or focus the conversation more with regards to pathological policy in the past and why that emerged, because it really is a story that'll just, it just curdles your heart to understand what was done to the American population with the food pyramid. It's beyond comprehension, but more importantly perhaps to understand and to investigate how that might be put right. Because the Maha people are trying to figure out how to communicate directly with the American population to reverse this as rapidly as possible and as sustainably as possible without a heavy handed, sort of top down approach. So we could discuss that practically on the dailywear side. So all of you who are watching and listening, join us for that.