Chronic Inflammation & Insulin Resistance Revealed

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Yates. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s kind of fun to be talking about a subject that we don’t usually focus on, but it’s such an important part of everyone’s health.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. Our conversation is going to focus on chronic inflammation and resistance and that cell danger response. Can you talk to us about insulin resistance being a metabolic issue with genetic correlations, but no predominant single gene abnormality?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, I think in the last 20 something years, medicine has fallen in love with genetics. It was I of most patients we’re always looking for, okay, where’s the gene? What caused this thing to happen? Unfortunately, it hasn’t really worked because other than a few rare diseases, almost everything that affects people is a combination of five, ten, usually hundreds of genes interacting. When we start looking, we find that it’s really the small molecules that what we call the metabolites, the chemicals that we use to produce energy that have a lot to do with our health, and especially a little organelle, a little part of the cell called the mitochondria. We’ve all been, I think probably even most of the general public are familiar with mitochondria as the part of the cell that produces energy, that produces ATP. But what’s really interesting is this little organelle, which is believed to actually have gotten into our cell as being at one time a maybe its own free living organism. But it joined us and it does have some of its own DNA, actually. But this little piece of us produces ATP, which is called the energy currency of the body, but it also controls and modulates our immune function. The immune function is what produces inflammation. It’s there to protect us. Inflammation is what keeps us alive. The body is constantly having to defend itself and protect itself from all the other critters that live inside of us. Because we all talk about the microbiome, all those trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, but also all the ones that are in our environment that we’re constantly being exposed to.

Your immune system is very busy and the the mind of country are always sensing what’s going on. Because when you get a viral infection, the first thing the virus starts to do, it’s tries to use your own metabolites to make more virus. It’s making it’s taking the molecules that your body would normally be making to make more of you and to make more of them. The mitochondria senses that. Because it’s not getting the same nutrients that it was getting the same small molecules and it begins to change its function. Now, when it does that, the reason that I’ve gotten so interested is because, I mean, should I treat people with a lot of chronic metabolic illnesses or things that chronic fatigue or autoimmune diseases and along with that, people are often fatigued, tired, they don’t have enough energy. For a long time people thought that these mitochondria were broken, that there was something wrong with that, when in reality what’s happening is that they are just doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but they’re often stuck in one day. When we get exposed to an infection, when we get sick in the first steps of inflammation are to try to contain another organisms like a virus or a bacteria. The mitochondria start by producing less ATP and they also the mitochondria also are responsible for producing a lot of the building blocks of we make of our DNA and RNA. We kind of turn that down in the first step of inflammation, which Dr. Naviaux, Dr. Robert Naviaux, from the University, San Diego, who is kind of my patron saint, I looked at him for many new ideas.

He has come up with this concept, what he calls the cell danger response. He’s broken it down into three steps. The first step is that the inflammation process that we’re all aware of when if you get injured or get infected, you get tired because your mitochondria have started to make less ATP, they use up, they send some of this ATP up to the surface of the cell to use as a signaling molecule to tell other cells that there’s a problem. When things are going well, this is a very transitory process. It lasts for a few hours to a few days, and then the next step is rebuilding. That’s the cell. That’s what he calls CDR2 that first step of reducing ATP production. At that same time, when you’re reducing ATP production, you’re increasing the amount of glucose that you burn and but it doesn’t go in. It becomes a molecule called pyruvate. We’re not going to try to keep it too technical. But this small molecule that your body can put into the mitochondria and when things are working well, you make a whole lot maybe like 36 or 38 ATP, or you can burn it up in the cytoplasm and only come up with two to four ATPs. The thing is, you can do a lot of that.

That’s a way to make quick energy because you can you only have anywhere from 400 to 500 mitochondria in a cell, but the ability to make a small amount of ATP and a glucose in what we call the cytoplasm, the kind of the background of your cell, you can amplify that like 50,000 times. Even though you’re not each little enzyme complex is only making a small amount of energy. You can multiply that. You can get a large amount of energy by burning the sugar, but in a very inefficient manner. That’s CDR1. That’s the beginning of the inflammatory cycle where you’re kind of like making less ATP, but you’re using ATP as a signaling molecule. In the second stage you’re beginning to repair because that virus got in there and you had to kill a bunch of virally infected cells. Now in step two, you are beginning to rebuild. The mitochondria start to work a little more normally, but you’re still getting a lot of your energy from burning sugar. This is the stage that lots of cancer cells are stuck in. This CDR2 because people interested in cancer would know that cancer cells are very dependent on glucose. They don’t burn fat very well. In fact, I should emphasize that. People understand as we move on is that the most efficient way to make energy is really to burn your fat.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yes, it is.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

But it takes your mitochondria working well to do that or I shouldn’t say, well, it takes your mitochondria to be working in their normal function. They’re on their non inflammatory, their non self defense function to burn fat and, and that’s the big connection between diabetes and inflammation is because when your body is stuck in low level inflammation there’s going to be some of your mitochondria that are not burning fat and they’re just burning sugar and we’ll we’ll tie this in later. But then you get to that third stage of the cell danger response where the cells have you like built new cells, but now they have to learn how to communicate because they are kind of baby cells and now they’re growing and they have to go to school. They have to learn how to understand the messages that are coming in their cell membrane has to mature. They’re you begin to get information from hormones because in that CDR2 stage one, you kind of cut down some of that ability to communicate. You kind of get your cell to cell information isn’t flowing as well because the cell membrane is a little hardened. In CDR3, it matures and all those cell receptors, all those hormone receptors are now opening up and working. We’re going back to a more normal metabolism. 

Now, chronic disease is mostly women. Some amount of cells in your body are stuck in CDR1, two or three, and many times different organs and even parts of organs have some of these cells stuck in different steps of this cell danger response. This sounds confusing, but it is. But it helps us understand why disease is not so linear. You can have good days and bad days. You can do well for months and then be sicker because it’s constantly evolving and changing. What changes it is your environment and your environment is obviously how much sun you get, how much rest you get, how much you and the and of course, your diet and the health of your diet. One of the things that we have seen over the last 40, 50 years is that the change in diet has had a huge effect on the diseases that we’re seeing. Because if you look back over the last 120 years, it’s incredibly traumatic. But the last 45 years, it’s probably almost as traumatic as heart disease and cancers were fairly uncommon illnesses in the 1800s. It wasn’t that doctors couldn’t recognize them. They were well recognize they just weren’t that common. It’s not because everybody died when they were 14 that is one of the I think one of the stories that medicine has perpetuated, too, to make itself look better than it is because what’s happened in the last hundred years is we’ve gotten really good at treating diseases that kill people when we’re young.

We’ve got really good like people don’t die as often during childbirth. Babies don’t die as often. We can get the child on that early childhood mortality, which was the scourge of life in the 1870s, before the 1900s. I mean, I forget it was one in five, which was like 20% or something of kids would die in that first year of first five years of life. The first year it was just really horrible. But now, because we can treat infections effectively, people do quite well and we can treat trauma. I mean, I think that’s the biggest thing that’s happened is people can get incredibly hurt and damaged in accidents and medicine is amazing. We can we do a lot for that.

But what we count on is once someone’s been injured, we do our magic can we can like do surgery and we can give drugs and support the body to survive and recover. But then people have to heal. It’s said healing phase that we’re not doing so well at. I think and that’s gotten worse, actually, because we can see allergies. I mean, when I started medicine, only when I was growing up, allergies were not that common. Now it’s almost like 50% of kids have allergies. Autoimmune diseases, Hashimoto’s, Thyroiditis. These thyroid illnesses, again, they were uncommon and now they’re a dime a dozen. Type 2 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes in children was almost unheard of 50 years ago. I mean, really, it was rare people didn’t see it. It’s a common problem. We and what’s changed is our diet and what particular in our environment and what particular issue or what particular aspect of our diet. It’s hard to say for sure. I mean, obviously we all agree that the incredible amount of fructose in the diet, because people have to understand it is fructose is from fruit.

I mean, it’s good for us. The problem is that when our ability we didn’t have that, we didn’t eat that much fruit. When we did, it was usually in the northern hemisphere as it was in the summertime you might eat a lot, but you were trying to gain weight because you had to survive winters if you lived in the northern Hemisphere, survival was an issue. A lot of us have genes that are very good at when we see fructose, we do wind up actually storing lots of fat. We use the fructose does things to our mitochondria which get them to go into a cycle that is actually inefficient but is if in inefficient at burning glucose, but very, very efficient I mean inefficient at burning fat but very efficient at making more fat because you need that to survive the long winter. Since we no longer have to, grocery stores and supermarkets are open all year now and there is plenty of food. These genes that one at one time kept us alive are now getting us sick. Because and it’s the amount of glucose that snuck into the diet because every processed food uses corn sirup, which is another way of saying fructose. Maybe there’s a lot of and this change in our diet has just dramatically changed the size of Americans. 

We have gotten larger and larger. As Dr. Yates and I were talking just before we started, been carrying a lot of weight doesn’t make you necessarily unhealthy. There are plenty of people who are large but healthy and there are plenty of skinny people who if we actually take a look at their livers, have fatty livers, and are not healthy. But the common cause behind this is probably fructose and the amount in our diet and on top of that, we have all the chemicals and toxins, preservatives and all the herbicides and pesticides which and just the chemicals that are just part of in our building materials that we’re constantly breathing in and being exposed to, that our bodies weren’t designed to deal with. On top of this, we also have the EMFs, and God knows we don’t have the data on that clearly yet. It does look like that might be a problem as well of creating a state of chronic inflammation. Going back tying this together, inflammation is your body’s self-defense. But when it stays stuck on part of that, self-defense is getting you to store that instead of burning fat. If you don’t burn fat, you’re going to wind up eventually with insulin resistance. Let’s see, I hope that wasn’t too much of a mouthful for people to get a handle on.

Beverly Yates, ND

No, I think that’s really helpful. You just go through it and to unpack it so people can look at the layers of the onion, so to speak. Get down to the essential, the Pearl of it here. You’ve had a chance to tell us about inflammation and how it drives into resistance, how the body is responding to various things, how it has historically been helpful for humankind. But now in this moment, it’s a problem because it’s just too much. To some degree, it would seem that for many of us, we are in a moment where we’re going to have to really acknowledge how different today’s world is and our access to some of these nutrients and micronutrients and ultra high processed foods and the problems with that. Because the lack of nutrient density, not eating things in there, season, etc., it just makes a real difference. That isn’t something historically humans have had to deal with. But at this moment it’s a very different game we’re playing.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes, especially even in people who think they’re eating healthy. That morning smoothie. Well, if that morning smoothie contains fruit, you’re usually overwhelming your body’s ability to handle it because basically your intestines can metabolize four to five grams of fructose and break it down into glucose and sucrose. Your body can handle that really well. The liver has no trouble, but when you drink a glass of orange juice, you overwhelm your intestines ability and that fructose goes right to your liver. In your liver, that fructose will start that process of shutting down the mitochondria ability to burn fat and you start to make more fat. You actually are building fat and you are sending that glucose to be made into the liver will make triglycerides out of it. Then that goes to your fat cells where they get stored and you do that before you’re going to go on a fast or before you’re going to go to work in the Arctic, that’s fine. But if you’re doing that every day, you are eventually going to wind up with some kind of metabolic dysregulation.

If you in many people don’t develop Type 2 diabetes, that’s obvious. But if we ever we measure their insulin levels, their insulin levels will be elevated and that is happening. Then they’re going to start getting hypertension and eventually maybe coronary artery disease or cancers. It just depends. What you’re doing is coming what disease you get when your system is overwhelmed depends on your genetics. But the stress you put on your body is your environment, is what you put in your mouth and where and how you live. What’s very interesting is that when people start to develop insulin resistance, one way to short circuit that is exercise because the at the cellular level, when you start to have inflammation and have all these, the issue is the fact that you store in your cells and well they will hurt you if they’re inside your muscle cells. But it’s just but more importantly, that is a source of something called diacylglycerols. But basically it’s a fatty acid. Fatty acids are very simple chemicals that your body uses for ever for just everything help builds your cell membranes. It’s really important. They’re just a very simple molecule with three carbons and some long chain fatty acids, which is big long chains of carbon molecules, basically. But some of the there’s a particular subset, this little thing they call diacylglycerols that when it gets into your muscle cell, it will stop when insulin binds to your cell. There’s a lot of this DAG inside your cell. It doesn’t let the insulin signals inside the cell.

We call it the Glut4 or this receptor that has to get to the cell membrane for glucose to get in easily. If you have this fatty acid inside yourself in suddenly you’re not getting glucose inside your muscle cells to use to burn for energy. It keeps floating around in the body and your body then makes more insulin. Because it’s got to yell louder at those muscle cells. When it does that, unfortunately, the amount of insulin in your bloodstream, let’s say, is ten or 20 or even 50 or 100 after a night, right after eating. But it’s can be three times that inside your liver. Because you remember insulin is produced in your pancreas and the pancreas is has one little duct that goes right to the liver. You get really high levels in the portable vein of insulin and that so you that really gives a big noise to the liver. When the liver sees a lot of insulin in it starts making more fat and stops burning the sugar. It starts storing it and so we have a cycle of increasing insulin levels in the blood and increasing and it makes more fat, which it then sends to fat cells to store. The problem as fat cells get a little bigger, they get inflamed easier. When they’re inflamed, you get more of these this DAG released and you have this kind of this very non virtuous cycle of getting more of these fatty acids, this DAG getting into your muscle cells, and then you have more insulin resistance. You’re in a difficult bind and that’s why inflammation. 

So the point is this I should be clear here. I mean, the point I’m trying to make is that inflammation. Now, if you have something that’s causing inflammation in your body and those fat cells get the inflammatory signal, they produce a lot more of DAG. You can wind up with insulin resistance because you’re maybe eating too much glucose, but you can also get into insulin resistance just because you’re inflamed and your fat cells are putting too much of that DAG into the bloodstream that gets into your muscle cells and that gets them to become death. The insulin signal. If you’re stuck in a cycle. That can be very frustrating because you can have a situation and we see a lot in these people with what I call the chronic inflammatory diseases, which are basically all chronic illness. But so many folks who tell you I don’t eat much my spouse eats twice what I do and I keep gaining weight and their weight doesn’t change. I think that’s what’s so frustrating for folks is because many people who have issues with their weight are looked at as though they’re gluttonous, that they have no self-control. All they do, they must be sitting there eating all day. Many people are trying to live on these really restricted calorie diets, 1200, 600 calories a day, and they don’t lose any weight. That’s because they have underlying inflammation. The signal that’s coming from the fat cells are going are preventing the insulin signal. Their muscle isn’t burning the sugar. It winds it back in the liver and you make more fat. It’s such a frustrating thing. To this day, many doctors still blame the patient as though you’re just not you must be cheating, as we say.

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s a real thing. Many of my patients over the years and I’m certain so many of yours, they’ve expressed that very frustration where they feel not heard, disrespected, and it hasn’t really helped them address their own issues, their root causes, because of the fact excuse me, like you say, the muscle is not responding to these signals. Instead the liver has gone into fat storage mode because of what’s going on with their insulin response. This primary issue around insulin resistance is making that difference. Thank you for just walking us through. Here’s all the pieces, how this gets started and why it can be so frustrating. I know people are going to be nodding their heads, recognizing themselves in that journey.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes. This is where so understanding that inflammation is can be driving this and this is inflammation. I use that word inflammation a lot. What I’m trying to say is that when I say inflammation, I mean that there are cells in your body that are protecting you and in that desire to protect you. They are, they are producing chemicals which if things work well, is going to be a transient cycle. I always compare it to like it’s like getting angry. If you get angry at someone in the moment, that’s fine. But if you stay angry, it’s not.

Beverly Yates, ND

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

I mean, like our psyches reflect our physiology very much the same stories. I actually think it’s almost easier to understand how the body works. We think psychologically than we think medically, because medically, we often think in such linear terms because medicine, again, was built on a model of injury and acute, what I call acute illness and acute illness is when you get sick and you get better the body goes through its process all as well. But the thing that we forget is that when you get injured, a whole lot of stuff happens that I’ve heard people call it the black box of healing. We give you a medicine and all the medicine does is like a Band-Aid. It stops the bleeding, it stops the extreme pain or the diarrhea or whatever, whatever the extreme symptom is. Then we wait for the body to heal. But if the body isn’t able to complete that healing cycle, then we just keep putting more Band-Aids on people and that’s where the kind of medicine that you practice that works on, like how do we help the body learn how to or not work, but how do we help the body get back to healing is so important because the medicine that I was trained in was just in how to find another Band-Aid.

That’s what we do. That’s where we have like with the autoimmune diseases, we’ve gotten better and better at finding more specific chemicals to block part of this inflammatory cycle. But if and if blocking that allows the body to then heal, well, that’s wonderful. But unfortunately, most of the time, because we don’t change anything else that’s going on, the people just have to take that medicine for the rest of their lives. I mean, we see that with Type 2 diabetes is a great example. Like, oh, wonderful, we have all that look at TV right now and be like there’s there’s a million advertising for all these great new drugs that will actually make you thin. But if you stop them you call comes right back.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yes because the rest of the changes that are needed underneath have not been put in place. People haven’t been really fully supported in that. They’ve been given a piece of the puzzle that could be lifesaving life changing, but it’s buying them time. It still has to address the root cause.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

That’s what’s so important for people to see is that when you’re stuck is to start thinking underneath. Is there something that hasn’t that hasn’t healed or is my environment am I still maybe I’m exercising more? Because it was like, well, I was going to a point I just like to make to people. Is that one of the cool things about exercise? If you really and you eat a ton of exercise probably well a fair amount, but maybe 45 minutes a day of reasonable activity of pushing yourself, you can short circuit the insulin resistance because there’s a chemical when you actually burn a lot of energy, there is a protein called AMPK, which means basically it’s what your body does to signal that you have to make a lot more ATP When your amp goes up, your body knows that it really needs to make more ATP because AMP is one of the byproducts of work, of metabolizing. What is the byproduct of metabolizing ATP and that will actually get that glut4 to go through the cell membrane without the insulin pathway having to work so well. A lot of exercise will help do this, but it depends on the inflammation. Then we have the other big issue of this low level toxicity. Low level toxicity is what we swim in because of our environment and the changes in our food.

This creates this same what I call cell danger or what Dr. Naviaux call the cell danger response because viruses and bacteria, but also toxins because toxins interfere with some part of the intracellular processes. Sometimes they tie up our gluthatione, sometimes they tie up different chemicals within the cell. This creates that same issue of the mitochondria aren’t getting what they need. They read mitochondria are constantly sensing their environment and if the PhD, the acid base balance in that cell changes or the amount of of raw materials that are going into that mitochondria change, it will begin to react as though there is a virus there with that same thing of browning out making less ATP and also burning less fat. Toxins will do the same thing as just having too much weight or eating too much sugar or fructose. That’s something that people don’t pay enough attention to, and they really should, in fact. Yes we Dr. Pizzorno, who is a very well known naturopath and he has been working for I don’t know how long, but he’s been really trying to get some research published over the last years. I’m showing how he can reverse Type 2 diabetes by helping people detox.

Beverly Yates, ND

It makes sense.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

By and how people detox is one stop eating toxic stuff, stop living in a toxic environment and we and we forget toxicity. I mean these days comes from everywhere. I mean, just living too close to a highway. We forget that when the wildfires happened we were all very worried about these 2.5. They were talking about these particles that were less than 2.5 microns in diameter, meaning these really tiny particles. They get put into the air with a forest fire. Well, you get similar particles every time cars driving at 50, 60 miles an hour, little tiny pieces of the rubber. That’s why you need new tires every now and then, because you’re actually burning off the treads. Well, they get aerosolized into tiny particles and they cause inflammation. I mean, a lot of inflammation.

Beverly Yates, ND

It’s everywhere. It really is.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

It’s everywhere. We see that people who live close to highways actually have more inflammation, people who live close to things like golf course. People pay a lot of money to live on the golf course. Well, not a great place to live. 

Beverly Yates, ND

I agree. It’s a toxic area, isn’t it?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

In they’re toxic areas. Each one of these toxins do different things. I mean, the small particles are very simple. They just trigger your macrophages, these white blood cells that sense things and macrophages, once they get inflamed, they definitely trigger fat cells because you’ve got macrophages that live all around your fat cells. That’s one of the things that we know will get these fat cells through these more of that, the DAG, that insulin, that chemical, that when it goes to your muscle cells will get them to stop loosening the insulin. It’s these are all circles and cycles and that’s what we have to remember about the body. I always want at that point I wanted to make again and again for people is that when you go to your doctor, they’re thinking in a linear fashion. They’re thinking you have arthritis. I’m going to give you a medicine for the pain, for the arthritis done.

You’ve got something broken. We’re going to put a cast on and allow it to heal on. You have pneumonia. I’m going to give you an antibiotic. But they’re not thinking about how the body actually heals. The healing process is a multi dimensional process that’s happening simultaneously in multiple levels. There’s no A causes B anymore, and it’s hard for our minds to comprehend because we are now at our heart we’re engineers, I mean, that’s how we all tend to want to think is that because we’re good at fixing things, but we’re good at fixing things that we usually understand because we made them we built the bridge. So and we know and at the mathematics works Newtonian math works really well. You want to build a bridge, the engineer designs it. At this point in time they can figure without even having to build it, how much stress it can withstand. It’s all very it’s not simple, but it’s linear. It’s all understandable and reproducible. But nature, we didn’t create nature. We don’t understand it that well. All our and all our attempts at applying are one in one is two mentality, to understanding how the body works, doesn’t get us healthy. 

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s a great point you make. That really, is that I think that’s really the essence of it. We’re trying to translate how we understand the world a certain way to apply to everything, and not everything fits that model. When it doesn’t fit that model, we have to figure out, now, what do we do next? Before we wrap up our interview, I have two more questions for you. One is, can you share with us why the research on all of these things is so confusing? Like there’s models that are based on rats or mice the murine models. There’s human models. Like why is the research so confusing? Because people do get lost. They look stuff up. They’re like, wait, it said, do this. No, but that contradicts the other one.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, I’m going to answer that in two ways because actually, before I get to the animal stuff, I just want to say that the biggest problem in research is that research in order to do good research that will get you published, you have to isolate variables. Actually, this ties into the animal models in way is you say what they’ve done in animal models is that they have the mice and the rats that we use are so genetically modified they’re nothing like their wild type. The ones that that you see in the street or hopefully not in your house, but those and the ones that we use in the lab, I mean, like they’re so different because we’ve genetically modified these animals so we can test one concept and we do the same thing with drugs. We want that drug to work for everyone. But we are so different. It doesn’t it only works that way when the drug is targeted to a specific issue. We’re stuck with this like if I can find the one thing that’s wrong with you, and that’s why we spent a tremendous amount of money in the last 20 years thinking that we’re going to find the genes for things.

Just a quick and I will get to the animals in there but a quick aside about genetics and diabetes. One of the studies that Dr. Naviaux did in the early 2000 that really helped shape some of his thinking was he did a study on adult with diabetic kidney disease, but he had two groups, one from Philadelphia and one from San Diego. He was looking at the genetics and their metabolomics. Looking at the metabolomics, I said, means looking at these simple chemicals that we use to make energy with and build our tissues with. Enzymes can be like thousands of proteins big of we use molecular weight they can be thousands even up to a million they can be huge. The things we call metabolites generally under a thousand of got killed carbons which is the measurement of molecular weight. Not that it matters. We’re just seeing a thousand versus tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and the most of the metabolites are in the hundreds. They’re small and but when he looked, he found that he found about 15 metabolites that predicted that these people had kidney, he had diabetic kidney disease. But he found 17 genes that predicted it. But the 17 genes he found in San Diego were different than the 17 genes that he found in Philadelphia because his population in San Diego was mostly Hispanic and his Philadelphia were mostly Italian were different. We make the same chemicals, we use the same chemicals.

Beverly Yates, ND

But they didn’t manage that because my hometown is Philadelphia. I would think the environment like certainly in South Philly, there’s a lot of oil refineries, things like that. The toxicity exposure might be different than what one might run into, let’s say, in San Diego is interesting.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes, No, it probably is. But I guess the point for me is that the genetics what really determine was that these small chemicals and these small chemicals are how you are, how your body communicates with its cells. Getting back to the rats in mice, just the simplest thing is that it turns out I believe it’s in mice, that in mice, the liver cells are the ones that tend to get insulin resistance first. While in humans, it’s the muscle cells that get the insulin resistance first.

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s important distinction that again, that’s important.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, just again, a simpler way of thinking about leptin. A big people people were interested in weight. Leptin about ten, 15 years ago was going to be the magic bullet for weight loss. Because in mice and rats, if you give them leptin, they don’t want to eat anymore because it’s a satiety signal from the fat cells and it works great. In people it was a total failure. There was no weight loss. That’s what’s so frustrating, is that what we learned. I mean, animal experiments are useful to any most places, but we still have to do the work in people, and it’s very hard to do the work with people. People are different. When you’re working with animal experiments, those mice are all of the same genetic clones. You get kind of you get hints of where to look in people, but it’s not very good. That’s why I said we’ve cured cancer in Mice for 20 years now. It just doesn’t work in people because we’re a little more complex.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yes, it’s not exactly the same. Thank you for making that really clear. I’m sure people listening will be nodding their head and taking notes and just understanding that people are trying to do research to figure things out. But some of what’s underneath might not. it clearly doesn’t completely match what we experience as people. Here’s our final question. As we end our episode here, which is to explain something that I know is very puzzling to people when they have chronic illnesses, particularly like, say, chronic fatigue, if they’ve got Lyme, if they’ve got Type 2 diabetes, they’ve got heart disease, fibromyalgia. They gain weight. What is the role of chronic inflammation across these issues?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes, Well it’s just that once your fat cells are in this millieu, because of fat cells live like they don’t live by themselves they’re they have lots of support tissue around them and amongst them are the white blood cells as I said especially particular macrophages. Macrophages are just a part of your first protection in the body. They’re the guys who really go out there and sense what’s wrong and give the information back on to your T and B cells. We talk about T and B cells now, because since COVID, almost everybody hears about them. But anyway, so when you have inflammation in the body from whatever chronic illness you have and whether it’s from toxins or infections that local inflammation keeps getting your fat cells to ship out, this TAG, this little tiny fat molecule that goes into your into your muscle cells and gives them the blocks, the insulin signal. Your blood sugars go high. Remember, this was just one thing I just want to emphasize at the end, the whole thing about blood sugar is that your brain needs blood sugar. Your brain needs glucose, even if you’re starving. Even if you’re on a ketogenic diet or you’re just on a fast.

You depend on your liver to make sugar for your brain, that’s probably the most important thing it’s doing. It’s going to keep doing that really, really well, no matter what. When you’re inflamed, you’re not getting the right you’re not getting the right signal. There’s two issues. One, there’s the inflammation. Inflammation is going to irritate your fat cells. Your fat cells you’re going to produce these inflammatory chemical that normally would be sending some energy to your muscles. But when this hits your muscles, it isDAG. It creates insulin resistance, partially because it’s trying to keep the glucose getting to your brain. That was the point. Because that’s the most important thing your body wants to do because you will die very quickly if you don’t have. I mean, we’re talking. I think it’s hours for me. I mean, it’s very fast. You need your liver to keep making enough glucose to keep your brain alive. That’s the prime directive. If that includes having a ton of insulin resistance, because when it’s working that keeps the sugar in your bloodstream high and that’s what your brain needs. The thing we have to see again and again in human disease is that it’s not usually something that’s totally broken that’s causing the disease. It’s just of a system that was designed to keep you alive has gone awry.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yes, it’s gotten just too much stimulation in today’s world. Oh, man, that is great. What a lovely overview of how all this works where it goes wrong and what we can do about it. That’s really helpful to know. Thank you so much, Dr. Gordon. I appreciate that. If people want to connect with you and contact you, where can they reach you?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Just our website is gordonmedical.com named after me and they can also look at info@gordonmedical is a quick link to find out. Find us but gordonmedical.com is a great place to check us out and see what we do and see if we can be of help. Hopefully we have a budget information there that can help people learn a little bit more about these chronic inflammatory conditions.

Beverly Yates, ND

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate having you on this episode for the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. I’m so glad you’re out there getting this important information out because the more people know, the better they can be at staying healthy.