Peter Attia· MD
now there are different degrees of that right you could be mildly insulin resistant and you know maybe it doesn't shorten your life by a decade but if you're in the business of wanting to live the healthiest life you can live which means longer and better you've got to be insulin sensitive full stop and that's why we're going through this discussion so let's talk about what insulin does at a more detailed level so that we can begin to talk about what goes wrong so bob i'm kind of looking at our notes here and i'm looking at the picture on page 15 that we'll we'll show folks this one's titled normal postprandial response to insulin so you got a little person there a little cartoon character they're eating a nice piece of bread so that piece of bread gets broken down into its constitutive starch molecules of which glucose is the main one glucose stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin insulin does basically a couple of things it tells the liver hey stop making glucose because if the liver was still making glucose you would now have a very high level of blood glucose which we never want and it tells the muscle take glucose in the muscle is the predominant place where we dispose of glucose so you'll hear me say this term glucose disposal glucose disposal all day long it just means muscle taking in glucose so what goes wrong here and again when i say wrong i think it's important to understand this is a continuum that on one end of the spectrum is just becoming insulin resistant and at the other end of the spectrum is full-blown type 2 diabetes