Ten years ago, I was in a room of 30 other doctors and had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Ron Rosdale expand on the dangers of insulin. It was a major eye-opening revelation to me and served to radically reform my ideas on diet. Everything I have read in the past decade on this topic has supported Dr. Rosedale's pioneering insights on this topic. He was truly one of the first experts who heralded the dangers of insulin.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of physicians still are not aware of the importance of insulin. If you haven't read his lecture on insulin, I would strongly encourage you to do so. It is one of the most well-read articles on our site and I can't tell you how many comments from health care professionals I have received telling me that is one of the best articles they have ever read. It truly is a classic.

Part two of my interview with Dr. Rosedale follows on leptin, and his new book, The Rosedale Diet that continues his pioneering work.

He is 10 years ahead of the curve on this one and if you want to take a peek into the future of what natural health will look like then please read the article below and seriously consider purchasing his excellent book. Dr. Rosedale is an incredible and tireless researcher. His command of the research literature in health is truly astounding.

Ron is one of my favorite health authors and I eagerly devour everything he has to say on health. I hope to hold a seminar with him next year and it should be awesome. I have great confidence he will further expand my understanding of how to achieve optimal wellness.

What sets your eating plan apart from others?

The Rosedale Diet was designed originally to treat serious chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. The ability to control sugar and fat burning is paramount in those and all chronic diseases, including obesity. Therefore, it also optimally controls weight and fat storage.

Most of the other diets are designed strictly to lose weight and that is not necessarily synonymous with health. Most disease processes cause weight loss including cancer and death.

Just because a particular diet may allow for weight loss does not necessarily mean it is healthy. Furthermore, weight loss does not necessarily imply fat loss. The vast majority of weight loss diets cause one to lose lean body mass -- muscle and bone -- in addition to fat, and that is definitely undesirable.

The Rosedale Diet focuses on regulating metabolism towards fat burning and, therefore, weight loss that occurs on this program is fat loss, often associated not with reduced lean body mass, but actually increased lean body mass as your muscles and bones are able to hear proper hormonal messages once again.

From the way you describe leptin, it actually controls your brain. Explain how that happens.

Leptin is a major way that your energy stores -- namely your fat -- speak to your brain to tell it how much energy your community of cells, the body, has stored. It is an extremely important hormone produced by the endocrine organ known as fat. In our evolutionary history, it was advantageous to store some fat to call upon during times of famine. However, it was equally disadvantageous to be too fat.

For most of our evolutionary history, it was necessary to run, to obtain prey and to avoid being prey. If a lion was chasing a group of people it would most likely catch and eliminate from the gene pool the slowest runner and the one who could not make it up the tree -- the fattest one.

Thus, fat storage had to be highly regulated and this is done, as is any regulation, through hormones, the most important being leptin. If a person is getting too fat, the extra fat produces more leptin which is supposed to tell an area of the brain in the hypothalamus that there is too much fat stored, more should not be stored, and the excess burned.

Therefore, signals are sent to stop being hungry, to stop eating, to stop storing fat and to start burning some extra fat off. More recently, it has been found that leptin not only changes brain chemistry, but can also "rewire" these very important areas of the brain that control hunger and metabolism.

This has really caught the attention of the scientific community. It has also been found that leptin can control brain areas that in turn control the ability to reproduce, thyroid levels, and the sympathetic nervous system which has huge impacts on blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and, perhaps, even the rate of aging.

How do people become leptin-resistant?

This is the subject of much research. I believe people become leptin-resistant by the same general mechanism that people become insulin-resistant: By overexposure to high levels of the hormone. High blood glucose levels cause repeated surges in insulin and this causes one's cells to become "insulin-resistant" which leads to further high levels of insulin and diabetes.

It is much the same as being in a smelly room for a period of time. Soon, you stop being able to smell it, because the signal no longer gets through.

I believe the same happens with leptin. It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolized in fat cells, fat releases surges in leptin, and I believe that those surges result in leptin-resistance just as it results in insulin-resistance.

I enjoyed your short section on body temperature. Why is having a lower body temperature is so important?

Almost all mechanisms that extend lifespan in many different organisms result in lower temperature. Flowers are kept in a refrigerator at the florist to extend their lifespan. The one sure way to extend lifespan in multiple species is via so-called "caloric restriction" with adequate intake of essential nutrients. This also invariably results in lower temperature, and generally in reduced thyroid levels.

Anything will dissolve faster in hot water than cold water. Extra heat will dissolve, disrupt and disorganize. This is not what I try to do to make someone healthy. It is not an increase in metabolism that I am after. It is improved metabolic quality. It is commonly advised to "increase metabolism" and increase "thermogenesis" for health and weight loss.

However, if you are insulin- and leptin-resistant, your metabolism is unhealthy and you increase its rate and increase heat production, all you will do is accelerate your demise.

Less emphasis is placed on exercise too. How does exercise fit in to the leptin/insulin mix?

I believe that one of the greatest benefits of exercise is to cover up mistakes in diet. If one eats a diet that elevates blood sugar, it is better to burn that sugar off than to leave it in the circulation elevating insulin and leptin and glycating (sticking to) important cellular components.

However, it is better yet to not allow the glucose there in the first place. I believe that diet is the most important aspect of anyone's health. If one eats incorrectly, exercise will not go very far in improving health.

If your hormones are telling you that you must burn sugar, you'll end up tearing down your lean body mass, muscles and bones to make sugar. I have shown that you can actually build lean body mass without an increase in exercise by improving hormonal signaling, especially in this case insulin signaling.

Insulin, in fact, is an important anabolic hormone. If one eats correctly, I believe that 15 minutes per day of mild resistance training is all that would be necessary for most people, and would go a long way in augmenting proper diet such as The Rosedale Diet, or the Total Health Program.

I also believe very strongly in nutritional supplements, but only if they are taken in conjunction with proper diet.

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