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 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 one 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. In fact, we recently held a highly successful and informative telephone clinic together. The "Secrets of Anti-Aging" telephone clinic was co-hosted by me, and primarily led by Dr. Rosedale, covered ALL of the following:
Five practical ways to improve your skin
How to increase your energy as you age gracefully
How to improve your aches and pains & overcome your loss of flexibility
The role supplements play in preventing aging
How to improve your memory and reverse your mental decline
How you can reverse the factors causing you to age rapidly and MORE!
Dr. Rosedale is extremely gifted in interpreting the complex basic science research into practical steps you can take to increase your longevity, and improve the way you feel - even if you suffer from a degenerative disease!
In simple terms, what is leptin and how does it work?
Simply stated, leptin is a very powerful and influential hormone discovered approximately 10 years ago produced by fat cells, that has totally changed the way that science looks at fat, nutrition, and metabolism in general.
Prior to leptin's discovery, fat was viewed as strictly an energy storage depot, an ugly one at that and one most everyone was trying to get rid of. After it was discovered that fat produced the hormone leptin (and subsequently it was discovered that fat produced other very significant hormones), fat became an endocrine organ like the ovaries, pancreas and pituitary influencing the rest of the body and, in particular, the brain. It tells the brain what to do about life's two main biological goals: eating and reproduction.
I would say now that rather than your brain being in control of the rest of the body, it is, in fact, subservient to your fat. Your fat, by way of leptin, tells your brain whether you should be hungry, eat and make more fat, whether you should reproduce and make babies, or whether to "hunker down" and work overtime to maintain and repair yourself.
It plays a large role in inflammation, immunity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and all other diseases of aging, and perhaps, aging itself.
Based on the lecture we featured on my Web site, insulin has a profound effect on one's metabolism. Your new book focuses on how the body can regulate leptin to control hunger. Is one more important than the other?
Both insulin and leptin work together to control the quality of one's metabolism and, to a significant extent, the rate of metabolism via nervous system control.
Each and every one of us is a combination of lives within lives. We are made up of trillions of individual living cells that each must maintain itself. Even more significantly, the cells must communicate and interact with each other to form a republic of cells that we call our individual self. It is the communication among the individual cells that will determine our health and our life. The communication takes place by hormones. Insulin and leptin are the major hormones regulating metabolism.
Metabolism can roughly be defined as the chemistry that turns food into life, and therefore insulin and leptin are critical to health and disease. Insulin works mostly at the individual cell level, telling the vast majority of cells whether to burn or store fat or sugar and whether to utilize that energy for maintenance and repair or reproduction.
Leptin, on the other hand, controls the energy storage and utilization of the entire republic of cells allowing the body to communicate with the brain about how much energy (fat) the republic has stored, and whether it needs more, or should burn some off, and whether it is an advantageous time nutritionally-speaking for the republic to reproduce or not.
Controlling hunger is one way that leptin controls energy storage. Hunger is a very powerful and deep-seated drive that, if stimulated long enough, will make you eat and store more energy. The only way to eat less in the long-term is to not be hungry.
Leptin also very powerfully influences energy utilization and fat burning via its effects on the sympathetic nervous system.
Why did you shift your focus from insulin to leptin?
I have talked about insulin's importance for many years, and some of those talks have already been published and widely distributed, with much help from your Web site, and I thank you much for this.
Therefore, the public has already been made aware of insulin's importance in health and disease. Unfortunately, the same is not true for leptin, as its importance is largely unknown to both the public and the medical community. I would like to see my book, The Rosedale Diet, help to alleviate that situation, and let be known the critical importance of controlling leptin in health and disease.
How is your diet plan compatible with my Total Health Program?
We both largely emphasize the importance of reducing grains and other nonfiber forms of carbohydrate that readily turn into sugar. Also, very importantly, we stress differences among fat and stress eating high quality beneficial fats, and avoiding those that we feel are more harmful.
One aspect of your plan that deviates from mine is its de-emphasis of protein. Why is protein a problem?
Many people equate low carbohydrate diets with high-protein because they are so scared of eating fat. Protein is used to replace and replenish cellular and body parts and thus, unlike carbohydrates, is an essential nutrient that must be eaten to maintain health.
However, if eaten in excess, extra protein will be turned into fuel and it is the process of using protein as fuel that I feel is quite unhealthy. This process creates waste products including ammonia and urea (where the term "urine" comes from) that are poisonous waste products the body must eliminate. Furthermore, what remains of the protein is largely converted into glucose through a process in the liver called "gluconeogenesis."
You basically end up training your body to turn protein into sugar and therefore when you do not eat you will continue the process. When you're sleeping at night you will be more likely to turn your lean body mass -- your muscle and bones -- into sugar. I see many diabetic patients and they are very good at this, unfortunately.
They may not have eaten for 12 hours when they wake up in the morning, but if they measure their blood sugar it is still quite elevated, sometimes even higher than when they went to bed.
Where did it come from? It came from converting their proteins from their muscle and bones into sugar. It would be far preferable to teach the body how to burn fat when energy is required so that lean body mass is spared. Eating extra protein impairs that learning process.
Continued in Part 2