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what if most people's problem isn't having too much fat but too little muscle all of my sickest patients had one thing in common they all had unhealthy muscle actually why don't fat people have a lot of muscle after all isn't carrying around all that extra weight like lifting weights all day your muscles are extraordinarily atrophy you look at the lumbar extensor muscles what should be about the size of the barrel of a baseball bat is as small as this magic marker obesity at its core is a disease of the muscle but what is Baseline Health in this video we'll break down why Baseline Health makes it hard to get fat why you need more muscle and more protein to achieve Baseline health and why athletes and bodybuilders
probably think low carb diets are stupid cut up potatoes 90 G of Oats 60 G of grats so why do we need more muscle for Baseline Health being healthy is mostly about just having low body fat right let's take a look at what Dr Peter AA calls Baseline Health if you have even the mildest interest in being healthy you can't be insulin resistant if you are insulin resistant you're not going to be healthy insulin resistance is basically the very early stages of diabetes insulin resistance in a nutshell means that the body has trouble processing carbohydrate you need insulin to process carbohydrate so if you're resistant to insulin's effect you are bad at processing carbohydrate research has shown that usually the less muscle
mass a person has the worse their body is at handling carbohydrate a 2011 study found that for every 10% increase in muscle mass insulin resistant reduces by 11% and prevalence of diabetes reduces by 12% at 2014 paper explains that reduced muscle mass and strength is commonly associated with many chronic diseases including obesity and insulin resistance this is likely one of the reasons why athletes and bodybuilders may think low carb dieting is kind of stupid they eat plenty of carbs and likely need plenty of carbs but they are fantastic at processing carbohydrate thanks in part to all their muscle to break this down simply when you eat carbohydrate it is broken down into
glucose insulin takes glucose out of the bloodstream and puts it into various cells so you don't have super high blood sugar or high blood glucose just from eating a croissant however muscle is well known to be the key glucose sink that absorbs most of the glucose the more muscle you have the more excess glucose the body can use or get rid of the muscle can either burn the glucose for energy or store it the muscle can store a lot of glucose and the liver can store a little bit when the liver is full of stored glucose and there's more glucose in the muscle can handle that excess glucose gets turned into fat in the liver and that fat gets stored in the fat tissue if this process happens
so much that you fill up all your fat cells that fat made in the liver eventually gets stuck in the liver and lodged in the muscle as well interestingly your muscle will actually start to look like a cut of wagu beef with that tasty fat marbling while delicious this indicates that you are becoming insulin resistant again a key feature of insulin resistance is that you become worse at processing glucose so in essence because muscle can dispose of glucose it is shielding you from the issues of excess glucose you can either deal with carbohydrate by focusing on having plenty of muscle or you can just not eat carbohydrate when you have less muscle it becomes harder to get rid of excess glucose and insulin resistance
worsens more muscle allows you to dispose of the excess glucose in your blood and when we eat a meal about 80% of the energy that's ingested in that meal is distributed to the muscle when muscle begins to fail or when we develop problems with our muscle it's uh not surprising then that we develop a range of diseases associated with that okay but just because you have tons of muscle doesn't mean you can eat an infinite amount take a look at sumo wrestlers despite their massively muscled legs they are still really fat and at very high risk of diabetes you can't just eat up to 7,000 calories a day without overloading the system even though you're training for hours and building
up those massive leg muscles of course these giant athletes would be far worse off without all that muscle it's commonly found that less muscle means higher risk for diabetes it's observed that there is a tendency for the average person to start slowly losing muscle after age 30 this is called sarcopenia and studies say we need to prevent this sarcopenia to help prevent insulin resistance and diabetes here's the Catch 22 muscle is good for preventing insulin resistance but of course losing weight and reducing excess body fat should improve insulin resistance but calorie restricted weight loss diets can cause you to lose muscle so how can we preserve our muscle mass lucky for us a
super easy low effort way to maintain more muscle mass is to just eat more protein this study did an analysis of 105 different studies to understand the effect of a wide range of dietary protein intakes effect on muscle mass they were looking at doses anywhere from 0.5 G to 3.5 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day this study found that the more protein people ate the more muscle mass they had and even as little as an extra 0.1 g of protein per kilogram of body weight added to their diet help people preserve muscle mass and potentially even increase the muscle mass the people eating under 1.3 G per kilog of protein a day stood to benefit the most by increasing their protein
intake if people ate more than 1.3 G per kilogram per day they still got benefits they just weren't as pronounced unsurprisingly adding resistance training along with the protein offered the most benefit to the muscle so being a sedentary couch potato is definitely not a good idea but what this study suggests is that even in people not exercising the more protein people ate the better for their muscle in 20 years of medical practice I have never once looked at a patient and said you're eating too much protein it's really not even a thing conventional diet advice doesn't Focus too much on building up muscle or even making sure to eat plenty of protein to at least prevent your
muscles from breaking down we're told to reduce calories to lose weight but what are we supposed to eat the food pyramid left the impression that we should have about twice as many servings of bread cereal and rice then high quality protein sources like meat poultry fish eggs and dairy okay but now we have the updated my plate but it still tells us to eat more grains and fruit than protein again there's a simple way to eat to preserve more muscle mass when you're cutting calories to lose weight eat more protein increased protein intake allows for greater muscle mass preservation when consumed during periods of negative energy balance as we discussed in my last video the great
thing about protein is that it will make it easier to stay in caloric deficit because it's so satiating if you have a high protein meal we know from brain Imaging as well as hormones that if you have a high protein meal you have more satiation she's fat you already considered obcd as a cause no I mean what if it's not a cause what if it's a symptom the interesting thing about insulin resistance is that research suggests that the cause of insulin resistance is not necessarily obesity itself but having no place to put excess calories that is the problem what does that mean well take a look at Japan they have 10 times less the Obesity of the United States however they don't have 10 times less the diabetes of the United
States they still have half the diabetes rate of America why well as Dr Ted n explains in this presentation of his evidence suggests that we have something called a personal fat threshold the way this works is once you fill up all your fat cells with fat starts to get loded in your muscle your liver and around your organs and you become more and more insulin resistant so basically insulin resistance is the result of your body running out of space to put your excess calories of course if you lose body fat you'll free up more space to put excess calories and you'll become less insulin resistant check this out researchers tried transplanting a new pouch of fat into a highly insulin
resistant rats and connected it to their blood supply this extra space to put calories reverse their insulin resistance the weird thing is that there's a small number of people that can actually make new fat cells this means they can keep making space for excess calories and can get way fatter without becoming insulin resistant so personal fat threshold is basically How fat you can get how much space you have to put calories before you start getting insulin resistant and sick this is where the term tofy comes from or thin on the outside fat on the inside I am confident about the way I look because I'm fairly thin for my height so I think I'm healthier than other people who are the same age but most doctors would say
otherwise people may appear thin but because their personal fat threshold is so low they can barely put any fat into their fat cells before the fat spills over and starts clogging up the liver muscle and organs with fat you're insulin resistant because you filled up all your atab aites you have no more room for fat flux every time you eat a meal it has nowhere to go Mr Kim was recently diagnosed with central obesity which is an excessive amount of internal fat around the organs carbohydrate comes into play here because as Dr niman explains consuming more carbohydrate than your body can handle makes it much more difficult to burn all this fat and glucose and fat are oxidized reciprocally so anytime you're burning
more glucose you're burning less fat and more fat you're burning less glucose you filled up your fat cells with fat because you suck at burning fat because you eat too much glucose that is the biochemical process that enables you to burn the fat is actually hindered by burning carbohydrate glucose goes into the mitochondria and when you dump in a bunch of extra glucose fat actually physically cannot enter your mitochondria to be burned the research is pretty straightforward the more your body Burns carbs the less it burns fat if you could take two people in this room and whoever burning more glucose and less fat at Baseline will literally be significantly fatter 3 years down the road that's what this study was you can
understand whether someone is burning carbs or fat because they will have a lower respiratory quotient if they're burning fat but a higher respiratory quoti if they are burning carbs but again saying we need to eat less carbohydrates so we can burn more fat may sound stupid to athletes bodybuilders and Gym Rats because exercis in itself will burn up the glucose stored in the muscle so this allows the body to handle more carbohydrate having more muscle means you can handle more carbohydrate and athletes and Physically Active people tend to have a lower respiratory quotient meaning their body is typically burning more fat than carbs so even while Physically Active people may eat a ton of carbs their bodies are still
great at burning fat because all that muscle and exercise keeps them very insulin sensitive so they're very good at processing carbohydrate insulin resistance starts in the muscle the muscle is your first line of defense and as this 2019 review in the journal nutrients explains not needing enough protein is an easy way to break down your muscle on a practical note Dr Gabriel lion says that to trigger protein synthesis you at the very least need to eat three meals with at least 30 G of high quality protein or 2 meals with at least 50 g of high quality protein she says that in total you want at least 1.2 G to 1.6 g of protein per kilogram of body weight every day also you need to be aware of that protein
quality in general animal Source proteins are better digested and have more of the essential amino acids than plant proteins in specific Dr Lane Norton explains that you need to go to Greater lengths to get enough of that key muscle protein synthesis stimulating amino acid Lucine if you are relying on plant sources of protein plant sources of protein tend to be lower in Branch amino acids they tend to be lower in essential amino acids and tend to be lower in Loosey despite what I said earlier about protein being good for muscle I'm definitely not saying you can just sit on the couch all day long eat steaks and expect to wake up looking like a Belgian Blue Bowl protein will
help you preserve muscle but you of course need resistance training for healthy muscle as well as Dr Stuart Phillips explained in a presentation of his to build up muscle you want to increase muscle protein synthesis and you want to suppress muscle protein breakdown eating protein is what triggers this muscle accumulation state where muscle protein synthesis is greater than muscle protein breakdown so prioritizing protein in your diet will hinder this muscle breakdown to a degree as you'd expect you'd have much more of this muscle synthesis when you add resistance exercise to your protein filled routine speaking of exercise I prefer not to use any particular pre-workout or caffeine before or during my workouts I just make sure to get
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