00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast, I continue my conversation with Dr. Catherine Crofts about insulin. This week, our discussion turns to challenging the status quo in nutrition science. So together, Catherine and I take a critical look at the flaws in the current dietary guidelines, particularly the persistence of high carbohydrate, low fat recommendations, despite mounting evidence for alternative approaches.

00:30
Our conversation dives into how our bodies process carbohydrate differently, the individuality of carbohydrate tolerance, and why excess processed carbs play such a central role in driving insulin resistance and chronic disease. Drawing on evolutionary and anthropological insights, our discussion considers what our history of hunting, brain expansion, and plant consumption suggests about human adaptation to diet, and just how we have evolved over the last thousands of years.

00:58
And this evolution sort of leads into a conversation about the striking health shifts seen in indigenous populations exposed to modern foods and whether refined carbohydrate and oils are the primary culprits or part of a wider cultural disruption. So we really do a dive into the guidelines and what our diet ultimately should look like. You guys are going to love this part two of the conversation. So

01:23
Dr. Catherine Crofts is a pharmacist, researcher and lecturer based in New Zealand with a special interest in the early detection of prevention of metabolic disease. She completed her PhD at Auckland University of Technology, where she analyzed the extensive insulin assay data collected by Dr. Joseph Kraft, shedding light on how abnormal insulin responses can precede changes in blood glucose by many years. And this is what we talked about in part one. If you missed that,

01:51
head back and absolutely listen to that, albeit you do not need to have listened to that to get a lot from this conversation. With a background that combines pharmacy practice, clinical research and teaching, Catherine brings a rare blend of practical experience and scientific insight to the conversation around metabolic health and diabetes prevention. All right team, before I crack on into the interview, would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast, hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform.

02:19
that increases the visibility of Micopedia and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from guests that I have on the show, like Dr. Catherine Crofts. All right, team, enjoy this conversation.

02:35
Hey, Catherine, great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me back, Miki. So I think now we'll get onto some not necessarily practical application questions, but more how does the story of insulin play into these broader, maybe public health recommendations, the types of foods people should be eating and things like that, which is sort of how I framed some of those questions I sent through on our initial email about this. Okay, cool. So first though,

03:05
I saw a tweet, is it still a tweet? I'm not sure. From someone in the low carb space, quite high up. It basically suggested that it said that over the last, I don't know, 30 years, we've been recommended to increase our fruit intake. And since then, cancer rates have skyrocketed. Basically implying that fruit is largely responsible for this increase in chronic disease.

03:34
I mean, I completely disagree with the premise of it. And then I looked at the little short that was from a talk done at Low Carb Down Under, of which I'm actually attending this year. Really looking forward to it. I love it. And I just thought, man, sometimes statements like that almost throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yeah, I would agree with that. But I was also thinking about somebody I worked with many years ago. ah

04:02
senior consultant in the hospital, and I'm sorry, I've got my fluffy coworkers just come in and- That's problem. He would have about six pieces of fruit a day in his lunchbox that he would bring to work. We also had to consider that the majority, well, not the majority, because that's not fair. uh Europeans, anybody sort of Northern Hemisphere

04:32
origins, you've got to think about the types of fruits that was available in evolutionary terms. They were all low sugar fruits. Yeah. Things like apples, pears, stone fruits, and they were also only available in season. So I think the overall message sometimes gets diluted down the lines because one of the messages I saw whenever it was, is that we need to increase our

05:01
intake and diversity of fruit and vegetables. And the five plus a day message is not wrong, but it should be at least three vegetable servings and a maximum of two fruit servings. And what a lot of people also overlook is what is the size of a serving? I mean, a banana is normally about two servings of fruit. So,

05:30
Yes, a lot of people do actually need to increase their intake of fruit. But if they're focusing on the tropical fruits, the pineapple, papaya, the mangoes, I mean, they're wonderful. They're tasty. I love mango. They're much higher in sugar. So we're focusing on the low sugar fruits, increasing diversity, but making sure we're not overdoing the portion sizes. That's

06:00
also important. then I think sometimes I think the other thing that gets overlooked is somebody pointed out to me the other day, there's actually no such thing as a vegetable. When you really get down to it, we've got fruits, roots, stems, leaves. What actually is a vegetable? And we look at things like tomatoes, capsicum. Are they fruits? Are they vegetables? Botanically, they're fruit. So maybe it's just

06:31
Let's not get too hung up about how much fruit we need to be eating. Let's just diversify the amount of plant materials that we're eating and keep it down to this low sugar end of the spectrum. And you know, the way that you sort of described that, I don't disagree with it all. Like to your point of your senior consultant, I had a client who was giving up smoking because of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. And he had swapped out all of his chips.

07:01
and actual Smocos uh for fruit. So yeah, so he was having eight plus serves of fruit a day and I'm just like, you just can't do that. And so there's absolutely a population of people who, like I would never say um fruit is great for everyone at all actually. And in fact, when I work with people with fat loss, I often get them to really minimize it because often we go to fruit for a snack, whereas actually we need

07:29
other nutrients which are often missed. But the other thing is, I mean, your client, if I may ask, having these eight servings of fruit a day, if some of those servings of fruit had actually been, I don't know, capsicum strips, would that have been an issue? I don't think so. Not sure. Capsicum is a fruit. Yeah. I think this is a, maybe this is what's not often captured in a

07:57
How many words you're allowed on Twitter anymore? That's just it. The nuances often get overlooked. That's why I keep bringing it back to. It's not about the fruit. It's about increasing plant content in the diet, high diversity, but making it low sugar. Because when you do that, mean, if you wear a CGM, most people, capsicum, don't have a huge spike in their sugars.

08:26
especially the green ones rather than the reds, yellows or oranges. if you're a Granny Smith apple compared to a pineapple, know, if you're aiming fine, have the fruit that make it the low sugar end of the spectrum and watch your portion sizes. You know, as I said, banana, two pieces of fruit, whereas a lot of people think a banana is one.

08:52
of fruit because it's a discrete piece of fruit. Same with an apple. If I go to the apples that I really want to be buying, they're actually like boulders. When you weigh it, it's like 240 grams. I'm like, that's a lot of apple. Whereas if I get a tiny apple, I'm like, ah, not quite satisfied. Of course, I'm insulin sensitive. I'm active. I eat fruit on the back of a meal. I'm actually, I'm not consumed with my fruit intake at all.

09:20
do think it's, to your point, that that's another muddy area. What is a serve versus what people actually eat? Also, you've just brought up the other really valuable point is what makes it work for you. It's one thing to have population guidelines, eat more fruit and vegetables. People emphasize the fruit, they're sweet and they're not bitter. It's easier to get people to have it. They're tastier, they've got the sugar in it.

09:49
If it doesn't suit you and your metabolic needs, then you're doing yourself a disservice just because it's a public health guideline. So you've got to the guidelines and then make it work for you. Yeah. And I think this is um the challenge. This is a challenge with guidelines that we need guidelines. I do think we do. But guidelines don't work for everybody. They are descriptive, but a lot of people take them as being prescriptive.

10:18
than not. It's a theory. It's a principle. We should all eat more unprocessed foods, especially vegetable material. But I don't tolerate oxalates. I can't have anything with high amounts of oxalates. um So the guidelines that say spinach is really healthy doesn't work for me. Anybody who's on a warfarin as a medicine.

10:48
You've to keep your vitamin K intake constant. So you've to be careful with the amount of green vegetables. You take the guidelines and make it work for you. So anybody who is at risk of high insulin levels, you've got to avoid the high sugary things. Sure, increase your fruit content, but what is fruit? Berries generally count as fruit in the scheme of things, know, because fruit and vegetables,

11:15
Well, as I said, there's no real such thing as a vegetable. just plant material, have lots of it, have a wide diversity of it, but keep it within your personal tolerances for, we'll just call it sugar at this point, but it's about keeping your NC land under control. From your perspective, if I think about the guidelines,

11:40
What would you say the biggest weaknesses in the current guidelines for us? And of course, I think you and I are quite aligned, but I'd be interested to hear if we're in agreeance on everything, we hardly ever, know, people are often not, and it was great, but yeah. Well, working with one of my undergraduates who's doing a independent research project at the moment, I would say utterly, it's process-photography.

12:10
because we don't realize the degree of processing in a lot of our food. um mean, when we think about things like um convenience food, pre-processed fast food, whatever you want to call it, I always considered Subway to be on the healthier end of the spectrum. Oh, yeah. Subway bread. Wow, the number of ingredients that are in that. Subway beef.

12:40
It's only 80 % beef. I hadn't worked to that until my student did this analysis. And so the amount of processing in our food. So we're looking at this stuff going, it looks healthy on the surface, but it's not. Or maybe it's not. We don't know the impact of the processing on the food at the moment. So I would say that is probably the... um

13:09
biggest concern with the guidelines is it does not take into account the amount of processing and votes. It's interesting as well because when I think about the guidelines, and if anyone is listening to this and they're thinking about it, I bet you what they'll have in their head is um the triangle, like the pyramid. Which is interesting, isn't it? Because we haven't had the food pyramid in action for maybe 30 years at this point, but it's a well-known, it's, you when people talk about it and think about the guidelines, they think about the base of the grains and the

13:39
fruits and vegetables and then the meat as it goes up. Yes, because I know that. I wouldn't really think about the guidelines as such. You've got that Eat Well plate or I think it's very hard to call it the Eat Badly plate out of the UK. until I went low-cal, when I was planning my evening meals, it would be based around the starch. I'll be having potatoes, rice, pasta for dinner. Now it's based around the meat.

14:08
So even if we weren't actually thinking about the guidelines, for many people dinner would start with what starch are we having tonight?

14:19
so sorry, I went off on a tangent. I don't necessarily think about the food pyramid and I don't know a lot of people who actually do. So it's around how they plan, but it would be around the, probably the Ministry of Health guidelines here in New Zealand, which is around having the whole grains, having the vegetables, having the low fat meats and things.

14:46
It's almost like when I think about how people eat, it's exactly as you've just described. They plan it around the starch or the carb. And then everything else is almost a condiment to that. you we're having toast or cereal for breakfast. um Maybe you'll have a couple of eggs, but that's like on the weekend when you've got time to do that kind of thing. And then lunch is often a sandwich or a panini or, you know, a pita or a salad, which just ends up for a lot of people being woefully low and

15:16
sort of everything that they need. And then dinner is a pasta or a rice type dish. And then the other stuff is laid on top of that classic Kiwi pattern of eating, which hasn't really like that in itself hasn't changed. But to your point about the processing of food, know, there are certainly there, I think that there are foods which have been processed in a way that allows them for better digestion and, and, for us to get better nutrients in them.

15:46
There'd be a small, but then there are of course those other ones. I would agree with that. mean, things like when you look at things like frozen vegetables, tinned tomatoes, frozen veg, um flash frozen, high nutrient density and things. Cooked tomatoes, tinned, yes, convenient. um And the cooking of the tomato increases the um lycopenes um and the other good things about them. But it's things like, as I said, uh

16:15
Bread. When bread was being made back, go back to the 1960s, four ingredients. um Flour, salt, yeast, water. Now when you look at a lot of bread, you've got so many other ingredients. It takes forever to get off, go off actually. Yes. Yes, it does.

16:46
But it's also, we don't know the impact of those extra ingredients. um I mean, a lot of them are, I don't know, things like vitamin E as a stabilizer or lecithin from sunflower oiled. So they appear to come from a natural base. But whenever I'm trying to figure out and go, ah does this matter?

17:15
from a metabolic sense, I go back, would somebody somewhere around the world have eaten these foods in this combination in these quantities, this processed form 300 years ago? And if they were, how would they be doing it? It's like fruit in season or things like uh honey.

17:41
uh Yes, but it would have been small amounts shared out amongst everybody because it was a challenge to get the honey out of the hive without being hurt. So it was a treat, it was shared, it wasn't available in large quantities. So yes, it have been available then. What was the quantity? How often was it eaten? Was it in season? What else was going on? So when we think about a lot of the more modern processed foods,

18:11
just wasn't available then. So what difference is it having? There was a paper recently talking about that there is a global deficiency of omega-6 oils in the diet. That was kind of the headline in the paper. But it's kind of misleading because when you drill into the paper, there is a deficiency of

18:40
essential omega-6 linoleic acid in certain parts of the world like Northern Africa, which does increase the incidence of cardiovascular disease. But it's disingenuous to say everybody should increase their intake of omega-6 oils when A is the essential linoleic acid that's important. think I've got that one right, but I think there's only one essential omega-6.

19:10
Um, and you've also got to get your omega six to three ratio correct because excessive amounts of any omega six, including I'll call it linoleic acid is also not good for health. So you've got these headlines out there that are honestly disingenuous. Um, because while they're not wrong, when they get taken out of context,

19:40
you've got bigger problems. I totally agree. often, and I often think about this, and I thought about this with the fruit comment earlier this morning when I saw it, I just thought we're very reductionist in how we think about nutrition, you know, and, and even those who have moved from moved into the low carb space, and they often accuse, you know, traditional sort of nutrition recommendations as being reductionist when we think about saturated fat and salt, and they absolutely are. But it's very

20:11
It's very easy not to see our own blind spots with our own sort of diet. Everybody has their own biases. It is unavoidable. I I know personally, I am biased against heavily processed foods, but I hadn't realized that I was until I went somewhere. I said I had no food requirements, but I can't actually eat anything here because everything is just so heavily processed. It's just a complete mess of turn off.

20:40
oh So every, but it's about being aware of your biases and going, I being reasonable in these contexts? Am I just being biased or am I being deliberate about it? Because I know this is best for me. And not only are we reductionist in bringing it down to ingredients, we also can be very reductionist in going, what works for one population works for every population.

21:10
and we've got to take so many ethnic differences into account. I mean, you and I are both, um I will call it Caucasian. So we've got 10,000 years of our ancestry, pretty well, we're farming. It has been major part of um what has shaped our genetics and our epigenetic expression. Whereas if you look at a lot of uh First Nations peoples, um

21:39
A lot of those populations were either hunter gatherers or had to manage with very low calorie diets. And it's only been one or two generations where there has been a ready food supply. So their genes are set up for famine feast situations. And if you give them constant feast and no famine,

22:10
then it's no wonder their metabolic health gets messed up. But the guidelines generally are written for people with a farming ancestry. So they're not going to work. We need to really revamp our guidelines overall to take all of this into account.

22:37
You know, we talk about cultural safety in healthcare, um but it's about embracing and working with the cultural differences. We have to do that one step further with our food guidelines and our public health guidelines to be able to work with our different people out there to manage and account for different healthcare conditions, different

23:05
ethnic makeups, different epigenetic expressions, different socioeconomic uh issues and backgrounds. I a lot of people don't know how to cook. So when you present them with traditional vegetables, they haven't got the time, the space, the preparation issues. Confidence, no confidence? Yeah, no confidence, no money, time poor. They may not have the um

23:35
equipment in their kitchens to be able to do it.

23:39
I was reading about Karaka berries, highly poisonous to dogs. But when you treat them properly, they are a highly nutritious, not necessarily subsistence though. They're kind of like grain and wheat was for the pre-industrial age Europeans. It gets you through the winter.

24:10
But to treat them properly, you've got to things like soak them in running water for a week. And then you can start boiling them and then you can start drying them and then you can grind them. Otherwise they're toxic. But this is what mean, the amount of preparation that was required for some food. So it's not surprising that we've moved towards processed food because somebody else has done the preparation for us. But flour goes off very quickly once it's ground. So of course,

24:38
you're going to have additives added into it to make sure it doesn't um go off as quickly, that you've got better storage. You know, what I find interesting, Catherine, and people will be listening to this and they'll be like, well, hang on, the Heart Foundation has separate guidelines for specific communities. And I'm not sure if you've ever seen these. I have. OK. However, the guidelines are, is that they add in cultural foods like coconut, specifically in the guidelines, or

25:07
they focus a bit more on seafood. So they think about food supply, but it's still in the context of a Western diet, essentially. But it shouldn't be. It should be in the context of a traditional diet. I saw some studies that were done out of Australia. Now, the Australian Aboriginals, they've got a...

25:35
They do not prioritize the written language in any shape or form. most of the histories are oral, but they've got uh a 60,000 year heritage of being in Australia and being a vibrant thriving community until the Europeans arrived. Now they've worked out that if they can get the Australian aboriginals who've got health challenges, basically back to living a traditional lifestyle.

26:05
not just looking at traditional foods and adding them into the Western lifestyle, but I mean the traditional lifestyle with a lot of walking, a lot of going back to heritage. I'm not going to go into any further details. can find it in the paper if you really want me to, but it would be wrong of me to talk about it if I don't fully understand it. But they've shown that if we go back to their traditional lifestyles, they can reverse a lot of the problems. So it's not just about the food.

26:36
It's not just about adding in coconut into a sugar heavy or a starch heavy lifestyle. A number of years ago, my husband and I went 10 days sea-hiking around Tonga. We were on the remote islands of the Ha'apai group. While we carried a lot of our food with us, our guide also did a lot of foraging.

27:06
Um, there wasn't that much starch involved in our diet. Yeah. But you know, that was the great day when, um, I mean, I'd try to line out in the kayak and bring some fish in. Um, there was a great day that he, um, uh, Ipali went and found the coconuts and made us a coconut curry fish stew that night for dinner.

27:35
But it was done from fresh coconuts that he grabbed off the tree. Now the amount of work he had to do to get the coconut cream, it was several hours worth for five people. So it's not just about putting the coconut back in. You've probably also got to do the traditional processing of the coconut, not just open the can. So we've got to... But also he was...

28:06
outside doing this in the sunshine with the wind, working with his hands, concentrating on the task in hand. It was kind of active meditation in some respects. It also probably got him away from, you guys go off, your own thing. Yeah, give me some space. It's safety guidelines. Leave me alone in peace for a bit. I wonder if part of it is that

28:33
There is that obvious recognition that things will never go back to the way they were. So how do we um bring that, I guess, bring the best, bring what we can into some guidelines now that are actually appropriate? think, and also I will say that it's been several years now, like at least 20 years of

28:58
of more research emerging around insulin, around carbohydrate load, around processed diet, yet our guidelines haven't actually shifted substantially? No, they haven't. And I think part of that is because it comes back to a reductionist approach. Now, if you think back to, I don't know what it was like for you growing up and your parents' situation, all the rest of it.

29:26
My parents, I mean, I'm British born. My parents were both born in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Like their boomers, they were born in the late 1940s. ah My parents' siblings were born, well, one of my aunts was born before World War II. They lived in London and Southampton. Their areas were bombed. They had to live through rationing.

29:56
As children, they lived through rationing. Everybody had their own vegetable gardens where they could. It's the British allotment thing. So they weren't just growing food so that they had food for survival because that was needed. But because they had their vegetable gardens, they were also outside, hands in the dirt. And it was also food.

30:25
garden to table. um And uh so you've got that connection to the land. You've got the connection from where your food has come from. You've got that we don't waste things unless we absolutely have to. A lot of people kept chickens if they could, eggs. So again, you knew where your food came from. As when I was a child, my parents had a vegetable garden still.

30:58
But it kind of got out of favor because it was easy to buy from the supermarket and the quality was better. There was a lot less work. You don't have to weed it when there was so many other things going on. So what's happened, I think, is also the boomers, that generation, they'd lived under so much deprivation from World War II.

31:26
poverty, the bombing, the rations, the lack of activities. um They wanted the best they could for their children. They wanted their children to experience what they didn't get. And so because we were being ferried off to brownies, to music lessons, to sports activities, to whatever,

31:49
parents didn't have enough time to look after the vegetable garden. It was easy to get the supermarket, especially when small town I was in, you got this brand new supermarket. It was bright, shiny, fruit and vegetables were great. It was convenient. And that, I think, has been a slow creep coming in through. So it's not just about the food. It's about the, we outside with our hands in the dirt, knowing where our food has come from?

32:18
getting the sun, getting the rain. We're out there experiencing the weathers. We're seeing where our food is coming from. We are aware of wastage. We're aware of compost. We don't do that anymore. I mean, honestly, I tried. Okay. I tried having a garden. I raised garden beds. We had plants. But everything grew at once. So I either had nothing or I had a glut. I didn't know what to

32:48
do with it. I tried bottling it. It just did not taste great. oh But I had a huge sense of pride though. The day that I cooked dinner, was fish I caught, kayak fishing that day. had a beautiful piece snapper with vegetables, eggplant, tomatoes, capsicum that had come from my garden. Everything we ate that evening for dinner

33:17
I'd either caught or gathered from the garden. Huge sense of pride and accomplishment, but for me it was just not sustainable. And I think we'll find that is for many of us, it is about managing the glut, it's about not knowing how to bottle. And as I said, I tried canning, tomato sauce, I suppose it went okay. And if we had nothing else, it was edible. But you know, it wasn't.

33:45
Catherine, you know, you talked about, um before about different cultures having almost a thrifty genotype. So they had that feast and that famine. Yes, yes, yes. And I don't know if you know, and it's fine if you don't, but you know, throughout the world war, you know, and babies being born post-world war and post-restriction, is there a more of a metabolic shift epigenetically with the children? Oh, God. Okay, you've opened a of worms there. So I think we've got two things going on.

34:14
One, if you want to look at the thrifty gene, you want to look at Richard Johnson University of Denver, Colorado. Is it Colorado and Denver? I get that muddled up. But Rick Johnson's work on uric acid and the thrifty gene for the hunter-gatherers is, I think that's gold. Yeah, we chatted about that. Because uric acid is needed to help lay down fat in the liver. You want enough fat in the liver to be able to survive a famine moment. Now, as I

34:43
said to my students many a time, what's special about the Pacific islands and famines? Well, a cyclone generally comes through every couple of years. And when that happens, the fish leave the reef, the coconuts are off the tree, and your vegetable garden gets destroyed. It takes about three months before you've got a reliable food back again. If you've got enough fat in your liver, you can survive three months on minimal rations until you've got it back again. um

35:13
But that same uric acid builds up when you've got access to a large amount of fructose, be it from healthy fruits or unhealthy soft drinks or just an overabundance of glucose-based starches, because in the body, glucose will be converted to fructose. We didn't know that until a few years ago. But all of that fructose gets built up into uric acid.

35:39
Now we've been blaming purines for excessive uric acid and gout for years, but fructose is probably a bigger driver of uric acid. And purines are an animal and meat-based... Purines generally come from... It's not just animal. Purines actually come from a breakdown of DNA. So cells that have got a lot of DNA in them, you'll get a lot of purines out of them. So em leggings.

36:08
Yeast is a perfect example. Yeast, single-celled organism. It's got a lot of DNA in each cell. So if you eat a lot of yeast, fermented foods, especially salamis and stuff, a lot of purines. Eggs, Minimal DNA, because the whole point of the egg is to make a new chicken. So egg whites, a lot of protein, but there's no DNA. Minimal purines.

36:38
Right? that's why fermented foods are a problem for a lot of people. But Rick was saying that if most people with gout cut out beer, yeast, fermented, and soft drinks or anything that's got a high amount of fructose in it, then they probably manage their gout quite well. I could go back to eating judicious amounts.

37:08
of chymoana. mean, one of the reasons why shellfish are quite a problem for gout is you've got quite a lot of concentrated DNA in those cells because they're nutrient dense. There's a lot of DNA in those things, which is why, as I said, legumes, PE protein can be quite a problem for people with gout because again, it's about the DNA content. Now you've got, so that is one side of your thrifty gene issue.

37:37
Yet it's possible post-World War II that you've got uh this thrifty gene, famine-fleece metabolic mess coming through. But Europeans don't have that same thrifty gene to the same degree that most hunter-gatherer phenotypes do, which is a lot of our First Nations peoples. What happened though with the world wars, but also colonialism?

38:07
everywhere around the world is you've got trauma going on. And the work that's happening with trauma and intergenerational trauma, you've got an change to cortisol levels. And it's how the body manages stress differently. And when the body doesn't do well with stress, it causes insulin resistance. Now, the reason for that is

38:36
I I'm going to ask you, I can't remember if I asked you the other week, but what's the main job of insulin within the body? What's your opinion? Yeah, it's to deliver nutrients. To deliver nutrients? Is what I'm going to say. And so remind me what it is. Deliver in store. Okay. Yes. nutrients is probably better than deliver. I mean, most of my students will say main job of insulin is to get glucose into cells. No, it's not.

39:05
Okay, on that level is to get glucose out of the bloodstream in a hurry because uh insulin in the bloodstream clogs everything up. then insulin is actually a major communicator around the body. Every cell in the body has got insulin receptors on it, whether or not it needs insulin to uptake glucose. Every cell in the body will uptake glucose without insulin.

39:32
but every cell in the body's got insulin receptors, whether or not it has to do with glucose management. Because insulin is a major signaling hormone and it is a major conductor of growth and repair. Now, if you are majorly stressed, again, I'm gonna take you back 1,000 years. What would cause major stress

40:01
in somebody a thousand years ago. Oh, like, I don't know if this was a thousand years ago, but. We can go back 500 or 300 years ago. like war, like war would, I was going to say run for your life or fight for your life. don't know if that Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, if you think about what people died from mostly 200 years ago, starvation, injury, infection, that is what the bulk of people died from.

40:30
200 years ago, some reference will say 150 years ago, basically, yeah, 150, 200 years ago, people died from starvation, infection, and injury. Insulin helped protect against those three things. Now we're very familiar with the concept of starvation, insulin resistance, body wall of on fat. Let's make sure we've delivered the glucose to the brain for rebuilding.

41:00
and the bits of the body that need it for energy that you can't get from fat. So we've preserved the glucose to places that need it. But when it comes to infection and injury, insulin causes vasoconstriction. Insulin encourages blood to clot, data platelets to clump. So if you are running from your life in war, risk of injury

41:30
that cortisol caused the insulin to increase, your body would start preparing you for imminent death, sex respect, or to help protect you against bleeding to death by causing vasoconstriction. Or restricting uh glucose from bits of the body that don't need it immediately, but let's send it to bits of the body that are gonna take us out of danger. But.

41:56
in those and it's the same for infection, modulating inflammation, modulating immune. And then once the damage was done, let's modulate growth and repair. Let's sequester and store nutrients when we've got them in a time of plenty, so that when we desperately need them for growth and repair, whether it's growing a fetus, growth spurt and puberty or repair after illness or injury,

42:26
We need to the nutrients around so we can survive and repair. Stress influences those responses, right? Because the cortisol goes up with injury, threat of injury, infection, maybe even threat of infection. But when you think about war, colonialism, the amount of trauma it caused,

42:55
The body honestly doesn't know the difference between the threat of war, being chased by a tiger, desperately needing to run down that um deer so you can have some food because everybody's starving. The body can't tell the difference between that and the trauma associated with colonialism. The stress of sitting in traffic, road rage,

43:25
the stresses that come with living in a concrete gray jungle. The stresses that come with being, I don't know, forced to sit in a school or a workplace cubicle with teachers who don't understand you or bosses that just dump on you. And you have to be them and it's stressful. The body doesn't know the difference. So the cortisol is building up.

43:53
and causing the changes in insulin resistance, insulin response, because it's trying to respond to imminent bleeding, risks that are not going to occur. But the difference was, is one of the big differences is that 200 years ago, we could rest and relax after a threatened period, you got to a place of safety.

44:20
Okay, sure, it might take a few months. You know, thinking about winter and the stresses that come with winter. But there was always the opportunity. It's built into us that we need after a period of threat. We also need that period of recovery to let our systems come back into balance. So a little bit of stress is actually quite good for us. Now we get growth resilience, but the problem is with modern life.

44:49
is we're usually getting the threats and the stresses, but we're not building in the recovery to let our bodies get back into balance. And so the threats all start building up. The insulin resistance gets worse and worse and worse. And we don't know what it is, but at some point there seems to be a tipping point where our bodies, no matter what you do for them, cannot respond healthily in a reasonable timeframe. We don't know what time frame they...

45:17
they need? Can they fully recover? um Is there a point where we've gone from an elastic response to a plastic response and we'll never get back to a fully healthy process? We don't know these things. But what we do know is stress, which can include intergenerational stress. So when you're saying, you know, what happened to the boomers, you know, post World War II and the evacuees and all the rest of it?

45:48
Well, I suspect many of them were traumatized and passed that down to the next generation. Doesn't matter, was World War II, colonialism, whatever the trauma was, and there were so many of them, refugees these days living through um varying wars, but also the traumas associated with COVID, lockdowns.

46:17
lost their jobs, loss of identities in those times. It would be wrong to judge somebody else's trauma and say that wasn't traumatic, that's wrong. But we are living in a time of we've got all of these increased stresses and we're not doing enough to balance it. And also what people are doing are going to food and alcohol as a self-soothe.

46:47
not just food and alcohol, cell phones, screen times, um risky behaviors. There's nothing wrong with bit of, know, risky behaviors is um a catch-all term. And it could mean anything from really pushing your luck in the mountain bike park to picking fights with people, to burnouts and risky driving behaviors, ah

47:16
uh There's a whole gamut of what I've put under risk behaviors, but it's about putting yourself deliberately under a high amount of stress because the reward that people get out of it or the noradrenaline, your body's going, I'm being threatened, I'm being threatened, I'm being threatened. You give it a real threat and your body goes, yep, told you I was being threatened.

47:44
it makes the things feel a bit right. Now, some of that is my theories. I'm not an expert in it, but I've been doing some work in the area and listening to a lot of people. It just feels like it makes sense. But our bodies don't like modern living. And that is causing the increase in insular resistance, inflammation, and who knows what else is doing and causing damage.

48:15
But my big thing is we've got to remove the reductionist approach to health. We've to look at it holistically and it's not just about diet. It's not just about here's your diabetes in this silo, here's your cardiovascular disease in this silo, here's your mental health in this silo. We've got to bring it all back together. Do you see that actually happening anytime soon?

48:38
oh No. Do I see it happening? Actually, yes. You you do see the glimmers of pockets of people working on these things. I will put in the plug for the health coaches that I work with. They are trying to tie it all together. um But it's an uphill battle because not many people recognize this, especially the, well, healthcare system, which is...

49:05
really fair to call it a healthcare system in some respects. It's more about let's try and make people disease-free system, which doesn't necessarily promote health. Our public health system is under siege. It's still working in a reductionist silo approach. I think we've got a long uphill journey to get to, but I think it's going to be one of those things that's one small step at a time.

49:35
Um, 10 years ago, when my thesis was published about hyperenticillinemia, can you think of all the challenges that were happening at the time? Low-carb was demonized by everybody. Tim Noakes' trial was going on. There were a number of prominent outspoken people in the low-carb space who were also being prosecuted by their, um, their health competency, uh, regulate regulatory bodies.

50:05
and being sentient and all the rest of it. Now low carb is being recognized as a viable system. It's only been 10 years. It's been a long, hard 10 years, but it's been 10 years. We've now got the high health coaches going. We're recognizing that it has to be a holistic approach and not just with diet or healthcare. The whole gamut has to work together. um

50:33
know, and now with the advent of AI, things are just moving so much faster and faster. I think the next 10 years is going to be really exciting. I'm really excited that I'm to be working with it. So I don't know what the future brings. um But I think it will go forward. But we've got a lot of baggage that we're holding with us that we've got to manage.

51:02
moving forward. So we've got to look after the people that the systems have inadvertently made worse. Yeah, there was a study done on cats and genes and it took about four generations to make them really bad. It took about four generations to correct what's going on. So we've got four generations of work here to do now. You know, if you think it's been 40, 80 years, basically, it's four generations.

51:32
We've got four generations in front of us. We can only move forward from here. Catherine, you've given us so much to think about. Thank you so much for that. I really love it. And particularly that sort of end message of it's not all doom and gloom. There is definitely hope, and more than hope, but based on legitimate reasons why we can actually, you know. It's gonna be a lot of hard work and effort, but I think we can get there. Definitely, there is hope. Yeah.

52:01
Yeah. And that's all we can hope for. Yeah. So we can hope for at this point. 100%. So remind people where they can find out more about you and your work. I don't have a big social media presence at the moment. Other people like you do it for me. But if anybody wants to get a hold of me to discuss anything more, have further conversations, I can be found at AUT. My email address, you can just Google me at KatherineCrotts at

52:31
AUT in Auckland, New Zealand and you will find my profile there. I love it. Catherine, thank you so much for your time this morning. You're very welcome, Miki, anytime.

52:53
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed that. I loved chatting to Catherine. She has such a wealth of information, such a geek, which as I am as well, and I can't wait to have her on again to dive more into these metabolic issues because she really is an expert. Next week on the podcast, I speak to my good friend Holly Nicholson about strength for over 40 year olds. Much more about that, but we have a great conversation. Until then though, you can catch me over on X.

53:21
threads, instagram @mikkiwilliden, facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition, or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and book a one-on-one call with me. All right team, you have a great week. See you later.