Are You Serious About Living a Longer, Healthier Life?

The potential to realize that dream has never been greater. I am an internist who focuses on type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart artery disease. The more that I studied those conditions, the more fascinating the story became. Several scientific discoveries came together at the same time that completely changed the way that I look at these diseases.

It all began 30 years ago when we learned that opening arteries in patients with stable heart artery disease does not prevent heart attack or sudden death. That is even true in patients who have stable chest pain. When they exercise, they have the same amount of pain after walking the same distance. We also learned that best practice medical treatment does help them. I became very interested in all things related to best medical treatment.

Then another anomaly arose. A study of type 2 diabetes in England showed that metformin treatment lowered the risk of a heart attack by 39% compared with other ways of achieving the same blood sugar. If you think about our current risk factor-based paradigm, that makes no sense. To this day, medical students learn that high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high bad cholesterol cause heart attacks and the key to preventing heart attack is lowering the risk factor to a specific level. For example, the target for blood pressure control is 140/90. It is all about lowering the risk factor. The metformin story does not fit that model. If the achieved sugar level was the same in both groups, why did the patients on metformin do so much better. I became very interested in that topic and my study led to very surprising results.

Lowering the risk factor levels is indeed important, but the method used to lower them is even more important. A protocol based on metformin lowers the sugar, but it lowers the number of heart attacks and deaths even more impressively compared with approaches that focus on just getting the sugar down using any medicine approved for that purpose. In fact, if you focus on only getting the sugar down, more patients die.

In the last several posts, I have worked hard to explain the reasons behind this fact in ways that anyone can understand. If you are serious about living a longer, healthier life, this is medical science that you need to understand. The final common pathways that cause most chronic disease, aging, and premature death are the master metabolic genetic switches mTOR and AMPK. mTOR is the growth/death switch and AMPK is the survival switch. Metformin directly activates the AMPK survival switch and deactivates the mTOR growth/death switch. That is the reason protocols based on metformin dramatically reduce heart attacks and deaths. That is the reason that metformin protects every cell and organ in the body.

Insulin has the opposite effect. It activates the mTOR growth/death switch and deactivates the AMPK survival switch. Insulin has these effects because it is a growth factor in addition to being a hormone. Most hormones are like Goldilocks porridge. They need to be just right. You all know about thyroid hormone. If you don’t have enough, you have no energy and you gain weight. If you have too much, you are in overdrive and that causes the heart to go out of rhythm and it can damage the heart. Insulin is the same way. We need insulin in just the right amount to help us process sugar. But if we are too heavy and eating lots of carbs and sugar, our insulin levels go way up. We become resistant to insulin effects and that drives insulin levels even higher. Those high insulin levels persistently activate mTOR and deactivate AMPK. That causes us to age faster and develop chronic diseases more quickly. A leading scientist on aging said it this way, “Inhibiting insulin signalling extends lifespan and delays age-related disease in species throughout the animal kingdom.”

The point is this. The better you understand this science, the more successful you will be in staying healthier longer. Many of you learned about antioxidants and took Vitamin E. This topic is no different except that metformin and the other drugs in our protocol are antioxidants that work to help you live longer.