Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing[1] case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated.

This implies one of the following must be true:

• The science is wrong. Insulin isn't ruining our health.
• Insulin resistance is an extremely difficult problem to solve.
• Civilization is FUBAR.

We know that civilization is FUBAR along many dimensions. Soviet agricultural policy was FUBAR. Maoist agricultural policy was FUBAR. American urban planning is FUBAR. Public education is FUBAR. Dualistic consciousness is FUBAR. I have heard that the Windows Operating System contains advertisements. It is entirely believable that the American metabolism is FUBAR too.

Visiting Japan made this fact impossible for me to ignore. By Japanese standards, Americans are fat. But that under-estimates the scope of the problem, because you can have an unhealthy metabolism without being visibly obese. But when everybody is unhealthy, how do you define "unhealthy"? The obvious reference class to use is hunter-gatherers. I'm not talking about our paleolithic ancestors. There's real-live hunter-gatherers living [...]

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Outline:

(03:43) Nationalism

(12:31) Peasant Diets

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.