# Insulin

Category: Hormones

Insulin is a hormone whose role in blood sugar regulation Peat considered vastly overstated, noting that studies found the insulin molecule itself was responsible for only about 8% of blood sugar disposition, with other factors like potassium in food acting as a major…

10 passages · 3 authors · 2006–2024 · Most-cited: [Ray Peat](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/voices/ray-peat/index.md)

Canonical page: https://bioenergeticoracle.com/concepts/insulin

## Synthesis

**Insulin** is a hormone whose role in blood sugar regulation Peat considered vastly overstated, noting that studies found the insulin molecule itself was responsible for only about **8% of blood sugar disposition**, with other factors like *potassium* in food acting as a major substitute. [Source 2, 3] He argued that if classical diabetes were truly defined by insulin deficiency, measuring blood insulin would be diagnostic, yet it is extremely rare for a doctor to measure insulin before diagnosing diabetes or prescribing insulin therapy. [Source 3] Peat pointed out that mortality from diabetes actually rose after insulin's introduction, from 16.0 per 100,000 in 1920 to 26.4 per 100,000 in 1944, challenging the narrative that the drug simply saved lives. [Source 4]

Peat located the true driver of diabetic hyperglycemia not in sugar itself, but in the **Randall effect**, where elevated *free fatty acids* block the ability of cells to oxidize glucose. [Source 1] He explained that estrogen shifts the organism toward fat oxidation, and by stimulating growth hormone—which antagonizes insulin and increases free fatty acids—it creates the very lipid-rich blood environment associated with diabetes. [Source 1] In the stress-driven form of diabetes common in middle age, Peat described a tissue-specific paradox: the liver becomes resistant to insulin's glucose-disposing action, yet *fat cells become very sensitive to insulin*, turning excess sugar into stored fat while high blood sugar persists. [Source 3] This condition, he maintained, is fundamentally a stress syndrome brought on by hormonal disruptions, where glucocorticoids inhibit sugar metabolism and mobilize fatty acids, leading to cellular calcification, rigid tissues, and mitochondrial damage. [Source 3, 4]

The context of sugar intake dramatically alters insulin's response. Peat contrasted high-starch foods like rice or bread, which provide glucose with very little *potassium* and magnesium and thus create intense demands on the pancreas, with fruit juice where glucose is accompanied by minerals that help dispose of it harmlessly as a complement or substitute for insulin. [Source 5] He also noted that a pure meal of **eggs or meat** is very stressful because it stimulates insulin, which then lowers blood sugar. [Source 8] Dinkov extended this protective framing, citing studies where insulin decreased the expression of the endotoxin receptor and suppressed inflammatory mediators, exerting effects opposite to those of glucocorticoids. [Source 9] Roddy added that insulin clears free fatty acids from the blood and helps convert T4 to T3. [Source 9]

Peat rejected the analogy of insulin as a metabolic brake and glucagon as the gas, a framing Roddy and his co-hosts described as completely off base and physiologically incorrect. [Source 10] Instead, Peat emphasized that **thyroid hormone** is the crucial regulatory factor that activates the oxidative system and makes insulin unnecessary, warming the body much as exercise does and enabling glucose oxidation. [Source 7] He observed a shift in scientific framing over decades, where high insulin was blamed for rapid aging in the late 1990s, only for later research to reframe the failure of good glucose function and insulin response as the essential problem. [Source 6]

## People also ask

### What did Peat believe was the real driver of diabetic high blood sugar?

Peat argued the primary driver was the Randall effect, where elevated free fatty acids block cells from oxidizing glucose, rather than a simple lack of insulin.

### How does the type of food affect insulin's demand on the body?

The corpus describes how high-starch foods like rice or bread create intense pancreatic demands due to a lack of minerals, whereas fruit juice provides potassium and magnesium that help dispose of glucose harmlessly.

### What role did Peat assign to thyroid hormone in relation to insulin?

Peat emphasized that thyroid hormone is the crucial factor that activates the oxidative system, making insulin unnecessary by enabling glucose oxidation and warming the body.

## Related concepts

- [Estradiol](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/estradiol/index.md)
- [Metformin](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/metformin/index.md)
- [Adrenaline](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/adrenaline/index.md)
- [Anemia](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/anemia/index.md)
- [Calcium-to-Phosphorus Ratio](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/calcium-to-phosphorus-ratio/index.md)
- [Cellular respiration](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/concepts/cellular-respiration/index.md)

## Cited passages

Passage numbers match the `[Source N]` markers in the synthesis above.

### Source 1 — #86 - The Estrogen Industry, the magic of progesterone and the importance of thyroid with Dr Ray Peat & Kate Deering

Ray Peat · Interview · Jan 31, 2022

> **Kate Deering:** right so so going into the context of insulin because and i'm just gonna i'm going off on many tangents right now because why not um Obviously, insulin is the hormone that everybody associates with blood sugar and essentially facilitates glucose getting into the cell, which I'm not really sure if that's exactly what it's done. But maybe go into a little detail about... Because insulin is such an important thing, especially when we go into talk about diabetes, it's just totally correlated there. Can you just talk about a little bit about what actually insulin does and what is happening in the diabetic state? Is it really a result of insulin resistance or is there something else going on?
>
> **Ray Peat:** If you isolate the pancreas cells, estrogen is a stimulant to them. Progesterone can stimulate that, but it's more likely to stimulate glucagon. But once you get out in the organism, you have to look at all the other things each of the hormones is doing. And everyone seems to forget that Estrogen shifts you to a fat oxidizing condition in which you have to do something else with any sugar. The estrogen tends to inhibit the oxidation of sugar and favors oxidizing fat, but that leaves the sugar. possibly to be disclosed as stored fat. Under the influence of estrogen, a normal woman, most of the studies say that women have about three times as much growth hormone as men. And one study using a different technique said it's actually 80 times as much as man. And if estrogen is supposed to be anabolic for bone and is associated with huge excesses of growth hormone, which is also supposedly anabolic to bone, then why is it that women have much smaller bones than men do? And one of the functions of growth hormone is to antagonize insulin and to increase free fatty acids. And so estrogen shifting oxidation to lipids away from sugar is also lipolytic, breaking down fat to burn or taking it from your diet to burn. So it's providing fatty acids to be oxidized partly by the super high amount of growth hormone blocking insulin, increasing free fatty acids in the blood. And an excess of free fatty acids is always associated with diabetes. And when you look at estrogen as a very profitable product, you have to forget all of these very big effects. during the development of birth control pills, they were recognizing the tendency of estrogen to produce diabetes. But everything which increases your free fatty acids is the real motor behind insulin, behind diabetes.

### Source 2 — Politics And Science: Diabetes 2000-2001

Ray Peat · Interview · Jul 26, 2013

> **John Barkhausen:** That's an amazing statistic because growing up I thought that the development of insulin saved hundreds of lives.
>
> **Ray Peat:** That's what the pharmaceutical industry always says, even though it often turns out differently. Like the cancer death rate has increased the more cancer therapy they apply, the higher the death rate is. And you can't see any little change in the death rate from increasing mammography or introducing new therapies or whatever. Every time they introduce something, it's saving lives. But when you look at the figures a few years later, it increased the death rate usually.
>
> **John Barkhausen:** So diabetes is a wasting disease.

### Source 3 — Politics And Science: Diabetes 2000-2001

Ray Peat · Interview · Jul 26, 2013

> **John Barkhausen:** Well, I'm just sort of feeling our way through the diabetes issue here.
>
> **Ray Peat:** The insulin itself should be diagnostic of diabetes if diabetes is to be defined as an insulin deficiency or as a reason for taking insulin. But when that was investigated, the insulin wasn't reliably diagnostic and so it's extremely rare for a doctor to actually measure insulin before diagnosing diabetes. If a doctor prescribes thyroid hormone without measuring the amount of thyroid hormone in the body, they lose their license. It happens all the time. But strangely because estrogen and insulin are such profitable big businesses, no one ever bothers measuring your insulin before prescribing insulin, or seldom they measure your actual estrogen before prescribing that. And very often when a kid gets a flu or some other viral infection and is in a stress condition, turning their tissue to glucose to fight the infection. They'll have extremely high blood sugar. Very often these kids get put on insulin for the rest of their life with terrible side effects from taking too much insulin just because they had hyperglycemia without trying to find out why they had such high blood sugar. And Since the popularity of insulin treatment and the growing obesity of the population, a new sort of official sub-definition of diabetes has come into existence, which it bypasses the problem that diabetes was being diagnosed without measuring insulin and so now they have the type of diabetes called insulin independent or the it is basically the same as as something called syndrome X but non insulin dependent diabetes is really among middle-aged people and older, it's the main thing that's called diabetes. And it's strictly a stress syndrome brought on by the hormone disruptions that commonly begin in the 30s and 40s. And this form of diabetes is simply resistance of the tissue to insulin in the sense of disposing of glucose. But the tissue is sensitive to insulin in the sense of turning on fat production.

### Source 4 — Diabetes, scleroderma, oils and hormones

Ray Peat · Article · 2006 · https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/diabetes.shtml

> Patients were seldom well informed of the arguments against the use of insulin, but the justification for the new genetically engineered human insulin is precisely that it avoids immunological damage.
>
> Insulin was introduced into medicine in the 1920s. According to the Britannica Book of the Year for 1947, page 265, "Mortality from diabetes in 1920 in the United States was 16.0 per 100,000, 14,062 deaths, but in 1944, it was 26.4 per 100,000, 34,948 deaths."
>
> One of the theories of the cause of diabetes is that a virus damages the beta cells in the pancreas, and the main argument for that in the 1970s was that the onset of diabetes in children can often be dated to a time shortly after a severe viral infection. It is true that intense sickness and a high fever (and high doses of drugs given to treat the sickness) can cause very high levels of glucose in the blood, and even glucose in the urine, but this is a fairly well recognized consequence of stress.
>
> High doses of cortisone (prednisone, etc.) typically cause elevated glucose levels.
>
> Cushing's syndrome usually involves hyperglycemia. Normally, this is just a functional response to an excess of glucocorticoids, but studies in dogs suggested that intense and/or prolonged stress can damage the insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas. Dogs had half of their pancreas removed, to increase the burden put on the remaining tissue, and after a large dose of cortisone the dogs became (and remained) diabetic.
>
> One of the problems associated with diabetes is the calcification of blood vessels, though now there is more emphasis on fatty degeneration.
>
> Other blood vessel problems include hypertension, and poor circulation in general, leading to gangrene of the feet, impotence, and degeneration of the retina.
>
> In muscles, and probably in other tissues of diabetics, capillaries are more widely spaced, as if the basal oxidative requirement were lower than normal. However, mitochondria contain more respiratory enzymes, as if to partly compensate for the poor delivery of oxygen to the cells.
>
> Osteoporosis or osteopenia is a common complication of diabetes, and seems to be associated with the calcification of soft tissues.
>
> F. Z. Meerson's description of the stress-injured heart is very similar to the general changes that occur in chronic diabetes.

### Source 5 — Politics And Science: Diabetes 2000-2001

Ray Peat · Interview · Jul 26, 2013

> **Ray Peat:** Yeah, aging itself is a wasting disease, and stress, anything that causes stress, produces wasting. But the... If they really wanted to diagnose classical diabetes, they would measure the insulin in the blood. And when people have studied the role of insulin in regulating blood sugar, they have found in one series of studies that the actual insulin molecule was only responsible for about 8% of the blood sugar disposition and other hormones and even just potassium in the food was a major factor in disposing of blood sugar. Potassium works like insulin. And so one of the factors of a high starch diet is that starch tends to be compacted in foods as a storage molecule. And it, by forming a gigantic molecule, can be stuffed somewhere in the cell. And the rest of the cell, with its normal concentration of potassium, can be small in proportion to the high starch content. So when you eat rice, or any of the standard starchy foods, you get very little potassium and magnesium along with your glucose equivalent. And so it's the type of sugar which produces the most intense demands on your pancreas to produce insulin. Where if you drank orange juice, for example, to get exactly the same amount of carbohydrate as in eating rice or bread. Your glucose, for one thing, is only half of the carbohydrate in the case of fruit juice, except for grape juice. That's plain glucose. But orange juice is only half glucose. But this glucose is accompanied by lots of potassium and fair amounts of other minerals that help to dispose of the glucose harmlessly as a substitute for insulin or a complement to insulin. What was your question?

### Source 6 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — July 18, 2022

Ray Peat · Interview · Jul 18, 2022

> **Patrick Timpone:** Interesting. So was he then, it's talked about that he was actually working for some sugar companies at one point and was trying to make the case that sugar was okay?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Mm-hmm.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Wow. And when was he, back in the 70s and 80s?
>
> **Ray Peat:** There has been a, a change in the time drift of answers. So when you see the change over time that it's gotten more from blaming things on sugars to more blaming them on oxidation, that can give you the opinion that it's objective and historical but when I looked at just the issue of immunity what are the things that cause immune system failure or activation The same thing happened in the 1990s with a series of absolute-looking articles, and especially Science magazine, the very top-prestige magazines were published. blaining immunological changes changes in insulin and roundworms had been identified as causing aging by mutating their quality of their diabetes molecules. They're producing too much, too active insulin. And so insulin back in 1998 to 2000, the great stress was suddenly discovering that high insulin or high glucose would cause rapid aging, premature death. But then, just in 20 years, the different way of asking questions. Is diabetes the cause or is it preventing? And it turns out that now the failure of good glucose function, good insulin response is the essential, not the objective, but the preferred, apparently objective answer.

### Source 7 — KMUD - October 15, 2021

Ray Peat · Interview · Oct 17, 2021

> **Ray Peat:** high ramping up and down blood sugar.
>
> **Caller:** You're not doing gluconeogenesis. But when it gets down to our whatever familiar set point,
>
> **Ray Peat:** and I think it's in the 80s,
>
> **Caller:** then the liver begins to do gluconeogenesis to provide sugar for our brain, which, of course, constantly needs it.
>
> **Ray Peat:** I think the crucial... regulatory factors, thyroid hormone that activates the oxidation system and makes the insulin unnecessary.
>
> **Caller:** Okay, all this time I've been taking a thyroid supplement because I'm familiar low in thyroid, so I also take a thyroid supplement. Have you checked your body temperature? Yeah, constantly. When you go around in society these days, you might get your body temperature tested at the dentist's office, and I'm usually a little low, 97-something usually.
>
> **Ray Peat:** You've heard about exercise reducing your need for insulin? Certainly. It's the same thing with thyroid hormone warming you up the same way exercise does. and activating your ability to oxidize glucose, partly just by being warmer.
>
> **Caller:** I hear you. I know. Cold is probably good for us in that way to be a little chilly. How about one more question? What do you think about...

### Source 8 — The Basics Of Pro-Metabolic w/ Dr. Ray Peat

Ray Peat · Interview · Nov 6, 2024 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAzwYYE44r8

> **Ray Peat:** Yeah, a pure meal of eggs or meat is very stressful because it stimulates insulin, which lowers your blood sugar.
>
> **Ashley:** Yeah, that's great. All right, well, thank you so much, Dr. Ray Peat, for your time today. We really appreciate and always enjoy talking with you. And we really look forward to your next newsletter that you are working on right now.
>
> **Ray Peat:** Okay, thank you.
>
> **Ashley:** All right, bye-bye.

### Source 9 — Generative Energy #101: Fasting Promotes Cancer? | Benefits of Insulin | Escaping Learned Helplessness with Georgi Dinkov

Georgi Dinkov · Interview · Jun 5, 2023 · https://open.spotify.com/episode/0F1b0jomsfx5LMqku3DSfg

> **Danny Roddy:** Well, the other thing is people never talk about the positive things about insulin. So it clears the blood, free fatty acids, helps convert T4 to T3.
>
> **Georgi Dinkov:** stimulates the stereogenesis, the stereogenic cascade, the transport of cholesterol into the inner mitochondria where it basically gets cleared and converted to pregnenolone. That is also insulin dependent. And then they, so again, maybe I'm talking. Oh, recent article, basically like, again, 180 degree to the truth. Glucocorticoids were found to be inflammatory and actually promote the expression of the endotoxin receptor. And even the authors of that study said, well, maybe that's why corticoids were found universally to not help in sepsis. We've been giving them to people like for decades and- And actually, these people have worse outcomes. Now we know why. Paradoxically, glucocorticoids, while they may dampen the immediate inflammation, they make it drastically more susceptible and actually more productive for inflammation later on. Now, one study showed increased expression of TLR4. And another study for glucocorticoids showed increased expression of COX and LOX. So, yeah, while you're taking the glucocorticoids, you may be suppressing the production of these endpoint inflammatory mediators, but the moment you stop, your rebound is going to come back with a vengeance. And they found, the second study found, that actually insulin had the exact opposite effects of the glucocorticoids, decreased the expression of the endotoxin receptor, and suppressed the expression of coccyx and lung.

### Source 10 — BV #1: Bryan Johnson’s Longevity Diet, How Stress Affects Our Cells, & Whether Glucagon is Evil

Danny Roddy · Interview · Sep 19, 2024 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tXXW85Sb4o

> **Mike Fave:** I do want to throw in here too, is like throughout the article, he uses like this weird analogy for glucagon and insulin as far as like how they're working or what they're doing. And the, I think part of the problem is that When I'm reading the article, I'm thinking about how he's processing it logically in his mind. And his ability to understand insulin and glucagon is dependent upon the frame or the way that the analogy that he's using. And since the analogy is basically entirely incorrect, not entirely, but to a very large extent incorrect, when he tries to make further extensions about how these things are working, it gets into this weird... Like he makes a lot of weird statements that maybe make sense in the frame, but are not actually physiologically correct. Yeah, there's a lot of backward.
>
> **Jay Feldman:** Sorry, go ahead.
>
> **Mike Fave:** Yeah, I think it's just I think if. from a constructive perspective, I think if his frame was better for the analogy he used, it would be, he would understand it better. But I think that there's a lack of understanding because the analogy that he's trying to paint through here is not consistent with what actually happens. It was more like having the analogy. And then as you were applying J working back from the analogy, instead of having the foundational understanding, and then you creating an analogy off of that foundational understanding.
>
> **Danny Roddy:** Well, not to mention this is completely wrong. Well, that's the whole analogy Mike's talking about.

_Generated 2026-07-20 from the Bioenergetic Oracle corpus._