Name: Peter Attia: What if blaming the obese is blaming the victims?
Uploaded: 2014-07-22T12:00:01.000Z
Duration: 16 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning

to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer

I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh

And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick

The question that was being asked of me was a different one,

which was, did she also need an amputation?

I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman

on that night with the same empathy and compassion

who came to the E.R. three nights earlier

that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer.

In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do

that was actually going to save her life.

I could do anything possible to make her stay

more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket

But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her,

So why was it that, just a few nights later,

as I stood in that same E.R. and determined

that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation,

why did I hold her in such bitter contempt?

You see, unlike the woman the night before,

And we all know that's from eating too much

As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself,

if you just tried caring even a little bit,

you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment

immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific,

and in that world I was actually taught to question everything,

and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards.

Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes

that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma,

I never once questioned the conventional wisdom.

I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events

Three years later, I found out how wrong I was.

Despite exercising three or four hours every single day,

and following the food pyramid to the letter,

I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something

You can think of insulin as this master hormone

that controls what our body does with the foods we eat,

This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo.

Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life.

And insulin resistance, as its name suggests,

is when your cells get increasingly resistant

to the effect of insulin trying to do its job.

can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin.

Now your blood sugar levels start to rise,

and an entire cascade of pathologic events

sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease,

and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier.

With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically,

adding and subtracting things most of you would find

I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less.

I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore.

More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance.

with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away:

How did this happen to me if I was supposedly

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Peter Attia: What if blaming the obese is blaming the victims?

disease

epidemic

effect

diabetes