Subscribe to Dr. Greger’s free nutrition newsletter at and get a free excerpt from his latest NYT Bestseller HOW NOT TO DIE. (All proceeds Dr. Greger receives from his books, DVDs, and speaking go to charity).
DESCRIPTION: Prediabetes and type 2 diabetes are caused by a drop in insulin sensitivity blamed on “intramyocellular lipid,” the buildup of fat inside our muscle cells.
DOCTOR’S NOTE:
If this video sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a redux of a video that I put out last year. But, it lacked this fancy new animation, courtesy of Scientific Animations: www.scientificanimations.com. They contacted me, and graciously offered to donate an animation to us—I love it! If there is anyone else out there who would like to kindly offer their services to help us better help others, we’d love to see it.
This was the first of a three-part video series on the cause of type 2 diabetes, so as to better understand dietary interventions to prevent and treat the epidemic. The follow-up videos are The Spillover Effect Obesity to Diabetes ( , in which I talk about how that fat can come either from our diet or excess fat stores; and Lipotoxicity: How Saturated Fat Raises Blood Sugar ( where I show how not all fats are equally to blame.
I mentioned low-carb diets in the video. For more on their potential health effects, see videos like Low-Carb Diets and Coronary Blood Flow (
Have a question about this video? Leave it in the comment section at and someone on the NutritionFacts.org team will try to answer it.
Want to get a list of links to all the scientific sources used in this video? Click on Sources Cited at You’ll also find a transcript of the video, my blog and speaking tour schedule, and an easy way to search (by translated language even) through our videos spanning more than 2,000 health topics.
If you’d rather watch these videos on YouTube, subscribe to my YouTube Channel here:
Thanks for watching. I hope you’ll join in the evidence-based nutrition revolution!
-Michael Greger, MD FACLM
• Subscribe:
• Donate:
• HOW NOT TO DIE:
• :
• :
• :
• Google+:
• Podcast:
