Dr. Attia delivers a powerful talk that you will eventually hear about.
This is what a huckster in the science industry looks like. His talk sounds like the pitch he must be giving to potential donors to raise money for his institute. I noticed the following:
1. science content of talk is zero. There is no data and, if there is even a testable hypothesis here, it's not clear what it would be. He does make the routine observation that not all obese people have insulin resistance and not all people who have insulin resistance are obese. This fact cannot establish that there is no causality in the relationship between diabetes and insulin resistance, only that the relationship is not one-to-one, which is not what anyone expects in biological systems anyway. Not all smokers get lung cancer, but smoking is indeed one of several possible causes of lung cancer.
2. Instead of science he presents an emotional narrative of moral development of which he himself is the hero. He realizes his moral error in despising the diabetic patient and has progressed beyond that. If only the rest of the world would follow, even if it is not clear that everyone else despises diabetic patients as he did.
3. So, he worked out 3 to 4 hours a day and, nevertheless, ate too much and got fat. It may have been a shock to his self-image, but it hardly seems sufficient to motivate a paradigm shift in medicine.
4. Despite his humblebrag about how he got religion and became a nice guy, he nevertheless seems to look down on the rest of the working scientists in his field. Hence, his call for everyone else to keep an open mind about rejecting their working model of diabetes in favor of his pet theory which lacks any evidence.
5. In any case, improving the metabolic mechanism of diabetes and obesity, while a worthwhile project, is not important for understanding the nature and cause of the obesity epidemic,nor for addressing it. Like all epidemics, what has changed is the environment. In the case of infectious disease it is the presence of bacteria. In the case of the obesity epidemic the environmental change is probably one or more of: increase amount of fat and sugars in the diet, increased advertising, increase in portion size and caloric content of restaurant meals, developments in food engineering resulting in improvements in palatability, subsidies for production of corn and glucose products dervied from it, etc.
The talk is what you get when you start with a business plan rather than genuine, new science.
