As I see it, insulin is a stress hormone. By Ray Peat's definition, a hormone is considered a stress hormone when more of it is produced under stress. The less stress hormone is produced and present, the better it is and the more healthy the body.

It is only produced when the blood sugar level is too high. And the blood sugar level is too high when the body tissues cannot absorb and metabolize sugar fast enough because there is a pathogenic blockage in the chain of reactions involved in mitochondrial respiration involving sugar. It is like when a river floods because the land surrounding the river is unable to take in the water from the river due to a mismanaged ecosystem.

When the body is metabolically healthy, insulin is not needed. When insulin is not present, blood sugar will not convert to fat in the liver.

Lipolysis will naturally occur as well, as it is when there is insulin when lipolysis is inhibited. What this means is that in a healthy metabolic state, the body defaults to allowing both sugar and fat metabolism to simultaneously take place.

That is the natural order. There is nothing wrong with fat metabolism going hand in hand with sugar metabolism. It should be allowed.

But note that this takes nothing away from the idea that healthy mitochondrial metabolism is still highly dependent on using sugar as a substrate, more so than in using fat as a substrate.

It has its very good uses. Like anything that can be overrated, its use can be abused.

If I were just new to bioenergetics, I would mistake it as one of , if not the answer to everything that ails me.

If I see sugar metabolism to be virtuous, and fat metabolism to be vicious, niacinamide would be my savior. I would use it a lot, indulge in it, or even megadose on it. There was a time I saw beta oxidation, or fat metabolism, that way. I have learned a lot since then, that this view is a very slanted view. To which I would describe as ideological. The danger to being ideological is I would draw lines in the sand. And I would not brook any argument in praise of fat oxidation. Niacinamide would be king.

For it inhibits lipolysis. And it is boosts sugar metabolism over fat metabolism. Restricting the availability of fatty acids, furthering the reliance if the body in sugar metabolism.

This is not natural. If we trust the wisdom of our body to determine, with the help of our own judicious intake of macronutrients, how much sugar and how much fat to use to make its energy, we shouldn't need to use an excess of niacinamide to favor sugar over fat metabolism.

For the body isn't stupid when it uses fats for energy. It uses fat for energy because it is conserving sugar stores, reserving these sugar stores for tissues that solely depends on sugar for energy, such as the brain and the red blood cells. If we shut down our use of fat for energy, the more quickly we exhaust our sugar stores, and when that happens, especially when it happens regularly, our body suffers more harm due to the stress of running out of sugar stores, which is more likely to happen when we are deprived of the use of fat stores.

Secondly, if we should effectively inhibit to a crawl lipolysis, by overusing niacinamide, how are we to shed the fat stores? Can we get overweight and obese by overuse of niacinamide? This get worse when we produce a lot of insulin, which causes the liver to convert blood sugar to fat. This would just make us keep on accumulating fat stores, when we keep adding to our fat stores and not reducing it because of overuse of niacinamide. Even without the use of niacinamide in the general population, already we are a nation of overweight and obese and unhealthy people.

I'm afraid if we don't check ourselves in our carte blanche usage of niacinamide, we may not be able to convince the carni guys and the keto guys that our sugar metabolic lifestyle is way better. Because niacinamide usage is not helping to make us metabolically fit. This is not how we would like to be seen as when we call our science bioenergetics.

But it can be too simplistic in giving the listener too much confidence in the metabolic ideas which are all valid. But interviews are never comprehensive ( nor are books) when it sings too much praise to the point of being ideological in character (in this case niacinamide gets overrated (ask me why, I say this because I don't expect it to be asked of me because you can't bear think of niacinamide being overrated) just as vitamin C gets to be) and that it fails to take into account process when all it talks about is taking substances, which these interviews are mostly peppered with (just think about cooking terribly when you have the same ingredients a great chef uses).

Additionally, when one takes to heart all that is learned here, and follows everything to a tee, and ends up not getting desired results, one shouldn't say Gyorgi is wrong, but start to think about what else is going on in his context that confounds. I can think of one thing that would confound.

BTW Haidut mentions this forum and Brad at the end of the video