Ask YourBody.
How your body actually works — from first principles, in plain language. A growing series that traces the real causes of modern disease, and hands you the means to see them for yourself.
Where would you like to start?
Four ways in, and no wrong door. Pick the one that fits — you can wander between the rooms once you're inside.
Start from the beginning
You don't need to know what a hormone is. Start here and the whole picture builds itself, one plain step at a time.
I've been told I have something
Pick what you — or someone you love — was diagnosed with, and see where it really comes from.
To understand it, not to replace your doctor.
How the body actually works
The switches, the fuels and the roads — the machinery, in the order that makes it click.
I want the evidence
The studies, the century of science behind it, and how risk gets sold. Judge it for yourself.
Many diseases. Often one root.
Much of modern chronic illness — type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, a great deal of heart disease, and more — is treated as a collection of separate, unlucky conditions, each with its own specialist and its own drug. But trace them far enough upstream and they often share a single root. Understand that root, and a surprising amount starts to make sense at once.
That's what this series is for: to show you how the body actually works underneath the diagnoses, in plain language, from the ground up.
First principles.
Received wisdom hands you conclusions — fat is bad, this is chronic, manage it forever. First-principles thinking does something different: it hands you the machine, and lets you reason up from what is actually true about how the body works.
Do that honestly, and something happens. You can't un-see it.
So every piece in this series asks the same four plain questions of a condition and the drugs used against it — the questions a curious person would ask if they refused to just be told:
Ask those four of almost anything, and you have something no authority can hand you and no headline can take away: a way of seeing that works far beyond any single disease.
Many diseases. One fire.
If you read one thing here, read this. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, high blood pressure and more are usually treated as separate illnesses — separate specialists, separate drugs. This piece shows they're often one fire, surfacing in different places: insulin resistance, the most profitable disease nobody is testing for. Every other piece on this site is a room; this one is the house.
Read The Invisible Fire →Putting out the fire.
Once you've seen the fire, the obvious question is: how do you put it out? This is the practical map the whole series builds toward — what to measure, what to change (concretely), what to realistically expect, and how to do it all safely alongside any medication you take. The drugs were always bailing water. This is turning off the tap.
Read Putting Out the Fire →Where to start.
The series is written for anyone curious enough to look. Start at the beginning — the foundation everything else builds on.
It's All Sugar
How everyday food — bread, rice, pasta, potatoes — becomes disease, and why the drugs manage the problem while food can address it. An interactive piece you can play with: flood the bloodstream, watch the doorman break, then turn it off.
Type 2 Diabetes & the Drugs
What metformin, the newer glucose drugs, and the weight-loss injections actually do — which marker each one manages, and what turning off the flood does that none of them can. Includes a drug simulator: apply each medicine and watch what it does to the flood.
More pieces are on the way — each taking the same honest look at a condition and the drugs used to manage it, always aimed at the cause rather than the number.
Ways of seeing, not diseases.
Some pieces here aren't about a condition at all — they hand you a way of reading health claims, or an understanding of the body, that the disease pieces then lean on. Read these and the rest lands deeper.
How Risk Is Sold
"Cuts your risk in half!" — what that actually means. Drag a hundred little figures and watch the same "25%" mean everything or almost nothing, depending on your real risk. The one question that sees through nearly any drug, screening test, or health headline.
Why the Cure Isn't the Product
Root-cause approaches get a fraction of the research money that drugs-for-life get — and it isn't a conspiracy, it's arithmetic. Sit at the investor's desk and watch why a one-shot cure, a pill-for-life, and an un-ownable lifestyle change pull money so differently. The Goldman note, the hepatitis-C curve, the GLP-1 counter-example — all held honestly.
Cholesterol — the most misunderstood molecule
Not sludge in a pipe — one of the most essential molecules your body owns, which it makes on purpose and guards with care. What cholesterol really does, why "good" and "bad" is a cartoon, and the honest question about plaque. The ground you need before anyone talks statins.
Statins — the drug and the fire it never touches
They genuinely help after a heart attack — and the same headline sells them to millions who gain almost nothing. Why they block the cholesterol enzyme at the wrong end while insulin keeps switching it on, what they cost (CoQ10, a real rise in diabetes), and the fire the drug never measures. Honest, and conceded where it's due.
Blood pressure — the salt hormone nobody measures
Insulin is a salt hormone: it tells your kidneys to hold on to sodium, and where salt goes, water and pressure follow. Why so much high blood pressure is quietly metabolic, what the tablets really do, and why cutting carbs can drop your pressure within days — a good problem that needs your doctor. Insulin and aldosterone, two hands on the same rope.
For clinicians and the deeply curious.
Some readers want the whole mechanism — the pathways, the studies, the references, the honest grading of what's established versus what's still emerging. Deeper, fully-referenced companion pieces, written at a clinical level, sit behind the accessible ones.
The Insulin Switch
The master switch of metabolism, and the hormone at the heart of the fire — the one signal that decides whether you store or burn. Why blood sugar can read "normal" for a decade while insulin runs high, unmeasured. Interactive: two gauges, one watched, one not.
Fat as an Endocrine Organ
Body fat isn't dead weight — it's the largest hormone-making organ you have, in constant conversation with the brain, liver and muscles. Leptin and leptin resistance, adiponectin, and the overflow model that explains why slim people get type 2 and some heavy people don't. Interactive: fill the warehouse past your personal fat threshold and watch it spill into the organs.
The Control Room
Body weight isn't a tally of willpower — it's a set-point the brain defends like a thermostat. How the hypothalamus reads the leptin signal, how inflammation jams it and resets the dial higher, and why the body fights to hold a weight it should be releasing. Held honestly on the chicken-and-egg of brain inflammation. Interactive: push below the set-point and feel it fight back.
The Two Fuels
The engine underneath the whole series: glucose and fat — kindling and logs — and the insulin switch between them. Why you can't burn both at once, and how metabolic disease is a body that lost the switch. Interactive: flip the fuel switch, and watch overload light the spark.
The Brain Runs on Fuel
The hub of the brain strand: 2% of your body, a fifth of your energy — and it runs on two fuels, not one. Glucose, ketones, and what happens when brain insulin resistance jams the main line. Interactive: jam the glucose line, then open the ketone line and watch the lights come back.
The Cholesterol Road
The molecule you were taught to fear is the mother of every steroid hormone — cortisol, aldosterone, the sex hormones — plus vitamin D and bile. What cholesterol is actually for. Interactive: tap through the steroidogenic tree.
The Phenylalanine Road
One road from the protein on your plate to the colour of your skin and the neurons of your brain, through a copper enzyme switched on by sunlight — with the Parkinson's link kept honestly as a hypothesis. Interactive: walk the road, step by step.
The Mineral Map
Minerals are the tools the enzymes use — the cofactor layer beneath every pathway, and beneath it, the soil. Interactive: a periodic-tile toolkit, with the contested claims flagged honestly rather than smoothed over.
The Tryptophan Road
The scarcest amino acid branches into serotonin and melatonin — and, far more of it, into the kynurenine pathway and NAD. Inflammation throws the switch. Interactive: drag the fire and watch the "tryptophan steal." Kept honest about the serotonin theory of depression.
The Glutamate Road
The body's busiest molecule — the brain's accelerator and brake, a building block of the master antioxidant, and the fuel of gut and immune cells. Interactive: tap the crossroads. Where two roads meet at the NMDA receptor.
The same root, in named diseases.
If the machinery pieces show how the fire burns, these follow it into specific conditions — each usually filed as its own separate disease, with its own specialist and its own drug, and each, on inspection, the same metabolic root surfacing in a different place. Fully referenced, and honest about where insulin resistance is central and where it's only part of the story.
Fatty Liver (MASLD)
The commonest liver disease on earth, and one of the clearest faces of the fire — a large, distinctive share of the fat made by the liver itself, out of carbohydrate, on insulin's orders. Renamed from NAFLD to MASLD in 2023 to name the metabolic driver. Interactive: open the three taps and fill the liver.
PCOS → PMOS
Named for the ovaries, driven from elsewhere: high insulin raises ovarian androgens and frees them by lowering SHBG — a double hit from one signal. Officially renamed PMOS in 2026 — the metabolic root written into the name. Interactive: drag insulin and watch the double hit multiply.
Gestational Diabetes
Treated as a problem that arrives with pregnancy and leaves with it — but closer to the opposite. Pregnancy is a metabolic stress test, and gestational diabetes is what it reveals: an insulin resistance already present, and a sevenfold warning of the diabetes to come. Interactive: hold the pregnancy’s demand fixed and drag the reserve she brought in.
Menopause & the Metabolic Shift
Why insulin resistance so often arrives at midlife. Not a switch thrown, but a quietly protective hormone withdrawing — the buffer removed from a tendency the diet had been building underneath. The mirror image of PCOS. Interactive: lift the buffer and watch four markers drift together.
Gout
Filed as a disease of rich living — but two of its three levers are pure metabolic physiology: insulin telling the kidney to keep uric acid, and fructose manufacturing it. It ties the blood-pressure and fatty-liver threads into one joint. Interactive: push the levers and cross the crystallisation line.
Your Arteries, Plainly
The gentle front door to heart disease. It throws out the "clogging drain" picture — the disease is in the wall, and a heart attack is a spot bursting, not a pipe blocking. Interactive: grow a spot, then inflame it, and watch which one turns dangerous. No jargon, no alarm.
The Arteries (Heart Disease)
The disease the statins are aimed at, seen from its own side. It holds two true things at once: the cholesterol particle is genuinely causal, and the metabolic fire shapes it and inflames the wall. Interactive: apply a statin and watch the residual risk it leaves behind.
Erectile Dysfunction — the canary
Often the body's earliest visible warning that the blood vessels are in trouble — a canary that sings years before the heart, because the small vessels clog first. Reframed from embarrassment to early signal, with the hopeful part: the same fire-cooling work can improve it. Interactive: the warning window, used or wasted.
Type 3 Diabetes? (the brain)
The one we hold most carefully. Some researchers nickname Alzheimer's "type 3 diabetes" — a real idea with real limits. What's settled, what's an open question, and what's an overclaim, including the trial that disappointed. Interactive: sort the claims into their honest tiers.
The Storming Brain
The firmest ground in the brain strand: a century of using a ketone-based diet to quiet drug-resistant epilepsy — proof that changing the brain's fuel changes how it fires, no insulin resistance required. The honest anchor the frontier is roped to. Interactive: tip the brain into a storm, then calm it with ketones.
Metabolic Psychiatry
The frontier, and the most carefully-held chapter on the site. Two pillars at two evidence levels: mood & serious mental illness (a deep but unproven hypothesis, with a 20-year paper trail) and reward & addiction (firmer, RCT-backed). Carries the strongest medication-safety line here. Interactive: sort the claims into their honest tiers.
Skin Tags — a sign you can see
One of the few places the fire shows on the outside. Insulin is a growth signal, and skin shows growth readily — so skin tags and neck darkening track with the metabolic state beneath. A marker, honestly tiered, not a disease. Interactive: raise the insulin, then try removing the tags.
Cancer & the Fire
The most careful chapter on the site. Cancer is partly a terrain problem, and the metabolic soil — insulin, IGF-1, the inflamed ground — is one of the few parts a person can tend. About risk and prevention, never treatment, with the firmest safety boundary here. Interactive: seed and soil — what you can move, and what you can't.
The Warburg Lineage
The companion to the cancer chapter, and the fun one: a hundred years of cancer as a metabolic problem — from Warburg's 1931 Nobel through overreach and burial to the oncometabolite drugs now on the pharmacy shelf. History, not advice. Interactive: walk the century on a timeline.
The Metabolic Front
The deeper companion to the cancer chapter: the metabolic view of cancer as it stands in mainstream oncology today — the scanner that finds tumours by their sugar appetite, the approved drugs that target a cancer's rogue metabolism, and the growth signal insulin sends. Prevention and terrain only, never treatment. Interactive: a live FDG-PET viewer.
Don't believe me. See for yourself.
Nothing here is asking for your faith. A fact you're told can be un-told by the next expert; a mechanism you genuinely understand — and then watch happen in your own body — is yours for good.
You're carrying the only laboratory that matters.
So read these pieces the way they're meant: not as instructions to obey, but as a machine to understand and then check. Ask your body. It's the one authority that can't lie to you.