The Metabolic Link

Join us for a FREE live Q&A with Dr. Salcedo on September 10 at 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET and ask her your questions directly. Register here.

What if the uterus is an end organ, responding to insulin and inflammation the same way the heart, kidneys, and liver do?

Dr. Andréa Salcedo is a board-certified OBGYN (DO, MPH, FACOG) and associate professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine whose research and clinical practice, w...

Today we are doing something we have never done before.

Once a month, members of The Metabolic Initiative get an hour to put their own questions directly to the scientists and clinicians at the forefront of metabolic health. Those sessions stay inside the platform. This one does not.

After Dr. Ben Bikman joined us for episode 100, the questions kept coming. So we invited him back to sit with Dr. Dominic D'Agostino and MHI co-founder ...

Ketogenic and low-carbohydrate diets often focus on a specific carbohydrate target: keep your net carbs under 30 grams. But as registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator Franziska Spritzler demonstrates in this presentation from Metabolic Health Summit, a carbohydrate target is not a therapy. Effective implementation means a full assessment of medical history, medications, labs, food preferences, lifestyle, and the motiva...

Join us for a live Q&A with Dr. Ben Bikman here.

For the 100th episode of The Metabolic Link, Ben Bikman, PhD, professor of cell biology and physiology at Brigham Young University and author of Why We Get Sick, returns for a milestone conversation with co-hosts Dominic D’Agostino, PhD, and Victoria Field. Together, they examine what clinicians are measuring, what conventional approaches may be missing, and how the science ...

What can 21 days of continuous glucose and ketone data, recorded during a 1,000-mile cycling journey, reveal about managing type 1 diabetes on a ketogenic diet?

Dr. Ian Lake is a UK-based primary care physician who has lived with type 1 diabetes for more than 30 years. After two decades of conventional high-carbohydrate management, he adopted a very low-carbohydrate, ketogenic approach and began examining insulin not simply as a glu...

Attend a Live Q&A with Dr. Glandt. Reigster here.

What if the way we treat type 2 diabetes is fundamentally backwards?

Dr. Mariela Glandt is an endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist who spent 15 years practicing conventional medicine before concluding, in her words, that how we treat diabetes “is actually upside down.” As co-founder of OwnaHealth, she focuses on addressing the insulin resistance underlying t...

Fewer than 40% of people with PTSD respond to standard care. For the intrusive symptoms at the core of the disorder, response rates may be lower than 15%. So what options remain for patients who have not responded to existing treatments?

Dr. Keren Doenyas-Barak, director of the PTSD program at the Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research and a faculty member at Tel Aviv University, has treated close to 1,000 civilian and mi...

Dr. Paul Reynolds has spent his career studying what he calls “two heads of the same beast”: inflammation and glycation — two interlocking processes that may help explain why so many chronic diseases are connected, even when they are treated as separate conditions.

Dr. Reynolds is a professor and research scientist at Brigham Young University whose NIH-funded research program studies inflammation, lung biology, gly...

In people with severe depression and cognitive decline, brain glucose metabolism has been shown in some studies to decline measurably. Ketone metabolism, by contrast, appears relatively preserved. That single observation is reshaping how researchers think about psychiatric illness.

In this episode, Dominic D'Agostino sits down with Bret Scher, a cardiologist who pivoted to metabolic psychiatry and now leads clinical education and co...

A gene mutation that reduces ketone production in the fasted state is associated with sudden infant death in modern populations. But in the ancestral context where it evolved alongside an omega-3-rich diet, it may have been part of what kept infants alive.

Dr. Gideon Mailer and Nicola Hale join The Metabolic Link to present their hypothesis that the CPT1A L479 Arctic variant is not anti-ketogenic but pro-metabolic flexibility, conse...

In a 12-week clinical trial at The Ohio State University, every woman with PCOS who completed the intervention experienced a change in her menstrual status. One participant, who had never had a period in her life, began menstruating within a week. Another saw spotting after five years of amenorrhea while taking only a ketone supplement without adopting a ketogenic diet. These are among the earliest controlled findings linking ketog...

A veteran walks into the clinic with a persistent migraine. Four minutes of vagal nerve stimulation later, the migraine is gone. This is not a one-off result. It is what Dr. Michael Hoffman has been observing for over seven years in the VA hospital system, using non-invasive devices he considers severely underutilized.

Dr. Hoffman is a stroke and cognitive-behavioral neurologist who trained at Columbia University, spent 14 y...

You could have elevated levels of contaminants like uranium or arsenic in your drinking water—and not know it. Many of these compounds are colorless, odorless, and undetectable without testing.

Johnny Pujol is a water chemist and the founder of Tap Score, a drinking water testing platform supported by a network of roughly 270 specialized laboratories. His path from electrochemistry research to consumer water testing was driven...

Register for a live Q&A with Dr. Tommy Wood on Wednesday, March 25th.

Decreased glucose uptake in the brain is often considered a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. But Dr. Tommy Wood asks whether part of that metabolic signature may reflect how little cognitive demand we place on the brain.

He sits down with Dr. Dominic D'Agostino for a nuanced conversation on metabolic health and cognitive function.. Dr. Wood is a neuroscientist,...

Get free access to our new Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy ebook here.

Could changing your metabolism reduce alcohol cravings, ease psychiatric symptoms, and even make cancer immunotherapy more effective? The science is pointing to yes, and the mechanisms are fascinating.

In this Journal Club episode, co-hosts Victoria Field, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, and Dr. Angela Poff break down five peer-reviewed papers from their newly released Ketoge...

Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky's VO2 max was once 87.6 ml/kg/min — an elite-level mark few humans have reached. He's competed at three world championships in three different sports. He's also had three cardiac ablation surgeries, bled from his bowels after races, and watched his vision tunnel to a speck crossing a finish line. His story is a master class in where the line falls between peak performance and self-destruction.

Now 63, Tarn...

Roughly 90% of Alzheimer's patients develop neuropsychiatric symptoms including anxiety, persistent fear, and an inability to recognize safety — but little research is being done to investigate why. New data connecting PTSD, trauma, and accelerated brain aging may hold the answer.

Dr. Caesar Hernandez is a behavioral, molecular, and circuit neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Division of Gerontology, Geriatrics &...

What if the sequence we've always assumed—plaque causes arterial stiffness—is actually backwards? Dr. Lily Johnston proposes that impaired nitric oxide signaling may stiffen arteries first, creating the endothelial injury that then promotes plaque formation.

Dr. Lily Johnston is a board-certified vascular surgeon and newly certified obesity medicine physician who bridges the operating room and metabolic medicine. After y...

The term “ultra-processed food” appeared nearly 100 times in the White House’s Make America Healthy Again report. But questions remain about whether the concept is precise enough to guide effective policy.

Dr. David Ludwig—Harvard endocrinologist, obesity researcher, and author of Always Hungry—joins Dr. Dominic D'Agostino to dismantle the ultra-processed food framework from the inside out. Ludwig revea...