Hello everyone, and welcome to Dr. Mercola's cellular wisdom, where we peel back the curtain on that mysterious workshop, we call the human body.

I'm Ethan Foster, your perpetual observer of life's quirks. Some say my superpower is patiently waiting to deliver a single dry remark.

And I'm Alara Sky, resident specialist in comedic dismantling and a keen aficionado of all things natural health.

Don't worry, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of cellular chaos.

But I'll also try to make Ethan question every meal he's ever had.

Thanks for that, Alara.

Always comforting to know, I can count on you to shake my dietary confidence.

Now, today's topic is a big one, high blood sugar and type 2 diabetes,

something that apparently overwhelms our body's cellular machinery, like Lucy Ricardo in a chocolate factory. We're talking about a new angle on the chaos called reductive stress. Exactly. For a long time, everyone's pointed to oxidative stress as the main villain, but guess what? There's another shadowy culprit in this whoodunit, reductive stress. It's the quiet

neighbor in the story, the one you never suspected, but who was actually building a secret

tunnel under your house. So, as I understand it, reductive stress is basically an oversupply of these

electron-carrying molecules, right? Think of them like over-enthusiastic volunteers, all

showing up at the same time with no one to direct

them.

One key molecule in that mess is N-A-D-H.

It roams the cell picking up electrons during glucose breakdown.

In normal conditions, N-A-D-H says, Hey, mitochondria, take these electrons off my hands,

and the mitochondria politely oblige.

But if you have way too much sugar,

and thus way too many electrons, NADH gets in line, and soon you've got a traffic jam bigger than a

holiday weekend at the airport. So the electron transport chain becomes like a congested freeway

during rush hour. Everyone's trying to exit at once, and the resulting frustration eventually

...