The Progress Report: Smarter Insulin

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is The Progress Report, our weekly adjunct to our interview based, longer podcast, and this is where we take a look at the news that you may have missed.

But not the news that Emma Varvaloucas missed because Emma Varvaloucas misses no good news. No good news shall go unexamined, unseen, unread by the mavens of The Progress Network who are scanning the world for stories not of everything going wrong, but stories of everything that could or might or is in fact going right in the world.

So, On that particular August uplift, what do you have for us this week?

Emma Varvaloucas: I enjoy the August double entendre. Today we have a little bad news with some of our reports, but we’re going to start with one that’s mostly good news. And this is about insulin. scientists have found what they’re calling a holy, not found, they’ve developed it, what’s called, what they’re calling a holy grail.

of insulin. Usually if you have like type 1 diabetes, something where you need to inject insulin on the regular, you have to do that daily, right? Often multiple times a day. They’ve developed a smart insulin that can actually read your glucose levels while it’s inside your body and it only activates if it needs to be activated, which is really cool.

You know, obviously if you have something like that, you only need to inject it once a week. It’s a completely different lifestyle, right? The, bad news portion of that is that it hasn’t gone through trials yet. They have to start human trials and of course, like, we don’t know what may happen in human trials.

there might be side effects. It might not, you know, the promise might not work out. We’ll have to wait and see on that one because it seems very cool.

Zachary Karabell: The new frontier. I mean, insulin’s been one of these things over the years where just incredible strides, right, of diabetes essentially being an uncurable condition, either early onset or, later life.

And Synthetic insulins or, you know, animal based insulins, our ability to supplement body insulin has been a huge deal. And obviously this is a next frontier thereof. I have no idea what the science is, right? Like smart insulin, but it’s obviously a way for triggering your body’s natural monitoring mechanism, but that is in the category of way cool.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is also in the category of way cool. it’s also, oh, this is, where we start the bad news, good news, right? They’re doing a study of Europe. I think it’s around 23 or 25 countries that they, pulled data from for this. And they have found that Europe is warming much faster than the rest of the globe.

So bad news for, those of us, in Europe. And they have also found that something like tens of thousands of people, the average is 50. I mean, but that’s a range that they’re giving. We’re killed last year because of heat and heat waves. So that is not good. however, the good part of this is that figure would have been 80 percent higher they calculate if not for effective adaptation against heat waves.

So What does that mean? That means public health efforts, A. C., just kind of, you know, general changes in individual behavior. But this is the part that I think is also in the way cool category. They found that people’s minimum mortality temperature, i. e. the minimum temperature where you would start to die, has actually risen 2.

7 degrees Celsius, so like almost 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 20 years. This data is for between 2000, 2019. So it’s our literally like our bodies have started to adapt to the heat, and we’re able to withstand heat better in the last 20 years and then we were before.

Zachary Karabell: Wow, that is fascinating. It’s like species adaptation to negative environmental impacts as a You know, a sign, I guess, of some degree of species resilience.

I mean, you know, the negative side is people have often compared people to bugs. Like, we’re the most resilient creature on the planet in the face of both man made and natural catastrophes, and our ability to clearly survive lots of really terrible things, again, some of which are natural, and in terms of climate change, increasingly, some of which are.

a byproduct of our existence, but that adaptive capacity, I mean, I do think we’ve talked about this a lot on the show, that the unfortunate or fortunate, depending on your perspective, reality of a warming planet is that the real claims of human catastrophe are, at least in my view, much less likely to come to pass than humans simply adapting to a bad deck, right?

That we’re, much more likely to deal with. the harms created, then we are likely to either prevent them or be done in by them. And Again, I don’t know whether that’s good news or bad news. I just think it’s a thing and is going to be ever more of a thing, like our ability to adapt to these realities.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, definitely the news that we can naturally adapt as an organism to this is much better news than a diet ever increasing numbers, right? Until the climate is solved. But it was cool for me too, because I’ve felt that living in Greece the last four years, I’ve felt my ability to withstand heat actually change in the last four years.

Sometimes common sense or personal experience aligns with science, sometimes it doesn’t, but in this case I was like, oh, that’s, really a thing, you know, on a species wide level. So, there we go. Final tidbit, good news, bad news again, so, the good news is that it seems like there’s finally a drop, a real fall in opioid use.

overdose deaths in the U. S. We and the newsletter Fix the News, which was formerly Future Crunch, spotted this back in March of 2023 that the numbers looked like they were starting to plateau or maybe dip. Provisional data is now out that came out in July actually from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, and there’s actually like a real dip happening from fall of 2023 onward.

So, of course, we don’t know if that’s the case. It’s going to last, but we will see. the question as to why is also, you know, there are a lot of different reasons. I, wrote about it in this week’s, edition of the newsletter if you want to hear more about that. One of them is that this could simply be the return to the pre pandemic normal, opioid overdose deaths shot up over the pandemic, much like a host of other bad outcomes, right?

Mental health, gun violence, like all of those are returning to normal and just like that these drug overdoses are returning to quote unquote normal. There are other reasons to believe that like some of the advances that we’ve seen in drug treatment development. access to fentanyl, test strips, other things like that.

So a crackdown on a particular Mexican cartel, a crackdown on, you know, China supplying the fentanyls in Mexico. There are other things in the next as well, so that’s all gonna play out, you know, in the next year or so, we’re gonna take another look at the data, but this is really the first encouraging sign that we’ve seen that we’re not just going up and up.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. It would also appear anecdotally that people are becoming. frankly, more cautious about not testing the drugs they consume. I mean, again, I’m sure there’s a demographic divide here and that it’s more likely to be, you know, middle class slash affluent slash urban drug users who are more likely to test before they ingest.

But that too is a factor. and I, as your newsletter pointed out, maybe some degree less of over laced substances with fentanyl, you know, which has always been a perplexing reality, right? I mean, Separate from the morality of all this, there’s no condition in which the dealer of a product has a particular interest in killing its customers.

So the, degree to which there are all these fentanyl deaths from over laced substances was always perplexing. And I, think, you know, again, we, this is a whole other conversation. A lot of that was probably inept production by illegal labs, right? It wasn’t like they were purposely overdosing people because again, that kind of makes no sense, but the extent of it was.

Just a little bit. Baffling and kind of bizarre on the face of it, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that makes more sense when you like actually look at a photo of fentanyl compared to something like heroin. Like, it’s so tiny. Like, the amount that you need to die is so like little, you know, 10 grains of sugar less than that.

It’s minuscule. So I think that’s part of it, right? And we have production facilities, let’s say, is a very generous term. They are not equipped to be handling materials that are so small well, per your point. But the other thing too is that What you’re saying about general awareness is also true. There was also a study, I talk about this in the newsletter that came out recently, that talked about market driven epidemics, which means like epidemics that are driven by companies that know that their products are harmful, but are like, well, we don’t care, we want to make money.

And you know, when forces combine, you know, authoritative voices, professional alarm, all kinds of different things come together. Consumption, you know, peak consumption does pass. I can’t talk. Peak consumption does pass. And in the case of prescriptions for opioids, right, which can lead to addiction, that actually happened in 2011 and since then we’ve seen like a 62 percent drop in opioid, I can’t talk.

We’ve seen a 62 percent drop, we’ve seen a 62 percent drop in opioid prescriptions from doctors. So that might be a factor as well.

Zachary Karabell: Well, there you go. I mean, the good news of the week. Human beings may be able to live without 2. 7 degrees Celsius increase in their body temperature, but your ability to speak under those conditions is clearly compromised.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s the heat and the fact that everyone around me is English second language. Like, I can’t remember. I can’t remember how to pronounce things anymore.

Zachary Karabell: That’s crucial. All right. Well, on that tongue twisting note of, good news on the fentanyl front and ambiguous news on the heat adaptation front, We will leave you to your August days, whether or not this finds you in a 2.

7 degree Celsius increased temperature at the beach or in your apartment or wherever life and heat may find you. We hope you’re having a good August and that you will, apropos this progress report, these weekly progress reports, keep an eye out for stories that are pointing in a better direction or at least a direction at.

is less dyspeptic and less dystopian, two of my favorite words on this dystopian, and I’m going to stick with them. But as you read and listen and notice what’s going on in the world, I guess we all should try to be more tuned in to things that are working, given how tuned in we are instinctually and culturally to things that are not.

So, thank you, Emma, for checking it out, and we’ll be back with you next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary, and thanks to everyone, as always, for listening.