Decoding Disease with Dr. Rue

In 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson was dying of Type 1 diabetes. He was desperately thin, and the treatment keeping him alive was a diet so restrictive it amounted to controlled starvation. Then he received an...

You’ve probably heard that your pancreas makes insulin. But what does “makes insulin” actually mean? It starts with something called preproinsulin, a long chain of amino acids that isn’t ready to do the job yet. Inside...

Inside a tiny cell is an even tinier gate, opening and closing as conditions change. Something so small, yet what happens at that gate can influence a much larger response. In this episode, we explore why this...

Glucose begins to rise in your blood. But how does a single cell know that it’s happening? And how does that tiny cell know it’s time to respond? In this episode, we explore one of the body’s most remarkable sensing...

Some of the smallest cells in the body carry some of the biggest responsibilities. A tiny population of cells helps determine how we respond to glucose, use energy, and maintain metabolic balance. In this episode, we...

Most people think of insulin as the hormone that regulates blood sugar. But that is only one part of a much bigger story. Its influence extends far beyond glucose, affecting how the body uses, stores, and responds to...

A tiny signal reaches a cell, and what follows can be enormous. One message can trigger a cascade of activity, amplifying that original signal into a much larger cellular response. In this episode, we explore what this...

A message reaches a cell. But how does that message become action? That transition, from receiving a signal to creating a response, is known as signal transduction. In this episode, we explore what signal transduction...

Your cells are surrounded by messages. Hormones and other signaling molecules are constantly ringing the doorbell, but not every cell answers every signal. So how does a cell know when a message is meant for it? In this...

If hormones travel throughout the body, why doesn't every cell respond to every hormone? Why can the same signal matter deeply to one tissue and seemingly mean nothing to another? These are the kinds of questions that...

How does your body know what it needs to do? How does one organ know what another organ needs? How do trillions of cells coordinate, adapt, respond, and somehow keep the whole system moving together? These are the...

This is a more personal episode. I share a little about why I fell in love with learning about the human body as a whole, not as a collection of isolated systems, symptoms, or diagnoses. The more I learned, the more...

Metabolic health influences far more than energy or weight. It touches nearly every system in the body, shaping how cells communicate, how the immune system responds, how hormones signal, and how the body adapts to...

We often assume that body size tells us something meaningful about health. But weight is only one visible piece of a much larger physiological picture, and many of the most important metabolic patterns are happening...

The body often whispers before it screams. Changes in energy, blood sugar stability, sleep, cravings, concentration, recovery, and how resilient you feel from one day to the next can all be part of a larger pattern...