In 1988, a brilliant Stanford University medical professor and researcher named Gerald Reaven noticed that insulin resistance was almost always at the center of a cluster of conditions that, together, greatly increased the risk for cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, low HDL cholesterol, and high triglycerides. Any of those conditions alone is a risk factor for heart disease, but together—with insulin resistance at the core—they were even more ominous.
