What do…
Heart disease
Strokes
Obesity
Diabetes
Alzheimer’s
Clogged arteries
Migraines
Fatty Liver
Metabolic Syndrome
Polycystic ovary syndrome
and Cancer
all have in common? Insulin resistance.
I have been doing a lot of studying lately on the latest info on insulin resistance. It looks like insulin resistance is one of the key causes of most of our modern health problems. We have been hearing about it for some time in relation to metabolic syndrome turning into diabetes, but that is about it. It turns out insulin resistance is a huge problem, much bigger than I realized.
First a little background – what is insulin? Insulin is a hormone your pancreas squirts into your bloodstream that tells the cells in your liver, muscles, and fat to open their doors and let in stuff. The stuff it tries to move out of the blood and into your cells is food you have eaten after your gut has broken it down into sugars, proteins, and fats. So when you eat, your food breaks down, enters your blood stream, and insulin tells your cells to let the food into the cells. Insulin is supposed to only be in your blood for brief times – just a squirt when needed to clear out excess foodstuff in your blood.
Insulin resistance is when your cells stop responding to the messages from insulin because they have had to deal with too much insulin too often. They get tired and stop listening, so the pancreas keeps sending out more and more insulin to get the cells to respond. As insulin goes up your brain decides you need to gain weight.
The whole process also causes a load of inflammatory chemicals to be released from your fat cells and immune cells that gradually inflame the whole body triggering all the diseases mentioned above. Individual differences determine which diseases you will get.
This is a slow process. Insulin resistance is usually taking place for 20 or more years before any symptoms show up. Often the earliest sign is a gradual rise in your blood sugars. But this is still way down the line from when the problem really started.
How do you find out if insulin resistance is destroying your health? The answer is to check your insulin levels with a blood test. The most basic test is a fasting insulin level test. I did this test about a year ago and found my level was 16. At that time I did not even know what a healthy insulin level was. The lab results paper said normal was anything under 25. Since then I have found that a healthy level is under 5. Lab normals are just the average value for everyone that took that test the year before. Their normal that said under 25 is normal shows you how many people taking that test are not in the healthy range.
The more comprehensive test is a glucose challenge insulin test over 5 hours. The doctor that developed this test 30 years ago tested almost 15,000 people and found that almost 75% of people had insulin resistance troubles. That says most people have metabolic inflammation attacking their glands, brain, and body.
Insulin resistance is a modern lifestyle disease. Poor countries that do not have our food abundance or processed foods have almost no insulin resistance. Formerly poor countries like China that now are eating just like us are suddenly exploding with diabetes and degenerative diseases. In their cases the biggest offender is sugar. Sugar is particularly responsible for insulin resistance, but there are lots of other causes that all add together to create this modern epidemic – stress, processed carbohydrates, excess animal proteins, pollution, poisons, excess food consumption, poor sleep, and snacks.
A simple example is a patient I saw recently who had gained 20 pounds for no reason. She said it started after she did a cleansing diet for 2 months that had her eating 6 small meals a day of healthy foods. Insulin spikes up every time we eat even the best of foods. Eating 6 meals a day meant her insulin levels were never able to return to zero. The body is only designed to eat two or three times a day and have a long time between dinner and breakfast to allow the insulin to do its job then return to its resting level of between 0 and 4. Frequent eating prevents this and the constant elevated levels of insulin create the insulin resistance cycle. As
resistance develops the pancreas starts pumping out ever increasing quantities of insulin to overcome the resistance gradually raising insulin levels even more. As insulin levels rise the hypothalamus in your brain starts raising your set point for your body weight… then bam, up your weight goes even if you are eating the exact same number of calories you have always eaten. Plus as a bonus, inflammation levels rise in your body and attack your arteries or brain or joints or most anywhere.
I strongly recommend everyone get his or her fasting insulin levels taken. All it takes is a simple blood draw in the morning before you eat anything. If your doctor won’t order one for you we can order it from the office for only $29. I will talk about what to do if your insulin levels are higher than 5 in the next newsletter.