This newsletter had to wait until after Halloween. I didn’t want to throw shade on the joy of running door to door gathering
small bundles of sugar for mass consumption later. After all, how often do we get people we hardly know to tell us how wonderful we look and reward us just for coming to their front door? We definitely don’t want to rain on that parade.
What does insulin have to do with Halloween joy? Well, insulin is the hormone that tells our cells to open up and suck in
all that sugar. The cells are supposed to take that sugar and convert it into the chemical energy ATP where the cells can manufacture new proteins and other necessary chemicals. For most people, insulin does this every hour of every day for their entire life. When you eat sugar or carbohydrates (which turn into sugar), your body senses how much sugar you ate by how much the sugar levels in your blood rise. The body does not like sugar in the blood very much because sugar molecules hook onto protein molecules and form new molecules that the body cannot use. So the sugar steals important functional proteins from our blood vessels and organs thus making them weaker. This is called glycation and is a chief sign of Type 2 diabetes. So for most people, a little bit of sugar or carbs is good, but a lot is bad. Halloween usually means a lot of sugar.
With Type 2 diabetes, our body reacts to these high levels of insulin when they happen too often. Insulin opens the
cells to the sugar by switching on a protein elevator in the cell membrane called glut4. When switched on by insulin, this elevator transports the sugar from outside the cell to the inside. But if this happens too often because we have been eating too much sugar, the cell gets too full of sugar, which could damage the inside of the cell. To prevent this, the cell turns off the elevators from the inside, so they will no longer respond to the insulin. This is called insulin resistance. This happens a few elevators at a time and gets progressively more shut down over time. The body still wants to get the sugar out of the bloodstream, so it compensates for the shutting down of the elevators by producing more and more insulin. This battle back and forth between insulin levels and insulin resistance is called metabolic disease. It is measured by blood tests showing both high levels of sugar in the blood and high levels of insulin in the blood.
Type 1 Diabetes is the opposite disease. The body can not form insulin anymore. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disea
se in which the patient’s own immune system attacks the pancreas where the insulin is made. It usually comes on in the teen years. No insulin means there is nothing to tell the cells to open up and let sugar into the cells to make the energy to do their jobs. Many cell types can use fats to make energy, but not all types of cells. Some desperately need to use sugar. This inability to get sugar into cells that have to have sugar is a problem that eventually kills the patient. The loss of insulin is a gradual process over many years as the autoimmune attack destroys the pancreas slowly. To compensate for this lack of insulin, type 1 diabetics have to inject insulin into their bodies daily to be able to survive.
eat, they can’t gain any weight. This may sound wonderful, but their cells are starving for food. Plus all the food they eat still gets digested and absorbed into the bloodstream. But now the only way for the sugar and proteins to get out of the bloodstream is to be excreted by the kidneys. This gives them very high blood sugar (with the damage that it causes) and it damages their kidneys to do this while turning their urine sweet. Taking daily injections of insulin can prevent this, but insulin is designed to make us fat. Too often Type 1 diabetics will short their needed insulin injections in order to stay thin and attractive. Unfortunately, this still creates damaging effects on their body from too much sugar in the blood and excess strain on their kidneys.
The common feature of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes is the presence of too much sugar in the bloodstream. Otherwise, the diseases are actually very opposite from each other. It is th
e measurement of the insulin levels that distinguishes between the two diseases. Type 1 will have low to no insulin in the blood while Type 2 will have too much insulin in the blood. The right amount of insulin to have from a fasting blood sample is between 2 to 5 ng/dl. A year ago my fasting insulin was 27. That is way too high, so I started fasting every Monday and Tuesday (fast mimicking). Last week I tested myself again and my insulin level was down to 11. I am working it down, but not quite enough. I have ramped up my efforts now by increasing my fast mimicking to 5 days at a time. My belief is that to get the insulin levels down where I want them I will have to lose a fair bit of weight.
Remember how I described insulin resistance forms in the first place? When the cells have too much nutrition packed inside themselves, they turn off the elevators and ignore th
e insulin. The primary cells that develop insulin resistance are our adipose tissues – our fat cells, and liver cells. The job of fat cells is to store fat for later use as energy during times of food lack. They are able to stretch out quite a bit, like blowing up a balloon. But at a certain point, they get as stretched out as they can go and they will shut down responding to insulin to keep from exploding. They even get angry and spit out inflammatory messengers called cytokines to let the rest of the body know they have had enough. A small percentage of people can simply form new fat cells to fill up, but most people can not do this. These are the people that can get massively obese. I think I am more average. If I get too heavy, I start hurting and feeling bad because of all the inflammation. So I figure I need to empty out much of the stored fat in my fat cells in order to get them to be insulin sensitive again. I need to deflate my balloons.
Evidence for this is seen in Dr. Jason Fung’s work in re
versing Type 2 diabetes with a simple 3-week water fast. This works for about 70% of his patients. Many other researchers have reported great improvements in a patient’s metabolic syndrome just by losing 20 to 30 pounds. I have spent years doing water fasting, so much that I believe I have messed up my microbiome as a result. So now I do fast mimicking instead. With fast mimicking, I eat only fibers and a small amount of fat, no carbohydrates or proteins, and keep the total calories below 600. Rather than doing 3 weeks of fast mimicking, I am doing 5 days at a time followed by 5 days of a keto diet, then back to fast mimicking. I will repeat this 5 or 6 times then retest my fasting insulin levels. Hopefully, this will do the job!
The big picture is that insulin is a hormone that is designed to help us survive when we don’t have a consistent food so
urce. This is how life was for humans throughout most of our history. Famines were common. Winter produced food shortages every year. We needed to store enough food in our body to be able to survive for 2 or 3 months without much to eat. Insulin is designed to make us fat on purpose, so we can survive. Our bodies were never designed for food abundance. Our bodies were especially never designed for chronic food excess, particularly carbohydrates and sugar. In a natural environment, sugar was only available in the fall when the fruit on fruit trees ripened. We were built to turn that excess sugar into fat at that time of the year because shortly after fruit season ended, winter showed up. Other than the rare find of a bee hive full of honey, there is never any sugar available to consume throughout the majority of the year. Put another way, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are designed to make us fat so we can survive the cold, dark, famine months of winter.
I guess what I am saying is that if we are lean and hungry through the winter, spring, and summer months, pu
tting on weight in the fall is a good thing. The problem is most Americans are not lean and hungry 3/4ths of the year the way Mother Nature intended. We eat to excess all year long. We eat and drink sugar all year long. Industry tempts us with hyper-palatable foods with an unnatural combination of both fat and sugar to override our natural instincts to stop eating when we get full. The body can only metabolize either fat or sugar, not both at the same time (called the Randle cycle). So any fat in the presence of sugar is going to be deposited in fat storage as the insulin triggered by the sugar shuts off fat metabolism. Think about it. Nowhere in nature is there a natural food source that has both fat and sugar in it at the same time. Consequently, we never developed the ability to process fat and sugar at the same time. This is something to consider with the holiday season now upon us. If you wish to decrease the impact of holiday foods, don’t eat food that combines both fat and sugar together or in the same meal. Let your sugar binges just be sugar and carbs. Fatty meals like meat and cheese are good with fiber foods like vegetables, but keep them away from starchy foods like potatoes, breads, and sweet desserts. Enjoy each, but enjoy them separately a couple of hours apart – just a thought.
David
Hey, that amazing C15 supplement that is for making your cell membranes stronger/less fragile is now availabl
e in the office! Pick yours up now! Learn more about it in this video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKt3S25Q-as
Ellen
wait till after Halloween since all those webs seem to fit the holiday quite nicely. But she was determined and cleaned them all away.
Some IBS is due to genetics
A recent study of IBS sufferers has shown that for certain
folks the cause is that they do not produce the proper enzymes to break down various carbohydrate foods. This is much like lactose intolerance where the patient is not able to break down lactose. This is mostly seen in IBS patients that have diarrhea as thier main symptom.
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“Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.”
~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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Statistically those who eat a lot of red meat have a higher
incidence of colon cancer. This has been studied for a long time and researchers believe they have found the cause – iron. Red meat has higher levels of iron than white meats, and excess levels of iron are very damaging to the body. Not everyone can get rid of the excess iron in their body.
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“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”
~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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Ozempic type drugs cause muscle loss
The rapid weight loss triggered by drugs like Ozempic are being found to cause almost twice as much muscle loss as slow
er weight loss from typical dieting. 25% to 39% of your weight loss with these drugs is really from lost muscle. This is not a good thing.
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“Life doesn’t require that we be the best, only that we try our best. “
~H. Jackson Brown, Jr.