insulin
Insulin and insulin resistanceEach time we eat, insulin is released into the bloodstream. This vital hormone, secreted by special cells in the pancreas, encourages our tissues - our muscles in particular - to gobble up the glucose surging through the bloodstream after we eat a meal.
That’s good news, because glucose hanging around in the blood is dangerous stuff. It can stick to proteins and destroy their ability to do their job. Kidney damage, blindness, and amputations may result.
But insulin has many other vital roles. After a meal, insulin stops the liver from releasing any fat, a potential metabolic fuel, into the blood. Why after a meal? It turns out that just like glucose, these fats, released as triglycerides, are dangerous if they hang about in the blood too long.
In some organisms, insulin plays the role of controlling their lifespan. What is the purpose of insulin in humans? If you ask your physician, they will say that the role of insulin is to lower blood sugar and you must learn right now, that is one of insulin’s many roles.
Insulin, sugar, and glycogen
When your body notices that the sugar level is elevated, it is a sign that you have more sugar than you need right now, your body is not burning it and therefore it is accumulating in your blood. So insulin is released to take that sugar and store it. How does it store it? Glycogen? Your body stores very little glycogen at any one time. All the glycogen stored in your liver and muscles would not last you through 1 active day. Once you have filled up your glycogen stores, that sugar is stored as saturated fat.
So the idea of medical professionals recommending a high complex-carbohydrate, low-saturated-fat diet is absolutely a mistake. A high complex-carbohydrate diet is nothing more than a high-glucose diet, or a high-sugar diet. Your body is just going to store it as saturated fat, and the body makes it into saturated fat quite readily.
Your body’s principal way of getting rid of sugar, because it is toxic, is to burn it. The sugar which your body can’t burn will be rid of by storing it as glycogen, and when those glycogen reserves are full, sugar gets stored as fat. If you eat sugar your body will burn it and you stop burning fat. Another major effect of insulin on fat is it prevents you from burning it. What happens when you are insulin resistant and you have all this insulin floating around all the time? You wake up in the morning with an insulin level of 90.
High levels of insulin cause health problemsHigh levels of insulin cause several problems: one of them is high blood pressure. One of the roles of insulin is to assist the storing of excess nutrients. Insulin plays a role in storing magnesium. But if your cells become resistant to insulin, you can’t store magnesium so you lose it through urination. Intra-cellular magnesium relaxes muscles. What happens when you can’t store magnesium because the cell is resistant? You lose magnesium and your blood vessels constrict. This causes an increase in blood pressure.
Insulin also causes the retention of sodium, which causes fluid retention, which causes high blood pressure and congestive heart failure.
A recent study(1) showed that overweight children with high levels of insulin in their blood are also likely to have high levels of homocysteine, a substance which appears to raise the risk of heart disease, stroke, and birth defects.
Osteoporosis is another potential problem resulting from insulin resistance. Insulin is a master hormone which controls many anabolic hormones such as growth hormone, testosterone, and progesterone. In insulin resistance, the anabolic process is reduced. Bone is built upon the command of such hormones. When these hormones are reduced, the amount of bone building is reduced, and the amount of calcium excreted is increased.
Insulin increases cellular proliferation. How does this affect cancer? It helps it grow. And there are some pretty strong studies(2,3) which show that one of the strongest correlations to breast and colon cancers are levels of insulin.
Insulin resistanceWhen your cells are exposed to insulin at all, they get a little bit more resistant to it. So the pancreas just puts out more insulin. Cells become insulin resistant because they are trying to protect themselves from the toxic effects of high insulin. They down-regulate their receptor activity and number of receptors so that they don’t have to be subjected to all that stimuli all the time.
Different cells respond to insulin differently. Some cells are more resistant than others, as some cells are incapable of becoming very resistant. The liver becomes resistant first, followed by the muscle tissue and lastly the fats. As all these major tissues, become insulin resistant your pancreas is putting out more insulin to compensate. Any time your cell is exposed to insulin it is going to become more insulin resistant. That is inevitable, we cannot stop this process, but the rate we can control.
But the pancreas can’t always keep up that high level of insulin production forever. Once the production of insulin starts slowing down, or the resistance goes up, then blood sugar goes up and the person becomes a diabetic.
“Insulin resistance syndrome” refers to a combination of risk factors for type 2 diabetes, including chronically elevated insulin levels, low HDL (”good”) cholesterol, abdominal obesity and high blood pressure.
Excessive intake of all carbohydrates, especially the high-glycemic type, is the primary culprit in the development of insulin resistance.
Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body no longer responds to insulin. As a result, levels of insulin in the blood become elevated and over time, can raise the risk for kidney failure and blindness, as well as heart disease.
A recent study(4) has found that insulin resistance syndrome, or “syndrome X,” is found in families with a history of early heart disease - a heart attack or blood vessel blockage before age 55 in men and before age 65 in women.
Symptoms of insulin resistance
Here is a list of some of the most common symptoms of people with Insulin Resistance. Many symptoms manifest themselves immediately following a meal of carbohydrates, and others are more or less always present. Keep in mind that these symptoms may also be related to other problems.
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