An extremely well presented essay
>From another list:
Chuck
Filligree: a positive response from Phillip
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Part 2
What is one of magnesium's major roles?
To relax muscles. Intracellular magnesium relaxes muscles. What happens
when you can't store magnesium because the cell is resistant? You lose
magnesium and your blood vessels constrict, what does that do?
Increases blood pressure, and reduces energy since intracellular magnesium
is required for all energy producing reactions that take place in the cell.
But most importantly, magnesium is also necessary for the action of
insulin. It is also necessary for the manufacture of insulin.
So then you raise your insulin, you lose magnesium, and the cells become
even more insulin resistant. Blood vessels constrict, glucose and insulin
can't get to the tissues, which makes them more insulin resistant, so the
insulin levels go up and you lose more magnesium. This is the vicious cycle
that goes on from before you were born.
Insulin sensitivity is going to start being determined from the moment the
sperm combines with the egg. If your mother, while you were in the womb was
eating a high carbohydrate diet, which is turning into sugar, we have been
able to show that the fetus in animals becomes more insulin resistant.
Worse yet, they are able to use sophisticated measurements, and if that
fetus happens to be a female, they find that the eggs of that fetus are
more insulin resistant. Does that mean it is genetic? No, you can be born
with something and it doesn't mean that it is genetic. Diabetes is not a
genetic disease as such. You can have a genetic predisposition. But it
should be an extremely rare disease.
What else does insulin do?
We mentioned high blood pressure, if your magnesium levels go down you get
high blood pressure. We mentioned that the blood vessels constrict and you
get high blood pressure.
Insulin also causes the retention of sodium, which causes the retention of
fluid, which causes high blood pressure and fluid retention: congestive
heart failure.
One of the strongest stimulants of the sympathetic nervous system is high
levels of insulin.
What does all of this do to the heart? Not very good things.
There was a study done a couple of years ago, a good, down to earth nicely
conducted study that showed that heart attacks are two to three times more
likely to happen after a high carbohydrate meal. They said specifically NOT
after a high fat meal.
Why is that?
Because the immediate effects of raising your blood sugar from a high
carbohydrate meal is to raise insulin and that immediately triggers the
sympathetic nervous system which will cause arterial spasm, constriction of
the arteries. If you take anybody prone to a heart attack and that is when
they are going to get it.
What else does insulin do?
Insulin mediates blood lipids. That patient who had a triglyceride of 2200,
one of the easiest things we can do is lower triglyceride levels. It is so
simple. There was just an article in J.A.M.A. an article and they were
saying that the medical profession doesn't know how to reduce triglycerides
dietarily, that drugs still need to be used.
It is so ridiculous because you will find that it is the easiest thing to
do. They come tumbling down. There is almost a direct correlation between
triglyceride levels and insulin levels. In some people more than others.
The gentleman who had a triglyceride level of 2200 while on all the drugs
only had an insulin level of 14.7.
That is only slightly elevated, but it doesn't take much in some people,
all we had to do was get his insulin level down to 8 initially and then it
went down to six and that got his triglycerides down to under 200.
The way you control blood lipids is by controlling insulin.
We won't go into a lot of detail, but we now know that LDL cholesterol
comes in several fractions, and it is the small, dense LDL that plays the
largest role in initiating plaque. It's the most oxidizable. It is the most
able to actually fit through the small cracks in the endothelium. And
that's the one that insulin actually raises the most. When I say insulin, I
should say insulin resistance. It is insulin resistance that is causing this.
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 listen
to that noxious stimuli all the time. It is like having this loud,
disgusting rap music played and you want to turn the volume down.
You might think of insulin resistance as like sitting in a smelly room and
pretty soon you don't smell it anymore because you get desensitized.
You can think about it, its not that you are not thinking about it anymore.
But if you walk out of the room and come back, the smell is back. You can
get resensitized is what that is telling you. It would be like you are
starting to go deaf and your are telling others to speak up because you
can't hear them, so if I was your pancreas, I would just start talking
louder, and what does that do to your hearing?
You would become deafer. Most cases of deafness, especially in old age is
due to excessive noise exposure. All the noise exposure your ears have been
exposed to, well the hair cells that end up triggering your brain to allow
you to hear eventually get killed. Sometimes it just takes a single
firecracker.
This is the same thing with insulin resistance. What happens is that if
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. I saw a
patient today, her blood sugar was 102 and her insulin was 90! She wasn't
sure if she was fasting or not, but I've seen other patients where their
blood sugar was under 100 and their fasting insulin has been over 90.
That is a fasting insulin. I'm not sure how many people are familiar with
seeing fasting insulins. But if I drank all the glucose I could possibly
drink my insulin would never go above probably 40. So she was extremely
insulin resistant.
What was happening was she was controlling her blood sugar. Statistically
she was not diabetic. She is not even impaired glucose tolerant. Her
glucose is totally normal supposedly. But her cells aren't listening to
insulin, she just has an exceptionally strong pancreas.
Her islet cells that produce insulin are extremely strong and are able to
compensate for that insulin resistance by producing thirty times more
insulin than what my fasting insulin is. And just by mass action her
pancreas is yelling so loud that her cells are able to listen, but they are
not going to listen forever. Her pancreas is not going to be able keep up
that production forever.
Well the usual treatment once she becomes diabetic, which would be
inevitable, once her production of insulin starts slowing down or her
resistance goes up any more, than her blood sugar goes up and she becomes a
diabetic. For many years, decades before that her insulin levels have been
elevated.
They have been elevated for thirty years probably and have never been
checked. That insulin resistance is associated with the hyperinsulinemia
that produces all of the co-called chronic diseases of aging or at least
contributes to them. As far as we know in many venues of science, it is the
main cause of aging in virtually all life.
Insulin is that important.
So controlling insulin sensitivity is extremely important.
How else does insulin affect cardiovascular disease?
We've only just touched upon it. Insulin is a so-called mytogenic hormone.
It stimulates cell proliferation. It stimulates cells to divide. If all of
the cells were to become resistant to insulin we wouldn't have that much of
a problem. The problem is that all of the cells don't become resistant.
Some cells are incapable of becoming very resistant. The liver becomes
resistant first, then the muscle tissue, then the fat. When the liver
becomes resistant, what is the effect of insulin on the liver, it is to
suppress the production of sugar.
The sugar floating around in your body at any one time is the result of two
things, the sugar that you have eaten and how much sugar your liver has
made. When you wake up in the morning it is more of a reflection of how
much sugar your liver has made. If your liver is listening to insulin
properly it won't make much sugar in the middle of the night. If your liver
is resistant, those brakes are lifted and your liver starts making a bunch
of sugar so you wake up with a bunch of sugar.
The next tissue to become resistant is the muscle tissue. What is the
action of insulin in muscles? It allows your muscles to burn sugar for one
thing. So if your muscles become resistant to insulin it can't burn that
sugar that was just manufactured by the liver. So the liver is producing
too much, the muscles can't burn it, and this raises your blood sugar.
Well the fat cells become resistant, but not for a while. It is only after
a while that they become resistant. It takes them longer.
Liver first, muscle second, and then your fat cells.
So for a while your fat cells retain their sensitivity. What is the action
of insulin on your fat cells? To store that fat. It takes sugar and it
stores it as fat. So until your fat cells become resistant you get fat, and
that is what you see. As people become more and more insulin resistant,
they get fat and their weight goes up.
But eventually they plateau. They might plateau at three hundred pounds,
two hundred and twenty pounds, one hundred and fifty pounds, but they will
eventually plateau as the fat cells protect themselves and become insulin
resistant.
As all these major tissues, this massive body becomes resistant, your
liver, muscles and fat, your pancreas is putting out more insulin to
compensate, so you are hyperinsulinemic and you've got insulin floating
around all the time, 90 units, more.
But there are certain tissues that aren't becoming resistant such as your
endothelium, the lining of the arteries do not become resistant very
readily. So all that insulin is effecting the lining of your arteries.
If you drip insulin into the artery of a dog, there was a Dr. Cruz who did
this in the early 70's by accident, he was doing a diabetic experiment and
found out that the femoral artery that the insulin was being dripped into
was almost totally occluded with plaque after about three months.
The contra lateral side was totally clear, just contact of insulin in the
artery caused it to fill up with plaque. That has been known since the
70's, it has been repeated in chickens, in dogs, it is really a well-known
fact. Insulin floating around in the blood causes a plaque build up. They
didn't know why, but we know that insulin causes endothelial proliferation,
that's the first step, it causes a tumor, an endothelial tumor.
Insulin causes the blood to clot too readily.
Insulin causes the conversion of macrophages into foam cells, which are the
cells that accumulate the fatty deposits. Every step of the way, insulin's
got its fingers in it and is causing cardiovascular disease. It fills it
with plaque, it constricts the arteries, it stimulates the sympathetic
nervous system, it increases platelet adhesiveness and coaguability of the
blood.
Any known cause of cardiovascular disease insulin is a part of. It
influences nitric oxide synthase. You produce less nitric oxide in the
endothelium. We know that helps mediate vasodilatation and constriction,
i.e. angina.
I mentioned that insulin increases cellular proliferation, what does that
do to cancer? It increases it. And there are some pretty strong studies
that show that one of the strongest correlations to breast and colon cancer
are with levels of insulin.
Hyperinsulinemia causes the excretion of magnesium in the urine. What other
big mineral does it cause the excretion of? Calcium.
What is the cause of osteoporosis?
There are two major causes, one is a high carbohydrate diet which causes
hyperinsulinemia. People walking around with hyperinsulinemia can take all
the calcium they want by mouth and it's all going to go out in their urine.
Insulin is one of the first hormones that any organism ever developed, and
as I mentioned in genetics, things are built upon what was there before. So
all the other hormones we have in our body were actually built upon
insulin. In other words, insulin controls growth hormone.
How does growth hormone work?
The pituitary produces growth hormone, and then it goes to the liver and
the liver produces what are called IgF 1 thru 4, there are probably more.
What does IgF stand for? Insulin-like growth factor. They are the active
ingredients. Growth hormone has some small effects on its own, but the
major growth factors are the IgF's that then circulate throughout the body.
Why are they called IgF's or insulin like growth factors? Because they have
an almost identical molecular structure to insulin. When I said that
insulin promotes cellular proliferation, it is because it cross reacts with
IgF receptors. So somewhere in the evolutionary tree, IgF's diverged from
insulin. Insulin can work very well all by itself, it doesn't need growth
hormone. Growth hormone can't do anything without insulin.
Thyroid-how does thyroid work?
The thyroid produces mostly T4. T4 goes to the liver and is converted to
T3, mostly there, other tissues too, but mostly in the liver. We are
getting the idea that insulin controls a lot of what goes on in the liver,
and the liver is the primary organ that becomes insulin resistant.
When the liver can no longer listen to insulin, you can't convert T4 to T3
very well. Usually in people who are hyperinsulinemic with a thyroid
hormone that comes back totally normal, it is important to measure their
T3. Their free T3 will just as often as not be low. Get their insulin down
and it comes back up.
Sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, does insulin help
control them? Absolutely, in various ways. Insulin helps control the
manufacture of cholesterol and where do all the sex hormones come from? All
the stearic hormones are originally derived from cholesterol, so that's one
way. Dr Nestler from the University of Virginia who has spent the last
eight years doing multiple studies to show that DHEA levels are directly
correlated with insulin levels, or I should say insulin resistance.
The more insulin resistant you are, the lower your DHEA levels. He firmly
believes this and has a lot of studies to back it up, that the decline in
DHEA is strictly due to the increase in insulin resistance with age. If you
reduce the insulin resistance, the DHEA rises.
And how are these sex hormones carried around the body? Something called
sex hormone binding globulins. The more that is bound, the less free,
active hormone you have. Sex hormone binding globulin is controlled by
what? Insulin. There is not a hormone in the body that insulin doesn't
affect, if not directly control.
Let's talk about osteoporosis.
You take a bunch of calcium. The medical profession just assumes that it
has a homing device and it knows to go into your bone. What happens if you
high levels of insulin and you take a bunch of calcium. Number one, most of
it is just going to go out in your urine. You would be lucky if that were
the case because that part which doesn't does not have the instructions to
go to your bone because the anabolic hormones aren't working.
This is first of all because of insulin, then because of the IGF's from
growth hormone, also testosterone and progesterone, they are all controlled
by insulin and when they are insulin resistant they can't listen to any of
the anabolic hormones. So your body doesn't know how to build tissue
anymore, so some of the calcium may end up in your bone, but a good deal of
it will end up everywhere else.
Metastatic calcifications, including in your arteries.
Diseases are a result of a lack of communication. There are certain things
that your cells need to be healthy. If you learn nothing else today, you
should know that everything is at the cellular and molecular level and we
are nothing but a community of cells. We are a commune of cells. We are a
metropolis of cells that have been given instructions to cooperate.
When you have a large number of cells, like we are, ten trillion or so,
there must be proper communication so that there will be proper division of
labor. You can take most any cell in your body and under the right
conditions you can put it in a petrie dish and it can live all on it's own.
They each have a life of their own.
You can manipulate the genetics of a cell, and we've now made a blood cell
in to a nerve cell. Pretty soon we are going to be able to take any cell we
want and make it into any other cell, because every cell in your body has
the identical genetics, all derived from that egg and that sperm that came
together. Why is one cell different from another? Because they are reading
different parts of the same library.
You can influence which part of that genetic library that every cell reads
by the environment of that cell. The environment of that cell is going to
be very much dictated by, number one, hormones, and what you eat. Eating is
just internalizing the external environment. That is what you have
circulation for, to bring that external environment to each and every one
of those cells that is inside of you.
I hope that by now you have gotten the idea that high insulin resistance is
not very good for you. So now let's talk about what causes insulin
resistance. We have been talking about high carbohydrate diets, let's start
talking about that a little bit more.
This is what causes insulin resistance.
That is definitely what worsens it. Any time your cell is exposed to
insulin it is going to become more insulin resistant. That is inevitable,
we cannot stop that, but the rate we can control. An inevitable sign of
aging is an increase in insulin resistance.
That rate is variable, if you can slow down that rate you can become a
centenarian, and a healthy one. You can slow the rate of aging. Not just
even the rate of disease, but the actual rate of aging itself can be
modulated by insulin. We talked about some of the lower animals and there
is some pretty good evidence that even in humans we still retain the
capacity to control lifespan at least partially. We should be living to be
130, 140 years old routinely.
Let's talk about carbohydrates, what are they? We talk about simple and
complex carbohydrates, that is totally irrelevant, it means absolutely
nothing. Carbohydrates are fiber or non-fiber. Few things in life are as
clear-cut as this. Fiber is good for you, and a non-fiber carb is bad for
you. You can bank on that.
There is not a whole lot of middle ground. If you have a carbohydrate that
is not a fiber it is going to be turned into a sugar, whether it be glucose
or not. It may be fructose and won't necessarily raise your blood glucose,
fructose is worse for you then glucose, so if you just go by blood sugar,
which is just glucose, it doesn't mean that you are not raising your blood
fructose, or your blood galactose which is the other half of lactose.
All of those sugars are as bad or worse for you than glucose. You can't
just go by so-called blood sugar which is just blood glucose, because we
just don't measure blood fructose or blood galactose, but they are all bad
for you. Why are they bad, well number one we know that it provokes insulin
and every time you provoke insulin it exposes yourself to more insulin and
just like walking in a smelly room it is going to become more resistant to
insulin.
So every time you have a surge of sugar and you have a surge of insulin,
you get more and more insulin resistant and all of the problems we've
talked about.
What else is bad about sugar?
We know it increases insulin, but even by itself, sugar is bad for you. You
can divide aging into basically two major categories, there is genetic
causes of aging, we know that cells have a limited capacity to divide,
normally we never get there, but the more rapidly you make cells divide,
the more rapidly they age.
One of the effects of insulin is to stimulate cellular proliferation and
division. So we know that it increases the rate of aging of a cell
population just by that, that is another whole discussion. Let's go to the
other half. Our cells accumulate damage with age we cannot help that.
When I say aging, we really are talking about something called senescence,
or the damage associated with aging, but the common usage is the word
aging. I cannot prevent you from being a day older tomorrow, that is aging,
tomorrow you will be a day older than today, and that we cannot do anything
about. When we talk about aging we normally think about the damage that is
associated with that day.
We have accumulated more damage during that day, that is called senescence.
What causes that damage? There is often an example of test tubes in a
laboratory. You don't think of test tubes as aging, yet if you mark test
tubes with a little red dot and counted the number of test tubes there were
at the end of the year with a little red dot left, there would hardly be
any, why, because they have encountered damage. They've broken, so even
though there is not aging they do have immortality rates. Aging is an
increase in the rate of mortality.
In humans, the rate of mortality doubles every eight years.
That is really how you gauge the rate of aging. We found in animal studies
that the rate of aging can be largely controlled by insulin. But the damage
that accumulates during that aging is caused by largely by sugar.
The two major causes of accumulated damage are oxygenation, and glycation.
I'm not going to spend my time talking about oxidation. Most of you know
all about that.
What is oxidation?
There are several definitions but we can use a very common one, whenever
oxygen combines with something, it oxidizes. Oxygen is a very poisonous
substance. Throughout most of the history of life on Earth there was no
oxygen. Organisms had to develop very specific mechanisms of dealing with
high levels of oxygen before there could ever be life with oxygen.
So we evolved very quickly, as plants arose and developed a very easy means
of acquiring energy, they could just lay back and catch rays, and they
dealt with that oxygen with the carbon dioxide by spitting it out, they
didn't want it around. So the oxygen in the atmosphere increased. All the
other organisms then had to cope with that toxic oxygen. Many perished if
they didn't have ways of dealing with it.
One of the earliest ways of dealing with all that oxygen was for the cells
to huddle together, so that at least the interior cells wouldn't be exposed
to as much. So, multi-celled organisms arose after oxygen did. Of course,
with that came the need for cellular communication.
So let's talk about glycation.
Everyone knows that oxygen causes damage, but unfortunately, the press has
not been as kind to publicize glycation. Glycation is the same as oxidation
except substitute the word glucose. When you glycate something you combine
it with glucose. Glucose combines with anything else really, it's a very
sticky molecule.
Just take sugar on your fingers. It's very sticky. It sticks specifically
to proteins. So the glycation of proteins is extremely important. If it
sticks around a while it produces what are called advanced glycated end
products.
That acronym is not an accident; it stands for A.G.E.'s. If you can turn
over, or re-manufacture the protein that's good, and it increases the rate
of protein turnover if you are lucky. Glycation damages the protein to the
extent that white blood cells will come around and gobble it up and get rid
of it, so then you have to produce more, putting more of a strain on your
ability to repair and maintain your body.
That is the best alternative; the worst alternative is when those proteins
get glycated that can't turn over very rapidly, like collagen, or like a
protein that makes up nerve tissue. These proteins cannot be gotten rid of,
so the protein accumulates, and the A.G.E.'s accumulate and they continue
to damage.
That includes the collagen that makes up the matrix of your arteries.
A.G.E.'s are so bad that we know that there are receptors for A.G.E.'s,
hundreds of receptors for every macrophage. They are designed to try to get
rid of those A.G.E.'s, but what happens when a macrophage combines with an
A.G.E. product?
It sets up an inflammatory reaction. We know that cardiovascular is an
inflammatory process, any type of inflammation. You eat a diet that
promotes elevated glucose, and you produce increased glycated proteins and
A.G.E.'s, you are increasing your rate of inflammation of any kind. You get
down to the roots, including arthritis, headaches.
When you start putting people on a diet to remedy all of this, my practice
is largely diabetes, so my patients are more concerned with their blood
sugar and their heart, things like that, but it is so common to have them
come back and tell me they used to have horrible headaches and now don't
have them anymore, or that they had a horrible pain in their shoulder, or
terrible Achilles tendonitis that they don't have any more.
The glycated proteins are making the person very pro-inflammatory.
So we age and at least partially we accumulate damage by oxidation, and one
of the most important types of tissues that oxygenate is the fatty
component, the lipid, especially the poly-unsaturated fatty acids, they
turn rancid. And they glycate, and the term for glycation in the food
industry is carmelization.
They use it all the time, that is how you make caramel. So the way we age
is that we turn rancid and we carmelize. It's very true. And that is what
gets most of us. If that doesn't get us, then the genetic causes of aging
will, because every cell in your body has genetic programs to commit
suicide. There are various theories for this, one is that if they didn't,
virtually every cell in your body would eventually turn cancerous.
Whether those so-called applopatic genes developed as a means to prevent
cancer or not is open to speculation but it is a good theory. We know that
all cancer cells have turned off the mechanisms for applotosis, which is
the medical term for chemical suicide. So we know that it plays a role.
Let's get to diet.
Diet really becomes pretty simple. Carbohydrates we started talking about.
You've got fiber and non-fiber and that's real clear-cut. Fiber is good,
non-fiber is bad. Fibrous carbs, like vegetables and broccoli, those are
great. What is a potato? A potato is a big lump of sugar. That's all it is.
You chew a potato, what are you swallowing? Glucose. You may not remember,
but you learned that in eighth grade, but the medical profession still
hasn't learned that.
What is the major salivary enzyme?
Amylase. What is amylase used for? To break down amylose which is just a
tree of glucose molecules. What is a slice of bread? A slice of sugar. Does
it have anything else good about it? Virtually no. Somebody emailed me who
had decided to do a little research. And there are fifty-some essential
nutrients to the human body.
You know you need to breathe oxygen. It gives us life and it kills us. Same
with glucose. Certain tissues require some glucose. We wouldn't be here if
there were no glucose, it gives us life and it kills us. We know that we
have essential amino acids and we have essential fatty acids. They are
essential for life, we better take them in as building blocks or we die. So
what he did is he took all the essential nutrients that are known to man
and plugged it in to this computer data bank and he asked the computer what
are the top ten foods that contain each nutrient that is required by the
human body. Each of the fifty-three or fifty-four, depending on who you
talk to, essential nutrients that there are were plugged in, and did you
know that grains did not come up in the top ten on any one.
What is the minimum daily requirement for carbohydrates?
ZERO.
What is the food pyramid based on? A totally irrelevant nutrient.
Let's go beyond Carbohydrates.
Let's back up even further? Why do we eat? One reason is energy. That's
half of the reason. It is very simple, there are two reasons why we eat,
one is to gather energy. We need to obtain energy. The other essential
reason (Not just for fun! Fun is a good one, but you won't have much fun if
you eat too much) is to replace tissue, to gather up building blocks for
maintenance and repair.
Those are the two essential reasons that we need to eat. We need the
building blocks and we need fuel, not the least of which is to have energy
to obtain those building blocks and then to have energy to fuel those
chemical reactions to use those building blocks.
So what are the building blocks that are needed, proteins and fatty acids.
Not much in the way if carbohydrates. You can get all the carbohydrates you
need from proteins and fats. So the building blocks are covered by proteins
and fats.
What about fuel?
That's the other reason we eat. There are two kinds of fuel that your body
can use with minor exceptions, sugar and fat. We mentioned earlier that the
body is going to store excess energy as fat. Why does the body store it as
fat? Because that is the body's desired fuel. That is the fuel the body
wants to burn and that will sustain you and allow you to live. The body can
store only a little bit of sugar.
In an active day you would die if you had to rely one-hundred percent on
sugar.
Why doesn't your body store more sugar if it is so needed? Sugar was never
meant to be your primary energy source.
Sugar is meant to be your body's turbo charger.
Everybody right here, right now should be burning mostly, almost all fat
with minor exceptions. Your brain will burn sugar, it doesn't have to, it
can do very well, even better by burning by-products of fat metabolism
called ketones. That is what it has to burn when you fast for any length of
time. They have shown that if your brain was really good at burning ketones
from fat that you can get enough sugar that your brain needs actually from
fat; just eating one-hundred percent fat.
You can make a little bit of sugar out of the glycerol molecule of fat.
Take two glycerol molecules and you have a molecule of glucose. Two
triglycerides will give you a molecule of glucose. The brain can actually
exist without a whole lot of sugar, contrary to popular belief. Glucose was
meant to be fuel used if you had to, in an emergency situation, expend and
extreme amount of energy, such as running from a saber tooth tiger.
It is a turbo charger, a very hot burning fuel, if you need fuel over and
above what fat can provide you will dig into your glycogen and burn sugar.
But your primary energy source as we are here right now should be almost
all fat.
But what happens if you eat sugar.
Your body's main way of getting rid of it, because it is toxic, is to burn
it. That which your body can't burn your body will get rid of by storing it
as glycogen and when that gets filled up your body stores it as fat. If you
eat sugar your body will burn it and you stop burning fat.
We talked about a lot of the effects of high insulin. We talked about
insulin causing the formation of saturated fat from sugar. Another major
effect of insulin on fat is it prevents you from burning it. What happens
when you are insulin resistant and you have a bunch of insulin floating
around all the time, you wake up in the morning with an insulin of 90.
How much fat are you going to be burning? Virtually none. What are you
going to burn if not fat? Sugar coming from your muscle. So you have all
this fat that you've accumulated over the years that your body is very
adept at adding to. Every time you have any excess energy you are going to
store it as fat, but if you don't eat, where you would otherwise be able to
burn it, you cannot and you will still burn sugar because that is all your
body is capable of burning anymore.
Where is it going to get the sugar?
Well you don't store much of it in the form of sugar so it will take it
from your muscle. That's your body's major depot of sugar. You just eat up
your muscle tissue. Any time you have excess you store it as fat and any
time you are deficient you burn up your muscle.
Getting back to the macronutrients, fuel, fat is your best fuel by far and
the fuel that your body wants to use. So there are two reasons to eat, you
need to gather the building blocks for maintenance and repair, that's
protein and fat, no carbohydrate needed, and you eat for fuel, without
question, fat is your most efficient fuel and the fuel that your body
desires the most.
So where do carbohydrates come in?
They don't. There is no essential need for carbohydrates. SO why are we all
eating carbohydrates? To keep the rate of aging up, we don't want to pay
social security to everyone.
I didn't say you can't have any carbs, I said fiber is good. Vegetables are
great, I want you to eat vegetables. The practical aspect of it is that you
are going to get carbs, but there is no essential need. The traditional
Eskimo diet for most of the year subsists on almost no vegetables at all,
but they get their vitamins from organ meats and things like eyeball which
are a delicacy, or were.
So, you don't really need it, but sure, vegetables are good for you and you
should eat them. They are part of the diet that I would recommend, and that
is where you'll get your vitamin C. I recommend Vitamin C supplements, I
don't have anything against taking supplements, I use a lot of them.
Fruit is a mixed blessing. You can divide food on a continuum. There are
some foods that I really can't say anything good about since there is no
reason really to recommend them. And the other end of the spectrum are
foods that are totally essential, like omega 3 fatty acids for instance
which most people are very deficient in, and even those have a detriment
because they are highly oxidizable, so you had better have the antioxidant
capacity. So if you are going to supplement with cod liver oil you should
supplement with Vitamin E too or it will actually do you more harm than good.
But most foods fall in the middle somewhere. Things like strawberries, you
are going to get something bad with strawberries, you are going to get a
lot of sugar with strawberries, but you are also going to get a food that
is also the second or third highest in antioxidant potential of any food
known, the first being garlic the second either being strawberries or
blueberries. So, there is something good to be had from it. So I will let
some patients put some strawberries in let's say a protein smoothie in the
morning. But if they are a hard core diabetic, strawberries are out.
It doesn't take much, if you have a type I diabetic who is not producing
any insulin they can tell you what foods do to their blood sugar. It
doesn't take much. What is very surprising to these people once they really
measure is what little carbohydrate it takes to cause your blood sugar to
skyrocket.
One saltine cracker will take the blood sugar to go over 100 and in many
people it will cause the blood sugar to go to 150 for a variety of reasons,
not just the sugar in it.
When you are eating a high carbohydrate diet, when you are born, your
mother, everbody is telling you to eat a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast.
You eat that bowl of cheerios and that turns to sugar, and your sugar goes
up very rapidly and that causes a big rush of insulin and your body all of
a sudden senses a huge amount of sugar being delivered to it at once, of
which it was never used to, in an evolutionary sense.
We only have one hormone that lowers sugar, and that's insulin. Its primary
use was never to lower sugar. We've got a bunch of hormones that raise
sugar, cortisone being one and growth hormone another, and epinephrine, and
glucagon.
Our primary evolutionary problem was to raise blood sugar to give your
brain enough and your nerves enough and primarily red blood cells, which
require glucose. So from an evolutionary sense if something is important we
have redundant mechanisms. The fact that we only have one hormone that
lowers sugar tells us that it was never something important in the past.
So you get this rush of sugar and your body panics, your pancreas panics
and it stores, when it is healthy, insulin in these granules, ready to be
released. It lets these granules out and it pours out a bunch of insulin to
deal with this onslaught of sugar and what does that do?
Well the pancreas generally overcompensates, and it causes your sugar to go
down, and just as I mentioned, you have got a bunch of hormones then to
raise your blood sugar, they are then released, including cortisone. The
biggest stress on your body is eating a big glucose load.
Then Epinephrine is released too, so it makes your nervous and it also
stimulates your brain to crave carbohydrates, to seek out some sugar, my
sugar is low. So you are craving carbohydrates, so you eat another bowl of
cheerios, or a big piece of fruit, you eat something else so that after
your sugar goes low, and with the hormone release, and with the sugar
cravings and carbohydrate craving your sugars go way up again which causes
your pancreas to release more insulin and then it goes way down.
Now you are in to this sinusoidal wave of blood sugar, which causes insulin
resistance. Your body can't stand that for very long. So you are constantly
putting out cortisone.
We can talk about insulin resistance.
We hear a lot about insulin resistance, but stop and think a little bit, do
you think our cells only become resistant to insulin? The more hormones
your cells are exposed to, the more resistant they will become to almost
any hormone. Certain cells more than others, so there is a discrepancy. The
problem with hormone resistance is that there is a dichotomy of resistance,
that all the cells don't become resistant at the same time.
And different hormones affect different cells, and the rate of hormone is
different among different cells and this causes lots of problems with the
feedback mechanisms. We know that one of the major areas of the body that
becomes resistant to many feedback loops is the hypothalamus. The various
interrelationships there I really don't have time to go in to here.
But hypothalamic resistance to feedback signals plays a very important role
in aging and insulin resistance because the hypothalamus has receptors for
insulin too. I mentioned that insulin stimulates sympathetic nervous
system, it does so through the hypothalamus, which is the center of it all.
--
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