Insulin and Its Metabolic Effects, Part 2

[Guest guest]

http://www.mercola.com/2001/jul/14/insulin2.htm

 

Insulin and Its Metabolic Effects

 

 

Part 2 of 4 (Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)

 

By Ron Rosedale, M.D.

 

Presented at Designs for Health Institute's BoulderFest August 1999 Seminar

 

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.

 

 

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