Insulin and Its Metabolic Effects, Part 3

[Guest guest]

http://www.mercola.com/2001/jul/14/insulin3.htm

 

Insulin and Its Metabolic Effects

 

 

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

 

By Ron Rosedale, M.D.

 

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

 

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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