Coconut Oil and its health benefits
Filipinos are well-known for their youthful appearance and soft, wrinkle-free skin, even though they live in a climate that exposes them to the sun's rays year round.Page:1 2 3 4
Dear reader, don’t think you are not diabetic and so this conversation will not benefit you. Insulin controls almost every other hormone in your body. What you may not know (and I am glad to tell you) is that, heart diseases, high cholesterol level, osteoporosis, impotence etc are in most cases linked to insulin resistance. When we miss this fact we spend a lot of time and money managing symptoms. In the true sense the conditions I have just mentioned are not diseases but symptoms insulin miscommunication. Let us begin by learning about the purpose of insulin.
Your doctor will say that it's to lower blood sugar, but I will tell you right now that, that is a trivial side effect. Insulin's evolutionary purpose as it is known right now is to store excess nutrients: proteins, fats, glycogen etc For the purpose of this conversation we will limit ourselves to carbohydrates because this is what this book is all about.
Anytime we take in carbohydrate the final breakdown product that enters the blood is glucose. When your body notices that sugar is elevated, it is a sign that you've got more than you need; you’re not burning it so it is accumulating in your blood. So insulin will be released to take that sugar and store it. And how does it store it? As Glycogen? Well as I have already pointed out earlier, the body stores very little glycogen at any one time. All the glycogen stored in your liver and muscle wouldn’t last you through one active day. Once you fill up your glycogen stores, the rest of the sugar is stored as saturated fat, 98 percent of which is palmitic acid. So the idea of the medical profession recommending a high complex-carbohydrate, low-saturated-fat diet is an absolute oxymoron.
A high-complex-carbohydrate diet is nothing but 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. Excess sugar in the teen years gets the pancreas (the gland that secretes insulin) used to continually dumping lots of insulin into the bloodstream to get ready for the day's sugar load. Since insulin only lasts about 15 minutes, the pancreas may have to work all day long--stressed. Here's where the rollercoaster first begins: all that free insulin will serve to abnormally lower the blood sugar on those occasions when the person forgot to eat his usual 10x normal sugar intake. A few years later, one of two things can happen:
INSULIN RESISTANCE
When the cells are constantly exposed to high insulin spikes because of the excessive carbohydrate intake, the cells become ‘hard of hearing’. In that state the cells no longer ‘listen’ to insulin and this result in a bunch of glucose still floating in your blood because the cells has simply ‘refuse’ to take up the extra glucose. The pancreas ‘unaware’ of the resistance of the cells to the action of insulin puts out more insulin to compensate. And by the Law of Mass Action some of the sugar might get in to the cells. At this state you are then said be hyperinsulinemic. This simply means you have high level of free insulin floating around in your blood. The high level of free insulin constantly floating in the blood is the ‘whistle blower’ signaling the arrival of the diabetes, heart diseases, and the impotence train down the road.
My dear friend you have a choice to make to stop this fast moving train before it arrives with its deadly baggage: coronary heart disease, diabetes, impotence etc. Now let me share with you how the resistance develops in the various body tissues with time. Some groups of cells in your body are incapable of becoming very resistant. The liver becomes resistant to insulin first, then the muscle tissue, then the fat cells. As you sit reading now the amount of sugar floating in your body is the result of two things:
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 in the morning with a bunch of sugar in your blood. The next tissue to become resistant is the muscle tissue. What is the action of insulin in muscles? Insulin allows your muscles to burn sugar. Now if your muscles become resistant to insulin it can't burn that sugar that was just manufactured by the liver. Since it can not use sugar for energy the muscle must burn protein for energy. The body’s building blocks are now being burnt for energy. So the liver is producing too much sugar, the muscles can't burn it, and this raises your blood sugar. Finally the fat cells become resistant, but it takes a much longer time. So for a while your fat cells retain their sensitivity to the action of insulin when the liver and the muscles have already become insulin resistant. With hyperinsulinemia and IR come a myriad of problems including the following:
High insulin can also stimulate the kidney to produce angiotensin, a substance which increases blood pressure. Most people are then given the drug lisinopril (zestril) to block the angiotensin converting enzyme. But the underlying problem is not the angiotensin but insulin. As I said in the beginning of this chapter, one of the purposes of insulin is to store fats and to discourage the burning of fats to provide energy. The net result is that your body continues to store fat and stops burning fats for energy. So as your liver become resistant and as result keep on producing and pumping sugar into your blood, and as your muscles too become resistant and could not burn that sugar for energy, your fat cells which are not resistant keep on storing fats.
So until your fat cells also become resistant you grow fat. As people become more and more insulin resistant, their weight goes up and up till one day they wake up and realize they are either diabetic or suffering from coronary heart disease. Click here to read the next page.
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