New information on insulin resistance....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-17-2009

In much the same way that too many fires for the available fire fighters to put out will make the fire fighters look inefficient, the main cause of insulin resistance is to cause so many more and so much stronger blood sugar surges than your body is programmed to overcome will make its insulin seem ineffective and your blood sugar will rise above desirable and health OK levels.

Our immediate ancestors that optimized and set our body’s digestion genetics tended to eat less than 3 teaspoons of sugar a day. They virtually always got that in fresh fruit that included some fiber that slowed the entry of that sugar into their blood. And, they all got lots of daily exercise. They had no TV and ate no free sugars other than honey on rare occasions. They ate no artificial sweeteners or refined grains.

So insulin resistance was extremely rare if it happened at all.

The American Heart Association just published data showing that the average adult American eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day and the average school aged child or young person eats 34!

(The largest source of this excess sugar is drinking regular soft drinks, they found.)

That doesn’t even include the massive increases in eating refined grain foods and lack of exercise.

(See our last post for Tuesday this week for ways to avoid these blood pressure surges. The two most important recommendations in it were to NOT drink soft drinks and to get regular exercise.)

But in addition to simply being swamped, insulin apparently also becomes less effective in other ways if the system is overloaded like this.

This insulin resistance results in excessively high levels of blood sugar that cause health problems which is diagnosed as type 2 diabetes if it gets too extreme. It also causes an excessive insulin level that begins to cause you to gain excess bodyfat. So it would be great to get additional ways to reverse prevent insulin resistance.

Yesterday, Health Day online news published a study that indicates that excessive saturated fat from fatty, grain fed beef and dairy fat also tends to cause or worsen insulin resistance.

In addition, that study found that this excessive intake of that kind of saturated fat causes leptin resistance. Since normally when you eat enough, leptin is released and that reduces your appetite enough you stop eating, that means that this excessive intake of that kind of saturated fat makes you fat in two ways! It causes you to overeat. And it increases your body’s tendency to store the energy in the food you eat as fat. Ouch!

How do you use this information to lower your insulin resistance and avoid being or becoming fat?

Eat meat up to two or three times a week instead of two or three times a day. Only eat meat from animals fed only grass or eat something else. Or, eat the leanest most fat trimmed meat you can and don’t eat as much of it or as large a serving when you do eat it.

Use extra virgin olive oil instead of butter almost all the time.

If you eat cheese, eat it far less often in small servings and usually eat it with foods that have lots of fiber to muffle its effects. Some feta or blue cheese in small chunks in a salad a few times a week is one way to do that.

Eat skinless poultry, eggs, nuts, wild caught fish, some seafood, beans and lentils, and perhaps take whey or egg based protein supplements for most of your protein. Also eat very lowfat dairy products.

When you use dairy products use lowfat, very lowfat or 1% lowfat, or nonfat dairy products. Most nonfat and very lowfat cheese tastes dreadful and tends to stick to your teeth. So with cheese eat smaller portions less often mostly. But 1% lowfat milk and nonfat, plain yogurt aren’t bad.

And, since this response may be mediated by this excess saturated fat increasing your LDL cholesterol, it may also help to take sterol supplements such as beta sitosterol and up to 600 to 900 mg a day of niacin, taking 300 mg after a meal two or three times a day.

Eating foods high in soluble fiber such as apples, beans and lentils, and “Old Fashioned” rolled oat oatmeal or steel cut oatmeal can also help.

And, to come full circle, we also know that not eating refined grains and very little sugar also tends to lower LDL and increase HDL.

Lastly, note that one of the health risks from the excessive increase in blood sugar that insulin resistance causes is that it damages your blood vessels and makes heart disease and heart attacks much more likely. Since the methods to lower insulin resistance also protect your heart, that makes doing them twice as valuable.