Insulin, Sugar, Glucose and Diabetes

Source: Doctor explains why 18% of young adults in India already have diabetes

Type-2 diabetes, he says, develops because the body becomes resistant to insulin: “The body makes insulin but cannot use it well, so sugar builds up in the blood.”

Source: Book - The Primal Blueprint_ Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy by Mark Sisson

Ramp Up Your Fat Metabolism

Ramp Up Your Fat Metabolism by eliminating processed carbohydrates from your diet to minimize your body’s insulin production. This means eliminating not only sugars and sweets but grain products, including wheat, rice, pasta, and corn (yep, corn is a grain, not a vegetable). A diet that emphasizes meat, fish, fowl, nuts, seeds, and colorful natural carbs, such as vegetables and fruits, is the primary way to improve your general health, control your weight, and minimize risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and other diet-influenced medical conditions. If you are carrying excess body fat, it will disappear virtually effortlessly when you focus on eating the delicious, filling, nutritious foods that have sustained humans throughout the course of evolution for two million years.

Where is insulin manufactured in our body?

The beta cells in your pancreas manufacture insulin

Avoid Poisonous Things

(Grok’s scenario)

The ability of humans to exploit almost every corner of this earth was partly predicated on consuming vastly different types of plant and animal life. Primal humans developed a keen sense of smell and taste, along with liver, kidney, and stomach function, to adapt to new food sources and avoid succumbing to poisonous plants that they encountered routinely when foraging and settling new areas. For example, the reason we have a sweet tooth today is probably an evolved response to an almost universal truth in the plant world that anything that tastes sweet is safe to eat.

(Modern man’s scenario)

Today, the number of toxic agents in our food supply is worse than ever. By toxic I mean human-made products that are foreign to your genes and disturb the normal, healthy function of your body when ingested. The big offenders, including sugars and sodas, chemically altered fats, and heavily processed, packaged, fried, and preserved foods, are obvious.

What’s less accepted and therefore more insidious as a dietary “poison” are processed grains (wheat and flour products, such as bread, pasta, crackers, snack foods, baked goods, etc., as well as rice, corn, cereals, etc.). These staples of diets across the globe are generally inappropriate for human consumption for the simple reason that our digestive systems (and our genes) have not had ample time to adapt to both the unfamiliar protein structure of grains and the excessive carbohydrate load of all forms of cultivated grains, including even whole grains. Essentially, the advent of grains and civilization has eliminated the main thing that’s made humans healthy: selection pressure to reach reproductive age - and to care for ourselves, and others, beyond!

Ingesting grains and other processed carbohydrates causes blood glucose levels to spike (both simple and complex carbs get converted into glucose - at differing rates - once they enter the body; we’ll use the accurate term blood glucose to convey what many call blood sugar). This spike is a shock to our primal genes, which are accustomed to natural, slower-burning foods. Your pancreas compensates for this excess of glucose in the bloodstream (too much glucose is toxic to the body - hence the importance of timely insulin shots for diabetics) by secreting excessive levels of insulin. While insulin is an important hormone that delivers nutrients to muscle, liver, and fat cells for storage, excessive insulin released in the bloodstream causes glucose to be removed so rapidly and effectively that it can result in a “sugar crash”: mental and physical lethargy and (because the brain relies heavily on glucose to fuel it) a strong craving for quick replacement energy in the form of more high-carbohydrate food. This leads to a vicious cycle of another ill-advised meal, another excessive insulin response, and another corresponding blood glucose decline.

Because insulin’s job is to transport nutrients out of the bloodstream and into the muscle, liver, and fat cell storage depots, its excessive presence in the bloodstream inhibits the release of stored body fat for use as energy. Insulin’s counterregulatory hormone, glucagon, accesses carbs, protein, and fat from your body’s storage depots (muscle, liver, fat cells) and delivers them into the bloodstream for use as energy. When insulin is high, glucagon is low. You don’t have fuel in your bloodstream, so your brain says, “Eat now! And make it something sweet so we can burn it immediately!” Unfortunately,

the mobilization of stored body fat has been humans’ preferred energy source (and weight-control device) for a couple of million years. It’s as simple as this: you cannot reduce body fat on a diet that stimulates excessive - or even moderately excessive - levels of insulin production. Period.

Beyond the weight-loss frustrations, overstressing your insulin response system over years and decades can lead directly to devastating general system failure in the form of type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease (thanks to vascular inflammation, peripheral oxidative damage, and other insulin-related troubles), and diet-related cancers. Even whole grains (brown rice, whole wheat bread, etc.) are not particularly healthy, because they still trigger excessive insulin production and can interfere with mineral absorption as well as displace the far more nutritious plants and animals from being the caloric emphasis of your diet.