...Continued Article on Insulin Resistance and Diet by Dr. Ron Rosedale (3rd and final part)Go to the very beginning of this article (Part ONE)....
What Causes Insulin Resistance? 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 the variable. If you can slow down that rate, you can become a centenarian, a healthy one. You can slow the rate of aging. Not even just 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 to 140 years old routinely. Let‘s talk about carbohydrates. We talk about simple and complex carbohydrates, this 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 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 your body to more insulin and just like walking in a smelly room your body 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 risk all of the problems we‘ve talked about. Harmful Effects of Sugar We know sugar increases insulin, but even by itself sugar is bad for you. You can divide aging into basically two major categories, one being genetic causes of aging. Cells have a limited capacity to divide, but normally we don’t reach that capacity. 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 by that alone. But to get to the other category, our cells accumulate damage with age and we can’t help that. When I say aging, I really am talking about something called senescence, or the damage associated with aging, but the common usage is the word aging. I can’t prevent you from being a day older tomorrow; that is aging. 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, which 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 largely by sugar. The two major causes of accumulated damage are oxygenation and glycation. Oxidation 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, they dealt with that oxygen with the carbon dioxide by spitting it out, so the oxygen in the atmosphere increased. All the other organisms then had to cope with that toxic oxygen. If they didn‘t have ways of dealing with it, they perished. 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 as much. So, multi-celled organisms arose after oxygen did. Of course, with that came the need for cellular communication. 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 (A.G.E.s). That acronym is not an accident. 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 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. 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 and headaches. When you start putting people on a diet to remedy all of this, patients who used to have horrible headaches or shoulder pains don‘t have them anymore. Glycated proteins make a person very pro-inflammatory, so we age and, at least partially, accumulate damage by oxidation. One of the most important types of tissues that oxygenate is the fatty component, the lipid, especially the poly-unsaturated fatty acids, and they turn rancid and glycate. The term for glycation in the food industry is carmelization. It is used all the time to 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 why this is, one being 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. Diet Diet really becomes pretty simple. Carbohydrates we started talking about. You‘ve got fiber and non-fiber and that‘s really clear-cut. Fiber is good, non-fiber is bad. Fibrous carbs like vegetables such as broccoli are great. What about 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. The Major Salivary Enzyme The major salivary enzyme is amylase. It is used to break down amylase, 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 nothing. Somebody e-mailed me who had decided to do a little research. And there are over 50 essential nutrients to the human body. You know you need to breathe oxygen. It gives us life and it kills us. It’s the same thing 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 this person took all the essential nutrients that are known to man and plugged them into a computer data bank, and he asked the computer what are the top 10 foods that contain each nutrient that is required by the human body. Each of the 53 or 54, 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. The food pyramid is based on a totally irrelevant nutrient. Why do we eat? One reason we eat is for energy. That‘s half of the reason. 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 and 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. The building blocks that are needed are proteins and fatty acids, not much in the way of carbohydrates. You can get all the carbohydrates you need from proteins and fats. 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 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 100 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, it is meant to be your body‘s turbo charger. Everybody right here, right now should be burning almost all fat with minor exceptions. Your brain will burn sugar, though it doesn‘t have to, by burning by-products of fat metabolism called ketones. That is what it has to burn when you fast for any length of time. It has been shown that if your brain was really good at burning ketones from fat that you can get enough sugar from eating 100 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 in an emergency situation if you had to expend an 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. What happens if you eat sugar? Your body‘s main way of getting rid of sugar, 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. 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 level of 90. And 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. You will still burn sugar because that is all your body is capable of burning anymore. Where does your body 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. So where do carbohydrates come in? They don‘t. There is no essential need for carbohydrates. 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 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 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. Most foods fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. For example, with strawberries you are going to get a lot of sugar, but you are also going to get a food that is the second or third highest in antioxidant potential of any food known, the first being garlic, the second either being strawberries or blueberries. I will let some patients put 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, any type I diabetic who is not producing any insulin 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 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. 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 and your nerves enough as well as, 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 that is 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 you nervous, and it also stimulates your brain to crave carbohydrates, to seek out some sugar. So you are craving carbohydrates, so you eat a bowl of cheerios or a big piece of fruit so that after your sugar goes low, and with the hormone release, 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. 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 though, so there is a discrepancy. The problem with hormone resistance is that there is a dichotomy of resistance--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. 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. Can Insulin Sensitivity Be Restored? Insulin sensitivity can be restored to its original state, well, perhaps not to its original state, but you can restore it to the state of about a 10-year-old. One of my first experiences with this, I had a patient who literally had sugars over 300. He was taking over 200 units of insulin, and he was a bad cardiovascular patient, so I put him on a low-carbohydrate diet. He was an exceptional case, after one month to six weeks he was totally off of insulin. He had been on over 200 units of insulin for 25 years. He was so insulin resistant, but one thing good about it is that when you lower that insulin, that insulin is having such little effect on him that you can massively lower the insulin and its not going to have much of an effect on his blood sugar. Two hundred units of insulin is not going to lower your sugar any more that 300 mg/deciliter. You know that the insulin is not doing much, so we could rapidly take him off the insulin and he was actually cured of his diabetes in a matter of weeks. He became sensitive enough and was still producing a lot of insulin on his own. Then we were able to measure his own insulin. It was still elevated, and it took a long time, maybe six months or longer, to bring that insulin down. It will probably never get to the point of the sensitivity of a 10-year-old, but yes, your number of insulin receptors increases and the activity of the receptors, the chemical reactions that occur beyond the receptor, occur more efficiently. How to Increase Insulin Sensitivity You can increase sensitivity by diet, which is one of the major reasons to take omega-3 oils. We think of circulation as that which flows through arteries and veins, and that is not a minor part of our circulation, but it might not even be the major part. The major part of circulation is what goes in and out of the cell. The cell membrane is a fluid mosaic. The major part of our circulation is determined by what goes in and out. It doesn‘t make any difference what gets to that cell if it can‘t get into the cell. We know that one of the major ways that you can affect cellular circulation is by modulating the kinds of fatty acids that you eat. So you can increase receptor sensitivity by increasing the fluidity of the cell membrane, which means increasing the omega-3 content, because most people are very deficient. They say that you are what you eat and that mostly pertains to fat because the fatty acids that you eat are the ones that will generally get incorporated into the cell membrane. The cell membranes are going to be a reflection of your dietary fat and that will determine the fluidity of your cell membrane. You can actually make them over fluid. If you eat too much and you incorporate too many omega-3 oils then they will become highly oxidizable (so you have to eat Vitamin E and monounsaturates as well). There was an interesting study pertaining to this where they had a breed of rat that was genetically susceptible to cancer. Researchers fed them a high-omega-3 diet, plus iron, without any extra Vitamin E and they were able to almost shrink down the tumors to nothing because tumors are rapidly dividing. This is like a form of chemotherapy, and the membranes that were being formed in these tumor cells were very high in omega-3 oils. The iron acted as a catalyst for that oxidation, and the cells were exploding from getting oxidized so rapidly. So omega-3 oils can be a double-edged sword. In fact, most food is a double-edged sword. Like oxygen and glucose, food keeps us alive and kills us. Eating is the biggest stress we put on our body and that is why in caloric restriction experiments you can extend life as long as you maintain nutrition. This is the only proven way of actually reducing the rate of aging, not just the mortality rate but the actual rate of aging. It has actually been shown by quite a number of papers that resistance training for insulin resistance is better than aerobic training. There are a variety of other reasons too. Resistance training is referring to muscular exercises. If you just do a bicep curl, you immediately increase the insulin sensitivity of your bicep. Just by exercising you are increasing the blood flow to that muscle, and one of the factors that determines insulin sensitivity is how blood can get there. It has been shown conclusively that resistance training will increase insulin sensitivity. Protein’s Role Now, back to the macronutrients. As I said before, you don‘t want very much in the way of non-fiber carbs, but fiber carbs are great. You are going to get some non-fiber carbs though. Even if you just eat broccoli you are going to get some non-fiber carbs. That is OK since for the most part you are getting something that is really pretty good for you. Protein is an essential nutrient. You want to use it as a building block because your body requires protein to repair damage and replenish enzymes. All of the encoded instructions from your DNA are to encode for proteins. That is all the DNA encodes for. You need protein, but you want to use it as a building block. I don‘t believe in going over and above the protein that you need to use for maintenance, repair and building blocks. I don‘t think you should be using protein as a primary fuel source, though your body can use protein very well as a fuel source. It is good to lose weight while using it as a fuel source because it is an inefficient fuel source. Protein is very thermogenic, meaning it produces a lot of heat, which means that less of it is going into stored energy and more is being dissipated--just like throwing a log into a fireplace. Your primary fuel should be coming from fat. You can calculate the amount of protein a person requires or at least estimate it by their activity level. The book "Protein Power" actually went very well in to this. You have to calculate how much protein is required by activity level and lean body mass. There is still some gray area as to how many grams per kilogram of lean body mass, depending on the activity that person requires. It can range anywhere from one to two grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, maybe even a little bit higher if someone is really active. You don‘t want to go under that amount for very long. It is better to go over than to go under that amount for very long. If you can cure a diabetic of diabetes, you can do the same thing to a so-called non-diabetic person and still improve that person. I want to improve my insulin sensitivity just as much as I do my diabetics because insulin sensitivity is going to determine, for the most part, how long you are going to live and how healthy you are going to be. It determines the rate of aging more so than anything else we know right now. Supplements What about supplements such as Chromium? All of my diabetics go on 1,000 mcg of chromium, some a little bit more if they are really big people. The amount is usually 500 mcg for a non-diabetic, though it depends on their insulin levels. I use a lot of supplements. What you really want to do is to try to convert the person back into being an efficient burner of fat. Earlier we talked about when you are very insulin resistant and you are waking up in the morning with an insulin level that is elevated, you cannot burn fat but instead are burning sugar. One of the reasons that sugar goes up so high is because that is what your cell is needing to burn, but if it is so insulin resistant it requires a blood sugar of 300 so that just by mass action some can get into the cell and be used as fuel. If you eliminate that need to burn sugar, you don‘t need such high levels of sugar even if you are insulin resistant. You want to increase the ability of the cells in the body to burn fat and make that glucose burner into a fat burner. You want to make a gasoline-burning car into a diesel-burning car. Did anyone ever look at the molecular structure of diesel fuel in your spare time? It looks almost identical to a fatty acid. There is a company right now that can tell you how to alter vegetable oil to use in your Mercedes. It‘s just a matter of thinning it out a little bit. It is a very efficient fuel. Triglycerides You can look at other variables that will give you some idea too, such as triglycerides. If people are very sensitive to high levels of insulin, they come in with insulin levels of 14 and they have triglycerides of 1000. You would treat them just as you would if they had an insulin level of 50. It gives you some idea of the effect of the hyperinsulinemia on the body. You can use triglycerides as a gauge, which I often do. The objective is to try to get the insulin level just as low as you possibly can. There is no limit. They classify diabetes now as a fasting blood sugar of 126 or higher. A few months ago it might have been 140. It is just an arbitrary number. Does that mean that someone with a blood sugar of 125 is non-diabetic and fine? If you have a blood sugar of 125 you are worse than if you had a blood sugar of 124--same with insulin. If you have a fasting insulin of 10, you are worse off than if you had an insulin of 9. You want to get it just as low as you can. Does This Apply to Athletes? With athletes, think about the effect of carbohydrate loading before an event. What happens if you eat a bowl of pasta before you have to run a marathon? What does that bowl of pasta do? It raises your insulin. What is the instruction of insulin to your body? To store energy and not burn it. I see a fair amount of athletes and this is what I tell them, you want everybody, athletes especially, to be able to burn fat efficiently. So when they train, they are on a very low-carbohydrate diet. The night before their event, they can stock up on sugar and load their glycogen if they would like. They are not going to become insulin resistant in one day. Just enough to make sure, it has been shown that if you eat a big carbohydrate meal that you will increase your glycogen stores, that is true and that is what you want. But you don‘t want to train that way because if you do you won‘t be able to burn fat, you can only burn sugar, and if you are an athlete you want to be able to burn both. Few people have problems burning sugar if they are athletes, but they have lots of problems burning fat, so they hit the wall. And for certain events, like sprinting, it is less important, truthfully for their health it is very important to be able to burn fat, but a sprinter will go right into burning sugar. If you are a 50-yard dash person, whether you can burn fat or not is not going to make a huge difference in your final performance. Beyond your athletic years, if you don‘t want to become a diabetic, and don‘t want to die of heart disease and don‘t want to age quickly, it is certainly not going to do you any harm to be able to burn fat efficiently in addition to sugar. Vanadyl Sulfate Vanadyl Sulfate is an insulin mimic, so that it can basically do what insulin does by a different mechanism. If it went through the same insulin receptors, then it wouldn‘t offer any benefit, but it doesn‘t, it actually has been shown to go through a different mechanism to lower blood sugar, so it spares insulin and then it can help improve insulin sensitivity. To really lower a person’s insulin, I give 25 mg 3 times a day temporarily. Glutamine Powder I also put people on glutamine powder. Glutamine can act as a brain fuel, so it helps eliminate carbohydrate cravings while they are in that transition period. I like to give it to them at night, and I tell them to use it whenever they feel they are craving carbohydrates. They can put several grams into a little water and drink it and it helps eliminate carbohydrate cravings between meals. A high-protein diet will increase an acid load in the body, but not necessarily a high-fat diet. Vegetables and greens are alkalinizing, so if you are eating a lot of vegetables along with your protein it equalizes the acidifying effect of the protein. I don‘t recommend a high-protein diet; I recommend an adequate protein diet. Fat in the Diet I think you should be using fat as your primary energy source, and fat is kind of neutral when it comes to acidifying or alkalinizing. In general, over 50 percent of the calories should come from fat, but not from saturated fat. When we get to fat, the carbohydrates are clear-cut. No scientist out there is really going to dispute what I‘ve said about carbohydrates. There is the science behind it. You can‘t dispute it. There is a little bit of a dispute as to how much protein a person requires. When you get to fat, there is a big gray area as to which fat a person requires. We just have one name for fat, we call it fat or oil. Eskimos have dozens of names for snow and east Indians have dozens of names for curry. We should have dozens of names for fat because they do many different things. And how much of which fat to take is still open to a lot of investigation and controversy. My take on fat is that if I am treating a patient who is generally hyperinsulinemic or overweight, I want them on a low-saturated-fat diet, because most of the fat they are storing is saturated fat. When their insulin goes down and they are able to start releasing triglycerides to burn as fat, what they are going to be releasing mostly is saturated fat. So you don‘t want them to take anymore orally. There is a ration of fatty acids that is desirable if you took them from the moment you were born, but we don‘t. We are dealing with an imbalance here that we are trying to correct as rapidly as we can. Most of us here have enough saturated fat to last the rest of our life. Truthfully. Your cell membranes require a balance of saturated and poly-unsaturated fat, and it is that balance that determines the fluidity. As I mentioned, your cells can become over-fluid if they don‘t have any saturated fat. Saturated fat is a hard fat. We can get the fats from foods to come mostly from nuts. Nuts are a great food because it is mostly mono-unsaturated. Your primary energy source ideally would come mostly from mono-unsaturated fat. It‘s a good compromise. It is not an essential fat, but it is a more fluid fat. Your body can utilize it very well as an energy source. Grain-Fed Animals are not Healthy Animal proteins are good for you, but not the ones that are fed grains. Grain-fed animals are going to make saturated fat out of the grains. Saturated fat in nature occurs to a very tiny degree. In the wild there is very little saturated fat out there. If you talk about the Paleolithic diet, we didn‘t eat a saturated fat diet. Saturated fat diets are new to mankind. We manufactured a saturated fat diet by feeding animals grains. You can consider saturated fat to be second-generation carbohydrates. We eat the saturated fats that other animals produce from carbohydrates. Zone was a good diet compared to the American diet. Is it an optimal diet? No. Is it optimal for what is known today about nutrition? It is not. Initially the author spoke about how it made no difference if you got your carbohydrate from candy or vegetables. What he is doing now is changing his recipes so that the 40 percent carbohydrates are coming primarily from vegetables, and the carbohydrates are going way down because he knows that if they don‘t, it‘s not as good a diet. I recommend 20 percent of calories from carbs, depending on the size of the person, 25 percent to 30 percent of calories from protein, and 60 percent to 65 percent from fat. You can get beef that is not grain-fed. Insulin is Not the Only Cause of Disease There are other considerations in disease, such as iron. We know that high iron levels are bad for you. If a person‘s ferritin is high, red meat is out for a while until the level goes down. There is a great deal of difference between a non-grain-fed cow and a grain-fed cow. Non-grain fed will have only 10 percent or less saturated fat. Grain-fed can have over 50 percent. Also, a non-grain-fed cow will actually be high in omega-3 oils. Plants have a pretty high percentage of omega-3, and if you accumulate it by eating it all day, every day for most of your life, your fat gets a pretty high proportion of omega-3. I would try for 50 percent oleic fat, and the other fats would depend on the individual, but about 25 percent of the other two. In a heavy diabetic I would probably go down on the saturated fat and go 60 percent oleic, and 1 to 1 on the omega-6 to 3 ratio--that would be therapeutic. The maintenance ratio would be about 2.5 to 1 for the omega-6 to 3 ratio. I would try to do most of this through diet. There are some practicalities involved. I would ask the person if they like fish and if they practically puke in front of me they are going on a tablespoon of cod liver oil, the best brand is made by Carlson, which doesn‘t taste fishy at all. Most people end up going on a supplement of omega-3 oils because they are not going to eat enough fish to get an adequate amount. It is a little hard to get that much entirely from diet. Sardines are a very good therapeutic food. They are baby fish so they haven‘t had time to accumulate a bunch of metal. They are smoked so they are not cooked and the oil is not spoiled in them. You have to eat the whole thing, not the boneless and skinless. You need to eat all the organs as they are high in vitamins and magnesium. DNA Glycates If people are worried about chromosomal damage from chromium, what they should really be worried about instead is high blood sugar. DNA repair enzymes glycate as well. Insulin is by far your biggest poison. They disproved that study that was against chromium many times. They showed that it only happens if you put cells in a petrie dish with chromium but in vivo studies prove otherwise. The lowering of insulin is going to be better than any possible detriment of any of the therapies you are using. Insulin is associated with cancer, everything. Insulin should be tested on everybody repeatedly. It isn’t strictly because there haven‘t been drugs until recently that could effect insulin, so there is no way to make money off of it. Fasting insulin is one way to look at it, not necessarily the best way, but it is a way that everybody could get it done. Any family doctor can measure a fasting insulin. There are other ways to measure insulin sensitivity that are more complex. We use intravenous insulin and watch how rapidly the blood sugar crashes in a fasting state in 15 minutes, and that assesses insulin sensitivity. Then you give them dextrose to make sure they don‘t crash any further. There are other ways that are utilized to directly assess insulin sensitivity, but you can get a pretty good idea just by doing a fasting insulin. Return from Insulin Resistance Diet to Cure for Diabetes... |
"Diet really becomes pretty simple. Carbohydrates we started talking about. You‘ve got fiber and non-fiber and that‘s really clear-cut. Fiber is good, non-fiber is bad. Fibrous carbs like vegetables such as broccoli are great. What about 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.
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