...Continued Article on Insulin Sensitivity by Dr. Ron Rosedale

A Common Cause

Insulin is the common denominator in everything I've just talked about. They way to treat cardiovascular disease and the way I treated my stepfather, the way I treated the high risk cancer patient, and the osteoporosis and high blood pressure. The way to treat virtually all of the so-called chronic diseases of aging is to treat insulin itself.

The other major avenue of research in aging has to do with genetic studies of so-called lower organisms. We know the genetics involved. We I've got the entire genes mapped out of several species of yeast and worms now. We think of life span as being fixed, sort of.

Humans tend to have an average life span of 76 years, and the maximum lifespan was this French lady at 122 years. In humans we feel this length of time is relatively fixed, but in lower forms of life it is very plastic. Lifespan is strictly a variable depending on the environment. Other species can live two weeks, two years or sometimes 20 years depending on what they want themselves to do, which depends very much on the environment.

If there is a lot of food around they are going to reproduce quickly and die quickly, if not they will just bide their time until conditions are better. We know now that the variability in lifespan is regulated by insulin.

Often it is thought that insulin's role is strictly to lower blood sugar. I once had a patient list off about eight drugs she was on and not even mention insulin. Insulin is not treated as a drug. In fact, in some places you don't even need a prescription, you can just get it over the counter, it's treated like candy.

Insulin is found in even single-celled organisms and has been around for several billion years. Its purpose, in some organisms, is to regulate lifespan. The way genetics works is that genes are not replaced, they are built upon. We have the same genes as everything that came before us--we just have more of them.

We have added books to our genetic library, but our base is the same. What we are finding is that we can use insulin to regulate lifespan too.

Aging is a Disease

If there is a single marker for lifespan, as they are finding in the centenarian studies, it is insulin, specifically insulin sensitivity.

How sensitive are your cells to insulin? When they are not sensitive, the insulin levels go up. Who has heard of the term insulin resistance?

Insulin resistance is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging, because the disease itself is actually aging.

We know now that aging is a disease. The other case studies that I mentioned, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, all the so-called chronic diseases of aging and auto-immune diseases, those are symptoms.

If you have a cold and you go to the doctor, you have a runny nose. I did Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) for 10 years so I know what the common treatment for that is, a decongestant. I can t tell you how many patients I saw who had been given Sudafed by their family doctors for a cold who then came to see me afterward because of a really bad sinus infection.

What happens when you treat the symptom of a runny nose from a cold and you take a decongestant? Well, it certainly decongests you by shutting off the mucus, but why do you have the mucus? It's because your body is trying to clean and wash out the membranes. What else is in mucus? Secretory IgA, a very strong antibody to kill the virus. If there is no mucus, there is no secretory IgA.

Decongestants also constrict blood vessels, the little capillaries, or arterioles, that go to those capillaries, and the cilia, the little hair-like projections that beat to push mucus along to create a stream. They get paralyzed because they don t have blood flow, so there is no more ciliary movement.

What happens if you dam a stream and create a pond?

In days you've got larvae growing, but if the stream is moving, you are fine. You need a constant stream of mucus to get rid of and prevent an infection. I am going into this in some detail because in almost all cases, if you treat a symptom you are going to make the disease worse. The symptom is there as your body's attempt to heal itself.

Now, the medical profession is continually segregating more and more symptoms into diseases--they call the symptoms diseases. Using ENT for example, a patient will walk out of the office with a diagnosis of Rhinitis, which is inflammation of the nose. Is there a reason why that patient has inflammation of the nose? I think so. Wouldn't that underlying cause be the disease as opposed to the descriptive term of Rhinitis or Pharyngitis?

Someone can have the same virus and have Rhinitis, Pharyngitis or Sinusitis. They can have all sorts of "itis's," which is a descriptive term for inflammation. That is what the code will be, and that is what the disease will be. So they treat what they think is the disease, but which actually is just a symptom.

The same thing happens with cholesterol. If you have high cholesterol it is called hypercholesterolemia. Hypercholesterolemia has become the code for the disease when it is only the symptom. So doctors treat that symptom, and what are they doing to the heart? Messing it up.

What you have to do if you are going to treat any disease is get to the root of the disease. If you keep pulling a dandelion out by its leaves, you are not going to get very far. But the problem is that we don't know what the root is.

The root is known in many other areas of science, but the problem is that medicine really isn't a science; it is a business (but I don't want to get into that, we could talk for hours).

You really need to look at the root of what is causing the problem. We can use that cold as a further example.

Why does that person have a cold?

If he saw the doctor, the doctor might tell him to take an antibiotic along with the decongestant. You see this all the time because the doctor wants to get rid of the patient. In almost all cases of an upper respiratory infection, it is a virus, and the antibiotic is going to do worse than nothing, because it is going to kill the bacterial flora in the gut and impair the immune system, making the immune system worse.

The patient might see someone else more knowledgeable who will say, "No, you caught a virus, don't do anything, go home and sleep, let your body heal itself." That's better. You might see someone else who would ask why you caught a virus without being out there trying to hunt for viruses with a net. We are breathing viruses every day; right now we are breathing viruses, cold viruses and rhinoviruses.

So why doesn't everybody catch a cold tomorrow?

The Chinese will tell you that it is because the milieu has to be right, if the Chinese were to quote the French. Your body has to be receptive to that virus--only if your immune system is depressed will it allow that virus to take hold.

So maybe a depressed immune system is the disease. You can be given a bunch of vitamin C because your immune system is depressed and it is likely that the person has a vitamin C deficiency. That s where most of us are at right now, where we would recommend a bunch of vitamin C to try to pick up the immune system.

But why is the vitamin C not working? Vitamin C is made in almost all living mammals except humans and a couple of other species. Vitamin C is made directly from glucose and actually has a similar structure; they compete for one another.

It has been known for many decades that sugar depresses the immune system. It was only in the 70s that they found out that vitamin C was needed by white blood cells so that they could phagocytize bacteria and viruses. White blood cells require a fifty times higher concentration, at least inside the cell as outside, so they have to accumulate vitamin C.

There is something called a phagocytic index, which tells you how rapidly a particular macrophage or lymphocyte can gobble up a virus, bacteria or cancer cell. In the 70s Linus Pauling knew that white blood cells needed a high dose of vitamin C and that is when he came up with his theory that you need high doses of vitamin C to combat the common cold.

But if we know that vitamin C and glucose have similar chemical structure, what happens when sugar levels go up? They compete for one another upon entering the cells. And the thing that mediates the entry of vitamin C into the cells is the same thing that mediates the entry of glucose into the cells. If there is more glucose around then less vitamin C will be allowed into the cell, and it doesn‘t take much glucose to have this effect. A blood sugar value of 120 reduces the phagocytic index 75 percent.

Here we are getting a little bit further down into the roots of disease. It doesn‘t matter what disease you are talking about, whether you are talking about a common cold or cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis or cancer, the root is always going to be at the molecular and cellular level, and I will tell you that insulin is going to have its hand in it, if not totally control it.

What is the purpose of insulin?

As I mentioned earlier, in some organisms it is to control their lifespan. What is the purpose of insulin in humans? 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 is known right now, we are looking at other possibilities, is to store excess nutrients.

We come from a time of feast and famine when if we couldn‘t store the excess energy during times of feasting, we would not be here because all of our ancestors encountered famine. We are only here because our ancestors were able to store nutrients, which they were able to do because they were able to elevate their insulin in response to any elevation in energy that the organism encountered.

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. How does it store it? Glycogen?

Your 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 that 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.

Insulin’s Other Roles

Insulin doesn‘t just store carbohydrates, by the way. Somebody mentioned that it is an anabolic hormone, and it absolutely is. Body builders are injecting themselves with insulin because it builds muscle and stores protein.

Magnesium

A less known fact is that insulin also stores magnesium. But if your cells become resistant to insulin, you can‘t store magnesium so you lose it through urination.

Intracellular magnesium relaxes muscles. What happens when you can‘t store magnesium because the cell is resistant? You lose magnesium and your blood vessels constrict.

This causes an increase in blood pressure and a reduction in energy since intracellular magnesium is required for all energy producing reactions that take place in the cell.

But most importantly, magnesium is also necessary for the action of insulin and the manufacture of insulin. When you raise your insulin, you lose magnesium, and the cells become even more insulin resistant. Blood vessels constrict and glucose and insulin can‘t get to the tissues, which makes them more insulin resistant, so the insulin levels go up and you lose more magnesium. This is the vicious cycle that begins even before you were born.

Insulin sensitivity starts to be determined the moment the sperm combines with the egg. If a pregnant woman eats a high-carbohydrate diet, which turns into sugar, animal studies have shown that the fetus will become more insulin resistant.

Worse yet, researchers have used sophisticated measurements and found that if that fetus happens to be a female, the eggs of that fetus are more insulin resistant. Does that mean it is genetic? No, you can be born with something and it doesn‘t mean that it is genetic. Diabetes is not a genetic disease as such. You can have a genetic predisposition, but it should be an extremely rare disease.

Sodium Retention: Congestive Heart Failure

We mentioned high blood pressure; if your magnesium levels go down or your blood vessels constrict you get high blood pressure. Insulin also causes the retention of sodium, which causes the retention of fluid, which causes high blood pressure and fluid retention: congestive heart failure.

One of the strongest stimulants of the sympathetic nervous system is a high level of insulin. What does all of this do to the heart? Not very good things.

There was a solid study done a couple of years ago that showed that heart attacks are two to three times more likely to happen after a high-carbohydrate meal and are specifically NOT likely after a high-fat meal.

Why is that?

Because the immediate effects of raising your blood sugar from a high-carbohydrate meal is a raise in insulin. This immediately triggers the sympathetic nervous system, which will cause arterial spasm, or constriction of the arteries. If you anyone is prone to a heart attack, this is when they are going to get it.

Blood Lipids

Insulin mediates blood lipids. For that patient mentioned earlier who had a triglyceride level of 2200, one of the easiest things we can do is lower triglyceride levels. It is so simple. There was just an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) saying that the medical profession doesn‘t know how to reduce triglycerides dietarily, that drugs still need to be used.

This is so ridiculous because you will find that it is the easiest thing to do. There is an almost direct correlation between triglyceride levels and insulin levels, though in some people more than others.

The gentleman who had a triglyceride level of 2200 while on all the drugs only had an insulin level of 14.7. That is only slightly elevated, but it doesn‘t take much in some people. All we had to do was get his insulin level down to 8 initially and then it went down to six and that got his triglycerides down to under 200.

The way you control blood lipids is by controlling insulin.

LDL cholesterol comes in several fractions, and it is the small, dense LDL that plays the largest role in initiating plaque, as it‘s the most oxidizable, and it’s the most able to actually fit through the small cracks in the endothelium. And this is the cholesterol that insulin actually raises the most. When I say insulin, I should say insulin resistance. It is insulin resistance that is causing this.

Cells become insulin resistant because they are trying to protect themselves from the toxic effects of high insulin. They down regulate their receptor activity and number of receptors so that they don‘t have to listen to that noxious stimuli all the time. It is like having this loud, disgusting music played and you want to turn the volume down.

You might think of insulin resistance as similar to sitting in a smelly room and pretty soon you don‘t smell it anymore because you get desensitized.

You can think about it, it’s not that you are not thinking about it anymore. But if you walk out of the room and then come back in, the smell is back, which means you get resensitized.

If your cells are exposed to insulin at all, they get a little bit more resistant to it. So the pancreas just puts out more insulin. I saw a patient today whose blood sugar was 102 and her insulin was 90! She wasn‘t sure if she was fasting or not, but I‘ve seen other patients where their blood sugar was under 100 and their fasting insulin has been over 90.

That is a fasting insulin. I‘m not sure how many people are familiar with seeing fasting insulins, but if I drank all the glucose I could possibly drink my insulin would never go above probably 40. So she was extremely insulin resistant.

What was happening was that she was controlling her blood sugar. Statistically she was not diabetic or even impaired glucose tolerant. Her glucose is supposedly totally normal. But her cells aren‘t listening to insulin; she just has an exceptionally strong pancreas.

Her islet cells that produce insulin are extremely strong and are able to compensate for that insulin resistance by producing thirty times more insulin than what my fasting insulin is. And just by mass action her pancreas is yelling so loud that her cells are able to listen, but they are not going to listen forever. Her pancreas is not going to be able keep up that production forever.

Once her production of insulin starts slowing down, or her resistance goes up any more, then her blood sugar goes up and she becomes a diabetic. For many years, decades before that, her insulin levels have been elevated but have never been checked.

That insulin resistance is associated with the hyperinsulinemia that produces all of the so-called chronic diseases of aging, or at least contributes to them. As far as we know in many venues of science, this is the main cause of aging in virtually all life.

Insulin is that important.

So controlling insulin sensitivity is extremely important.

Insulin and Cardiovascular Disease

Insulin is a so-called mytogenic hormone. It stimulates cell proliferation and cell division. If all of the cells were to become resistant to insulin we wouldn‘t have that much of a problem, but all of the cells don‘t become resistant.

Some cells are incapable of becoming very resistant. The liver becomes resistant first, then the muscle tissue, then the fat. When the liver becomes resistant it suppresses the production of sugar.

The sugar floating around in your body at any one time is the result of two things, the sugar that you have eaten and how much sugar your liver has made. 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 with a bunch of sugar.

The next tissue to become resistant is the muscle tissue. What is the action of insulin in muscles? It allows your muscles to burn sugar for one thing. So if your muscles become resistant to insulin it can‘t burn that sugar that was just manufactured by the liver. So the liver is producing too much, the muscles can‘t burn it, and this raises your blood sugar.

Well the fat cells become resistant, but not for a while as it takes them longer. So for a while your fat cells retain their sensitivity.

What is the action of insulin on your fat cells? To store that fat. It takes sugar and it stores it as fat. So until your fat cells become resistant you get fat. As people become more and more insulin resistant, their weight goes up and up.

But eventually they plateau. They might plateau at 300 pounds, 220 pounds, 150 pounds, but they will eventually plateau as the fat cells protect themselves and become insulin resistant.

As all these major tissues, your liver, muscles and fat, become resistant your pancreas is putting out more insulin to compensate, so you are hyperinsulinemic and you‘ve got insulin floating around all the time, 90 units or more.

But there are certain tissues that aren‘t becoming resistant such as your endothelium; the lining of the arteries doesn’t become resistant very readily, so all that insulin is affecting the lining of your arteries.

If you drip insulin into the femoral artery of a dog, there was a Dr. Cruz who did this in the early 70s by accident, the artery will become almost totally occluded with plaque after about three months.

The contra lateral side was totally clear, just contact of insulin in the artery caused it to fill up with plaque. That has been known since the 70s and has been repeated in chickens and in dogs; it is really a well-known fact that insulin floating around in the blood causes a plaque build-up. They didn‘t know why, but we know that insulin causes endothelial proliferation. This is the first step as it causes a tumor, an endothelial tumor.

Insulin also causes the blood to clot too readily and causes the conversion of macrophages into foam cells, which are the cells that accumulate the fatty deposits. Every step of the way, insulin is causing cardiovascular disease. It fills the body with plaque, it constricts the arteries, it stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, it increases platelet adhesiveness and coaguability of the blood.

Insulin is a part of any known cause of cardiovascular disease. It influences nitric oxide synthase; you produce less nitric oxide in the endothelium. We know that helps mediate vasodilatation and constriction, i.e. angina.

I mentioned that insulin increases cellular proliferation, what does that
do to cancer? It increases it. And there are some pretty strong studies that show that one of the strongest correlations to breast and colon cancers are levels of insulin.

Hyperinsulinemia causes the excretion of magnesium in the urine. What other big mineral does it cause the excretion of? Calcium. People walking around with hyperinsulinemia can take all the calcium they want by mouth and it‘s all going to go out in their urine.

Insulin-like Growth Factors (IgFs)

Insulin is one of the first hormones that any organism ever developed, and as I mentioned in genetics, things are built upon what was there before. So all the other hormones we have in our body were actually built upon insulin. In other words, insulin controls growth hormone.

The pituitary produces growth hormone, and then it goes to the liver and the liver produces what are called IgF 1 thru 4, there are probably more. What does IgF stand for? Insulin-like growth factor. They are the active ingredients. Growth hormone has some small effects on its own, but the major growth factors are the IgFs that then circulate throughout the body.

Why are they called IgF‘s or insulin-like growth factors? Because they have an almost identical molecular structure to insulin. When I said that insulin promotes cellular proliferation, it is because it cross-reacts with IgF receptors. So somewhere in the evolutionary tree, IgFs diverged from insulin. Insulin can work very well by itself; it doesn‘t need growth hormone, but growth hormone can‘t do anything without insulin.

Thyroid

The thyroid produces mostly T4. T4 goes to mostly to the liver and is converted to T3. We are getting the idea that insulin controls a lot of what goes on in the liver, and the liver is the primary organ that becomes insulin resistant.

When the liver can no longer listen to insulin, you can‘t convert T4 to T3 very well. In people who are hyperinsulinemic with a thyroid hormone that comes back totally normal, it is important to measure their T3. Just as often as not, their free T3 will be low, but get their insulin down and it comes back up.

Insulin helps control sex hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone as well. Insulin helps control the manufacture of cholesterol and where do all the sex hormones come from? All the stearic hormones are originally derived from cholesterol, so that‘s one way. Dr Nestler from the University of Virginia who has spent the last eight years doing multiple studies to show that DHEA levels are directly correlated with insulin levels, or I should say insulin resistance.

The more insulin resistant you are, the lower your DHEA levels. He firmly believes, and has a lot of studies to back it up, that the decline in DHEA is strictly due to the increase in insulin resistance with age. If you reduce the insulin resistance, the DHEA rises.

And how are these sex hormones carried around the body? Something called sex hormone binding globulins. The more that is bound, the less free, active hormone you have. Sex hormone binding globulin is controlled by what? Insulin. There is not a hormone in the body that insulin doesn‘t affect, if not directly control.

Osteoporosis

You take a bunch of calcium. The medical profession just assumes that it has a homing device and it knows to go into your bone. What happens if you have high levels of insulin and you take a bunch of calcium? Number one, most of it is just going to go out in your urine. You would be lucky if that were the case because that part that doesn‘t does not have the instructions to go to your bone because the anabolic hormones aren‘t working.

This is first of all because of insulin, then because of the IGFs from growth hormone, also testosterone and progesterone. They are all controlled by insulin and when they are insulin resistant they can‘t listen to any of the anabolic hormones. Your body doesn‘t know how to build tissue anymore so while some of the calcium may end up in your bone, a good deal of it will end up everywhere else--leading to metastatic calcifications, including in your arteries.

Diseases are a result of a lack of communication. There are certain things that your cells need to be healthy. If you learn nothing else today, you should know that everything is at the cellular and molecular level and we are nothing but a community of cells. We are a commune of cells; a metropolis of cells that have been given instructions to cooperate.

When you have a large number of cells, like we have ten trillion or so, there must be proper communication so that there will be proper division of labor. You can take most any cell in your body, put it in a petrie dish and under the right conditions it can live all on its own. They each have a life of their own.

You can manipulate the genetics of a cell, and we‘ve now made a blood cell into a nerve cell. Pretty soon we are going to be able to take any cell we want and make it into any other cell, because every cell in your body has the identical genetics, all derived from that egg and that sperm that came together. Why is one cell different from another? Because they are reading different parts of the same library.

You can influence which part of that genetic library that every cell reads by the environment of that cell. The environment of that cell is going to be very much dictated by hormones and what you eat. Eating is just internalizing the external environment. That is what you have circulation for, to bring that external environment to each and every one of those cells that is inside of you.

I hope that by now you have gotten the idea that high insulin resistance is not very good for you. So now let‘s talk about what causes insulin resistance.