Insulin and Its Metabolic Effects

Dr. Ron Rosedale is the developer of The Rosedale Diet, which focuses on eating for proper leptin signaling and for keeping our insulin levels low. I highly, highly recommend that everyone read the following presentation by Dr. Rosedale so that you can see how faulty our understanding of cholesterol, heart disease, and diabetes is in main stream medicine. This information is key to living a long healthy life free of modern diseases. Please also read my page on the origin of diabetes and hyper/hypoglycemia as well as my page on advanced glycation endproducts and hybridized food.

Dr. Rosedale, M.D., is an internationally renowned expert in nutritional and metabolic medicine and an anti-aging specialist. He is founder of the Rosedale Center in Denver, Colorado; cofounder of the Colorado Center for Metabolic Medicine in Boulder, Colorado; and founder of the Carolina Center of Metabolic Medicine in Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. Rosedale has helped thousands suffering from so-called incurable diseases to regain their health.

By Ron Rosedale, M.D.

Presented at Designs for Health Institute's BoulderFest, August 1999 Seminar

Case Histories

By-Pass Surgery

First, let‘s talk about a couple of case histories. These are actual patients that I‘ve seen; let‘s start with patient A. This patient saw me one afternoon and said that he had literally just signed himself out of the hospital "AMA," or against medical advice. Like in the movies, he had ripped out his IVs.

The next day he was scheduled to have his second by-pass surgery. He had been told that if he did not follow through with this surgery, within two weeks he would be dead. He couldn‘t even walk from the car to the office without severe chest pain.

He was on 102 units of insulin and his blood sugars were 300 plus. He was on eight different medications for various things. But his first by-pass surgery was such a miserable experience that he said he would rather die than go through the second one. He came to me because he had heard that I might be able to prevent this.

To make a long story short, this gentleman right now is on no insulin. I first saw him three and a half years ago. He plays golf four or five times a week. He is on no medications whatsoever, he has no chest pain, and he has not had any surgery. He started an organization called "Heart Support of America" to educate people about the alternatives to by-pass surgery that have nothing to do with surgery or medication. That organization, as he last told me, had a mailing list of over a million people.

High Triglycerides/Cholesterol

Patient B is a 42-year-old man who was referred by patient A. He had a triglyceride level of 2200, a cholesterol level of 950 and was on maximum doses of all his medications. He was not fat at all; he was fairly thin.

This man was told that he had familial hyperlipidema and that he had better get his affairs in order, because if that was what his lipids were despite the best medications with the highest doses, he was in trouble.

Whenever I see a patient on any of those medications, they‘re off the very first visit. They have no place in medicine. He was taken off the medications and in six weeks his lipid levels, both his triglycerides and his cholesterol, were hovering around 220. After six more weeks, they were both under 200, off of the medications. As I said earlier, they have no place in medicine.

I should mention that this patient had a CPK that was quite elevated. It was circled on the lab report that he had brought in initially with a question mark by it because they didn‘t know why. The reason why was because he was eating off his muscles--if you take (gemfibrozole) and any of the HMG co-enzyme reductase inhibitors together, this is a common side effect, which is in the PDR; they shouldn‘t be given together.

So, he was chewing up his muscles, including his heart, which they were trying to treat. If indeed he were going to die, it would be that treatment that would kill him.

Severe Osteoporosis

Let‘s go to something totally different--a lady with severe osteoporosis. This fairly young woman was almost three standard deviations below the norm in both the hip femeral neck and the cervical vertebrae and was very worried about getting a fracture. She was put on a high-carbohydrate diet and told that this would be of benefit. She was also placed on estrogen, which is a fairly typical treatment.

They wanted to put her on some other medicines, but she wanted to know if there was an alternative. Although we didn‘t have as dramatic a turn around in this case, we did take her off the estrogen she was on and got her to one standard deviation below the norm in a year.

Severe Angina of the Leg

Claudication, that is, severe angina of the leg when you walk (this is the same thing as angina of the heart, except of the leg), is characterized by pain in the legs after walking a certain distance.

My stepfather had extremely severe claudication. It was a typical case; he would walk about fifty yards and then get severe, crampy pain in his legs. He was going to see the best doctors in Chicago, but they couldn‘t figure out what was wrong with him initially.

For example, he went to a neurologist who thought it might be neurological pain or back pain. Finally, he went to a vascular surgeon who thought it was vascular disease, so they did an arthrogram--sure enough he had severe vascular disease. They wanted to do the by-pass surgery that is typically done for this, and he was considering it because he had a trip planned to Europe in two weeks, and he wanted to be able to walk around.

Ten years prior he‘d had an angioplasty for heart disease. At the time I’d told him to change his diet, but of course he didn‘t. This time, however, he listened. I said that if he did exactly as I told him, he could avoid the by-pass and be walking just fine in two weeks. Modulating this one aspect of his disease--I have never seen it fail--works very quickly to open up the artery.

High Cancer Risk

This patient had a mother and sister who had both died of breast cancer. I put her on the exact same treatment as the other cases I just mentioned, because they all had the same thing wrong with them.

A Problem with Typical Treatments

What would be the typical treatment of cardiovascular disease? First they check the cholesterol. To treat high cholesterol (over 200) they put you on cholesterol lowering drugs, which shut off your CoQ10. What does CoQ10 do? It is involved in the energy production and protection of little energy furnaces in every cell, so energy production goes way down.

A common side effect of people who are on all these HMG co-enzyme reductase inhibitors is that their arms feel heavy. Well, the heart is a muscle too, and it‘s going to feel heavy too.

One of the best treatments for a weak heart is CoQ10 (for congestive heart failure). But doctors have no trouble shutting CoQ10 production off so that they can treat a number.

The common therapy for osteoporosis is drugs, and the common therapy for calaudication is surgery. For cancer reduction there is nothing.

But all of these have a common cause--the same cause as three major avenues of research in aging, one of which is called caloric restriction.

Caloric Restriction Research

There have been thousands of studies done since the 1950s on caloric restriction of laboratory animals. If you restrict calories but maintain a high level of nutrition, called CRONs (Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition), or adequate nutrition, CRANs (Caloric Restriction with Adequate Nutrition), these animals can live anywhere between 30 percent and 200 percent longer, depending on the species.

Researchers have tested caloric restriction on several dozen species, and the results are uniform throughout. They are doing it on primates now, and it seems to working with primates, though we won‘t know for sure for about another 10 years.

Centenarian studies

There are three major centenarian studies going on around the world. They are trying to find the variable that would confer longevity among this group of people who live to be 100 years old. Why do centenarians become centenarians? Why are they so lucky? Is it because they have low cholesterol, exercise a lot and live a healthy, clean life?

Well, the oldest person ever recorded was Jean Calumet of France who died last year at 122 years of age. She smoked all of her life and drank.

What researchers are finding from these major centenarian studies is that there is hardly anything in common among these people. They have high cholesterol and low cholesterol, some exercise and some don‘t, some smoke, some don‘t. Some are nasty as can be, some nice and calm and some are ornery.

But, they all have relatively low sugar for their age, and they all have low triglycerides for their age.

And, they all have relatively low insulin.

CONTINUE ON TO PART TWO OF THIS ARTICLE...

Or return from The Rosedale Diet to Origin of Diabetes and Hypoglycemia...

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"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 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. "

-Dr . Ron Rosedale