Lower Blood Sugar Naturally - User Manual For Humans S1 E05 - Dr Ekberg

good evening and welcome to our fifth installment in our series user manual

for humans so tonight we'll have another good talk we're going to get it's good

material to cover and a lot of times people don't really understand what what health

is about or why it matters or... they may feel fine they're still young they still

don't have any major diseases but we're going to talk about blood sugar and

diabetes and this is one of the most important one of the most prevalent

conditions we've ever seen and it's epidemic it's exploding we'll talk we'll

give you some statistics toward the end to to scare you some and if you're

taking good care of yourself then I'm sure that you know someone who doesn't

who needs to know this information so take good notes and pass this on we will

talk about the purpose of blood sugar what is it for what does it do in the

body what sort of balance do we need to maintain the process of absorption

because that's crucial in determining the level of blood sugar what are the

hormonal effects and that's primarily insolent we'll talk about what is

insulin resistance because most people know that that's a bad thing and that it

could lead to diabetes but how does it all work and then we'll talk about

diabetes which today effects eight point three percent of the u.s. population

that are full-fledged diabetics and there's many times that number of people

that are pre-diabetic one of my favorite quotes what gets us in trouble is not

what we don't know it's what we know for sure that just ain't so that's Mark

Twain and there are so many things that we're going to cover in the series that

are well-established facts that the establishment the people who know say

this is the way it is and yet we find out a few years

or the people on the cutting edge know that it just ain't so for one thing

since we're talking about diabetes the food pyramid says that we should eat 8 to

11 servings of grains every day well that's an excellent recipe to get

diabetes if you're not in the risk zone just follow the food pyramid and before

you know it you'll be there then let's talk a little bit about why we why we

end up in this position first of all why do sweets taste so good I think that's

the biggest problem for a lot of people and we have to think back and look at

survival advantage and back many thousands of years ago there wasn't a

whole lot of sweets so the taste of sweet helped humans to select the foods

that gave quick energy so back then it was basically fruits and an occasional

honey beehive that you ran across those were the sweets that we had and the more

that you could quickly get energy into the body the better your chances of

survival and if there was abundant food then wherever you could find sweet and

rich food you could pack on some fat and that would help you survive later in

times of starvation so that's why we have that mechanism in the first place

and it never became a problem until we started processing food and extracting

that the source of the sweet flavor of the sugar out of the natural food and

processing it so it became widely abundant and we can have it as syrup and

coca cola and candy and now it's a

completely different animal they've estimated that back in the day when they

were hunter-gatherers that if they ran across an occasional beehive that was

the only refined sugar that they would ever come across and just kind of

guesstimating they assumed that if you find four pounds of honey per year per

person that's pretty that you're still pretty lucky but that would add that

would amount to about one teaspoon per day so essentially for the period of

time that your DNA has developed you've been exposed to about 1 teaspoon a day

so that's the amount of sugar that that you're fine with anything else is a

little bit of a burden on the body. back in the day there was no such thing

as bread pastries waffles pasta syrup pancakes candy cookies chocolate pasta

and so on and so on and so on these items did not exist they just

weren't in in existence so because of that your DNA has never encountered

those foods your body can deal very well with short-term starvation but it has no

defense against chronic abundance of processed foods historical adaptation

again we mentioned this a little bit before but the DNA of Homo sapiens has

not changed the significant in about forty thousand years we've been

hunter-gatherers we come across the occasional bee hive we've eaten fruits

and vegetables we hunted meat and game and that's what our DNA recognizes that.

that's what we know what to do with then in the last 4,000 years which is a blink

of time in evolution in terms of changing DNA we introduced

agriculture so we had more than an occasional few grains but there was

still no processing at all then in the last few hundred years we have had a

modest availability of processed sugar and processed grains and 150 years in

terms of compared to 40,000 again is it's a blink there's there's no time for

the body to adapt and in the last 50 years we've had an abundance of sugar in

this country I think the it's roughly a half a pound of sugar per person per day

okay and I don't eat my half a pound so some of us eat in mind as well that's

that's astounding that's 800 calories of sugar refined sugar and syrup and corn

syrup per day so that is why and then of course we add the starch and the white

bread and the waffles to that there's no wonder that there's an epidemic of

diabetes so let's talk a little bit about the process what is blood sugar

and what's the process of getting so first we eat the food and it's in our

gut then it has to be digested and just because we put something into

the mouth doesn't mean that it is functional and available to the body it

has to pass across a number of membranes through a process of digestion and

absorption and then it gets into the bloodstream and now it exists in the

form of sugar as glucose molecules in the bloodstream and it is still of

absolutely no use to the body because the only place we can use the sugar is

inside of cells so now we have to get it from the bloodstream and into the cell

and this doesn't happen by itself there are there are gates and there are

receptors on the cells to absorb to take in the sugar but these gates they don't

work without insulin so that is what insulin is all about that is the

function of insulin is that it activates the receptors so that we can get the

sugar into the cell you have a little receptor the insulin attaches to it and

now that gate is open for the sugar and

this is important to realize and the more processed the food is the quicker

it will get into the bloodstream and the faster your blood sugar will rise we'll

talk more about this so weight gain is not about how many calories you eat it

is in a way but not really and here's why when the sugar gets into the

bloodstream when when the food gets into the bloodstream faster than we can use

it and get it into the cells and burn it off then the excess has to be stored

okay and we can only store about 800 calories worth 200 grams or so worth of

sugar and carbohydrates and the rest of it has to be turned into fat so fat

develops when the food we eat gets into the bloodstream too fast we have to get

a lot of insulin to get it into the cell and whatever the cell can't use at the

time gets converted to fat so the it's not so much the amount of food we eat

but how is it processed by the body and interestingly fat and protein gets into

the bloodstream very very slowly so fat and protein do not contribute to weight

gain unless you just completely totally stuff yourself every day and so now we

will talk about blood sugar and how it works

so you have a diagram here on slide eight and we want to see if we can

illustrate this here is the amount of blood sugar and here is a very narrow

band and this is right around a hundred milligrams of blood sugar per liter now

what happens in the body if your blood sugar goes significantly below or

significantly above we can get in what's called a diabetic coma you literally

physically get into a coma your brain stops working if you get very far

outside of the zone either above or below so that means this is where the

body wants to be and when anything gets far away from it it's an emergency it's

life-threatening for the body so this is very very high priority for the brain

glucose blood sugar is the primary fuel for the brain it can really only use it

can use a little bit of ketone bodies and so forth but glucose is really the

only fuel that the brain uses so it's very important for the brain to function

for us to have a normal level and again the brain stops functioning if we get

above or below so if we eat let's say that we are starting around the lower

end of this hundred and we get hungry and we eat a meal a

hunter-gatherer meal we catch ourselves a rabbit and we find some roots and some

leafy greens and we make ourselves a meal that meal is going to be digested

because it's protein because it's whole food lots of fiber and good stuff it

will be absorbed very slowly into the bloodstream so over the next few hours

the blood the blood sugar rises very very slowly and we'll say this is one

hour two hours three hours four hours

now remember we have to use insulin to get the blood the sugar out of the blood

and into the cell because this is of no use to the body until we can get it into

the cell so now we secrete insulin the pancreas which sits right around here

releases insulin and the insulin takes the sugar out of the blood so once we

have a certain amount of insulin the blood sugar will start falling again and

it will go back down and then the body has some reserves so

the body can maintain it within this level for quite some time so this is

what the body wants this is what whole foods and real food and food with fiber

and protein and fat does but that's not what we eat anymore how much sugar do we

have in the bloodstream at any given time a hundred milligrams of blood sugar

per deciliter multiplied by the volume of blood that you have in your body

means that you have in your bloodstream at any given time five grams of sugar

that's it one teaspoon of sugar is all you want in your bloodstream at a time

that's all your brain can handle so going from the lower end of this to the

upper end of this is about a span of 20 milligrams of sugar that's one gram that

is how much your blood sugar can fluctuate before it becomes a reason for

your body to respond and change before it becomes an emergency if you will it's

not getting a little bit outside it's not really an emergency but the body

will respond it will try to keep it within this level which is about 1 gram

difference so that's a fifth of a teaspoon and how much sugar is in a coke

40 (grams) okay so if you're going to can only fluctuate if you're not sure you can

fluctuate one gram and you dump in 40 grams of something that will be absorbed

in 15 minutes do you think that's a bit of a stress to the body because it's

never in the history of mankind has it been exposed to 40 grams of liquid sugar

that just goes rushing straight into the bloodstream so this is what happens with

real food now I'll just draw on top of this now let's say that you have

a cup of coffee with a little sugar in it and you have donuts and a coca-cola

or apple juice for breakfast so now your blood sugar let's say that this

is a hundred 200 300 400 your blood sugar can very very quickly get up to

about three four hundred and it will do it even faster than this it will it will

happen in 15-20 minutes remember we said this is an emergency what has

to happen what is the body going to do about this emergency it's

going to release a lot of insulin exactly and because this is an emergency

it's not going to hold back it's going to dump all the insulin and can

basically to try to get this craziness under control so with this much insulin

in the blood stream assisting the sugar getting into the cells how quickly is

the blood sugar going to drop almost instantaneously it's going to drop as

fast as it came up so the blood sugar comes crashing down and then it gets to

the normal level of 100 do you think with this much insulin and going down at

this rate do you think it's going to stop smoothly right around the hundred

and flatten out? it's going to keep going it's going to keep going and then

eventually it will taper off because now we have an emergency on the other side

so what is this called what's the name for this this place when your blood

sugar is really low

listen hypoglycemia exactly what does it feel like when you have hypoglycemia

sluggish irritable cranky and what do you get cravings why do you get cravings

because this is very unhealthy the brain doesn't work so the brain says give me

some fuel quickly and what's the fastest source more coca-cola more sugar more

starch more juice give me something quick so that I can come back to life so

then you have some other snack or a muffin or something and up it goes and

then it shoots back down and up and down this people who have hypoglycemia they

really cannot develop hypoglycemia without this mechanism this is the cause

of hypoglycemia it's the roller coaster the craziness of all these swings in

blood sugar okay so one more little footnote what happens to all of these

calories that you ingested remember we said when they're ingested into the

bloodstream faster than you can burn it and then all this insulin shoves them

out into the cell but less than an hour has passed and in that hour you've only

burned about a hundred calories so the excess has to be converted to fat so

even though you've converted all these calories too fat you're still having

cravings because the reverse process is too slow and your body needs in brain it

needs this fuel fast it's going to tell you

some more sugar give me some more blood sugar okay so this is the devastating

roller coaster that's the foundation of developing diabetes and virtually half

of all the diseases known to mankind who has heard of insulin resistance insulin

resistance is also known as pre-diabetes and we'll cover some numbers here in a

minute but here's basically how it works you have a little diagram but i'll try

to draw it as we go i'll just draw the one so here is here is the cell and the

cell has a membrane and out around here are sugar molecules and we'll just draw

them around for simplicity so we have some sugar molecules out here and the

cell needs the sugar inside because nothing happens in the body until the

energy is inside the cell so now we need something called an insulin receptor and

here is the insulin receptor and it looks like that let's say and then comes

around and I'll keep drawing colors here then we have insulin and we'll just

draw that as a triangle and insulin floats around and then insulin makes its

way and attaches to the receptor and it causes a confirmation change so now this

this channel is available to process and transport glucose so here comes a

glucose molecule before it was just floating around but now because of the

insulin it can get in the cell so inside the cell we need to

maintain a certain amount of glucose to create energy for the metabolic

processes and the life of the cell but we only need so much at a time so that's

why the fuel supply needs to be gradual and that's why again the sugar is so

devastating because it's not gradual it just it's an avalanche so we have let me

draw a few more of these so there's a receptor there's a receptor there's a

receptor and there's a receptor so in order to process and get a gradual

supply of sugar we need a certain amount of receptors and we need a certain

amount of insulin so hypothetically speaking for for illustration purposes

this amount of receptors and this amount of insulin will provide that much sugar

for the cell and that will maintain the processes now we have a bunch of

coca-cola and donuts and junk food and syrup and all of a sudden we have five

times as much sugar in the bloodstream

here's all that sugar and it's just banging on the door to get into the

cell and there's some insulin receptors that are attaching and they're

allowing the sugar to get into the cell but with this much sugar around pretty

soon the cell is going to be saturated and it's going to say well you know hold

off guys I don't need that much so what's the cell going to do we know the

principle of use it or lose it that the body will always only replenish the

resources that it needs and if there's this much sugar the cell doesn't need

this many receptors so there's two steps it's going to turn down its sensitivity

it's going to turn down his allowance so it's going to say for every insulin

molecule I'm only going to let in half as many sugar molecules that's the first

step of insulin resistance the second step is that it's going to say you know

with this much sugar I don't need all these receptors I can get with this much

sugar I can get all the sugar I want inside the cell with half as many

receptors because when it rains it pours so imagine that you had a cabin and you

were living off the land and the only water that you had was rain water and so

every time it rained you had a hundred buckets and you would go put the buckets

out and collect the rainwater and you get that much water in each bucket and

then you collected all the buckets and you put them in and you got four buckets

worth of water and you for a week and then hopefully it rained

again within the next week what would happen if it was always raining it was

always pouring down would you still put out a hundred buckets or would you just

sit on the porch and stick a bucket out when you needed some that's what the

cell is doing when it's raining too when it's too much when it's a abundant

availability it's not going to make as many receptors that's called

down-regulation of receptors and it's one of the most crucial principles in

physiology that your body will adapt to your environment so diabetes is not a

disease it's an adaptation and nothing more it's a physiological adaptation and

also what happens now we still have all this sugar in the bloodstream what did

we say about too much blood sugar in the bloodstream we said

it's an emergency the brain will go into a coma so now we have a challenging

situation because the brain needs to get the sugar out of the blood stream but

the cells don't want it so now the brain says to the pancreas we need to get this

out of here make more insulin make a whole bunch of insulin and if you make

enough you can cram all that into the cell and you can turn it all into fat

but in the long run you're pushing the system so hard it's going to break

because if the pancreas is always being made to

use more and more and more insulin and the cell is becoming more and more

insulin resistant then you're pushing the system from two directions and it

the system doesn't want to play like that so eventually what happens is the

pancreas burns out and you have so much insulin resistance in the cells that the

pancreas can't keep up making enough insulin and that's that's the end stage

of insulin resistance and pre-diabetes and if you push this just a little bit

further now the pancreas breaks down and stops making insulin all together and

you have just developed type 2 diabetes insulin dependent now your body can't

make insulin at all or very very limited amount and certainly not enough for

insulin resistant cells so now all this insulin is gone all the blood sugar is

still there and now the cell isn't getting any sugar now the sugar is

saying hey where my sugar go and now it starts making new receptors it starts to

up-regulate the receptors but it's too late because there is no insulin to

transport it across and this is why diabetes is called starvation in the

midst of plenty because now you have all this food in the bloodstream but none of

it is getting into the cell so the initial stage diabetes people will

weight before then figured out that they can't make insulin all right so the

important thing to realize about this is that your body is magnificent it's a

healing machine it's amazing if it down regulates something it can upregulate it

again so what has to happen to this picture as long as you have some

pancreas function left you can salvage it but you have to get rid of the

insulin resistance so what do you have to do you have to balance your blood

sugar you have to get back to your hunter-gatherer diet and make sure that

the insulin gets into the sugar gets into the bloodstream very very gradually

and the second thing you have to do is exercise you have to move and why is

that because during exercise something magical happens and these cells can

start taking in glucose without insulin or with extremely small amounts okay

so I'll take questions afterwards if there's any part of this that's

unclear but remember it's all about use or lose it and that holds true for

cells and receptors also and up-regulation and down-regulation is a

crucial mechanism of all cells in the body so one favorite cartoon again

Glasbergen this lady is talking to the doctor says I think diabetes is

affecting my eyesight I have trouble seeing the consequences of poor food

choices I love it so how does the how does this problem occur in the first

place and there's a lot of talk about something called glycemic index and

we'll talk very very quickly about what that is it basically measures how soon

after you eat something has that been converted into sugar and enter the blood

so if something is converted very slowly and absorbed very slowly it's said to

have a low glycemic index so low glycemic index or things like fat

protein whole foods vegetables meat fish and nuts in other words most of the

things that that nature produces in their whole form something that is

processed something that will doesn't need much digestion that is almost sugar

as you eat it will get into the bloodstream almost instantly and that's

called a high glycemic index so when you want to start controlling this you need

to look at glycemic indexes and you want to keep them... if you want to

correct a situation that's already out of hand you need to give very very very

low glycemic index it you basically cannot

any sugar or starch or anything like that and don't be fooled when they say

whole wheat or complex carbohydrates because it is still high glycemic index

food it will still get out very very quickly and in between there's some

medium glycemic index those would basically be beans and whole fruit and

let me make a note there that while a whole fruit has a medium glycemic index

if you juice it it becomes a high glycemic index because you break up the

cell walls and you take away all the fiber and all the sugar becomes

available instantly so the juice is not the same thing as a fruit and when they

say made from that means it's not what it used to be simple as that and another

note on I just use milk as an example that because fat takes longer to process

and milk has both fat and lactose in it which is a sugar then if you drink whole

milk preferably raw whole milk then the fat will balance out the sugar so it

becomes a medium glycemic index whereas if you drink a skim milk you've taken

all the fat away so there's nothing to buffer the sugar and that becomes a high

glycemic index okay so understand that the principles and then you can figure

things out for yourself so now is the time to shake you up and scare you a

little bit and the people in this room you already know a lot about this I can

tell but think about people you know and take this to heart and realize that a

lot of what we're talking about in all these sessions they kind of

applies across the board even though we're just talking about diabetes today

side effects and complications diabetes is the primary or contributing cause of

death and 231,000 cases in 2007 that's a lot of people the primary or

contributing cause of death estimated costs 174 billion dollars and that's

medical costs and work loss and disability so it's not just the expense

but at some point people are unable to maintain that work and they they're

disabled which means they can't really enjoy life at all nervous system damage

occurs in sixty to seventy percent of diabetes that means that the sugar is

the sugar in the bloodstream is so much above where it's supposed to be that it

starts penetrating the tissues around it and it causes... when and sugar in the

tissues attract water and causes swelling so that's why you have vascular

problems and neurological problems because the vascularity... that the blood

is around the nerves as well so it's going to choke off clothes off blood

vessels and nerves and that is why diabetes is also the leading cause of

blindness because the blood vessels in the retina are so fine and so sensitive

the diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness there's 4.2 million

people with diabetic retinopathy a leading cause of kidney failure with two

hundred two thousand people in chronic dialysis they have to have they don't

have any kidney function they have to have them filter because of

diabetes and it's again the vascular problem blood vessels swelling it's the

leading cause of amputation 65 thousand seven hundred cases of a complete leg

amputation and there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of cases where

they start taking off one toe at a time because they lose their control they

lose the vascularity so whenever they hit something and break something or

break the skin it doesn't heal again okay the brain is shut off from the body

part means it can't do its business anymore it also increases risk of heart

disease stroke dental disease coma pneumonia influenza and depression do

you need any more reasons okay this this is what quality of life is about and

we're talking about something that affects a huge huge portion of the

population so do you know anyone with insulin resistance someone who is

pre-diabetic go ahead and just write down five people that you care about who

could benefit from what you just learn just go down and scribble down some

names real quick so consider it letting these people know what we talked about

and consider bringing them next time that we talk about this or related topic

because it can save their life this is serious business let's look at the

prevalence because if you don't think that you know anybody or that you're in

good shape then this is the prevalence in 2010 and this is from the National

Institute of Health.gov website the National diabetes information

clearinghouse diabetes affects 8.3% of the population

that's 25 million eight hundred thousand people right now that have to take

insulin then when we get up to ages above 65 years old it affects 26.9

percent of the population that are diabetic that's ten million nine hundred

thousand people that's that's a huge number it's almost becoming the norm for

people above a certain age to get these conditions and we've seen that it's

about up-regulation down-regulate regulation is a physiological adaptation

to chronic stupidity that's all it is and it's it's a stupidity that is

recommended by the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart

Association and the four food groups and so on prediabetes these are people who

are insulin resistance with a greater risk it's basically a matter of time

before they develop this and keep in mind when we talk about these numbers

that we are the first generation to be exposed at this level that the

pre-diabetic people a lot of them will become diabetic because this is the

first time we've eaten like this thirty-five percent of adults 20 years

or older or pre-diabetic that's 79 million people in this country alone or

pre-diabetic those are some scary numbers and when you get to the elderly

65 or older its fifty percent one in two and we've just talked about the side

effects and complications so these people are heading for

and it is completely reversible I'm not going to tell you that a hundred percent

of diabetes can be reversed type 1 we don't really know if anyone can be

helped but I would venture to say that ninety-eight percent or more of type 2

diabetes is completely reversible if you have any insulin production at all left

then it's just a matter of life style what factors affect insulin resistance well

we talked about food anything with a high glycemic index is going to make

sugar rush into the bloodstream and stress the system and cause a

physiological adaptation so that's the number one but we also need to

understand that stress raises cortisol whenever you're stressed your body

believes that it has to perform extra work that there's an emergency it has to

defend itself against and it's going to need energy to expend during this

emergency so he will tell all your tissues to raise the blood sugar it will

start breaking down protein to convert some of that into blood sugar and it

will give you cravings so that you can raise your blood sugar even more that's

why people who are stressed have cravings it's because of cortisol there

are drugs there are some specifically called techwin and seroquel that have

been linked to developing diabetes but anything with cortisone corticosteroid

the medical form of cortisone is the version of human cortisol so anytime

that you take those drugs which are supposed to be anti-inflammatory you

also raise your blood sugar and you're setting yourself up for

insulin resistance now let's look at the good side how do we help it exercise

exercise exercise okay first of all you're burning off sugar but secondly

you're reducing insulin resistance because your cells become more sensitive

to insulin when you're exercising you need none or very little insulin to

absorb the sugar so most most type 2 diabetes you can pretty much get off

insulin instantly if you just start exercising enough and keeping your blood

sugar the food's level good heart rate variability because the things we're

talking about in this office breathing and heart rate variability it is linked

to all of these mechanisms so when you increase your heart rate variability you

reduce your stress you reduce your cortisol and it has been inversely

linked to development of diabetes chiropractic reduces stress for many

reasons and we'll talk about that separately because there's a lot of

neurological mechanisms but it's known that chiropractic reduces stress people

feel better we'll talk about the details and breathing exercises like I said

heart rate variability breathing exercises feeling good feeling relaxed

practicing relaxation visualizations they all reduce stress and all of that

will help with reducing insulin resistance so now I think I've got you

sort of paying attention and thinking that you know this is more than than

just a curiosity so being a chiropractor and talking about this. This is my

passion this is what it's all about it's the big picture back pain shmack pain

it's like who cares that's back pain just indicates that there's something in

the body that isn't working that's the tip of the ice

the diabetes and the heart disease and the strokes and all of that stuff that's

the bigger picture that's what we're really working for and as you well know

chiropractic affects the brain it reduces stress and it helps with all of

these things ok so in chiropractic the stage one that's just initial crisis

care that's just reversing a pain breaking the patterns and getting people

feeling better unfortunately most people think it's just about pain so as soon as

they feel better they think they're all better and then they go get diabetes or

heart disease or something else few years later but what we're talking about

is to continue this until everything in the body that supposed to work is

working so stage two is stabilization care that means that we keep going past

the pain we work on the nervous system we work on exercising and doing specific

things to balance out nervous system to become more stable a more stable nervous

system and brain can handle stress and it can turn off and balance sympathetic

parasympathetic better it's all nervous system and then stage 3 once we get up

to a good level now we need to maintain that lifestyle we get maintenance

chiropractic for peak performance and we keep doing all the right things to

maintain top function check out the previous talk we did on heart rate

variability and you can see how it affects immune system immune globulin is

how it affects cortisol DHEA how it effects cognitive performance and

reaction time we're truly talking peak performance so it's it's not about pain

that's just the tiny little thing we get started with it's about quality of life

at any age so the people who are still young and don't have many symptoms

that's the time to start taking care of things by the time you're

65 and you're 40 years into a disease process you already have so much

degeneration that it's much much much harder to turn it around to get a

quality life again so if there are any questions we'll take those now and other

than that I would like to thank you very much for coming