What Is Insulin Resistance? (Diet Is Very Important!)

What is insulin resistance? A lot of people have heard of insulin resistance

they know that it's a big problem but how big a problem is it and where

does it come from is insulin a bad thing? well today we're going to talk about all

these things so that you understand it and hopefully so that you understand it

well enough to help others start understanding it because this is maybe

the biggest health problem that we have in the Western world

stay tuned (logo) insulin resistance is exactly what it sounds like it's the body's

resistance to insulin insulin is a good thing it's been around for as long as

life has been around and it helps us survive the purpose of insulin is to

store the excess whenever we have feast versus famine when there's a feast and

we have some extra then the insulin is there to store it so insulin is an

anabolic hormone anabolic means to build up and what are we building up we're

building up tissues we're building up reserves we're building muscles we're

building fat we're building up anything that can help us survive later so when

we have plenty we want to save for a rainy day so that later when we don't

have so much we can start using those stores we can break down the stores and

that's called catabolic but today we're going to talk about the anabolic part

because that's what insulin is. the purpose of everything that you eat is to turn that

food into fuel and building blocks and insulin has to do with both but when we

talk about insulin resistance we're primarily concerned about the fuel apart

so anytime that you eat something that raises blood sugar that sugar is in the

bloodstream and it can't get into the cell without the help of insulin so

insulin is like a key it's a hormone that plugs into the lock and it opens up

the door so the glucose can get inside the cell and

this is a very tightly very precisely regulated process it doesn't happen by

itself and remember that insulin is an anabolic hormone it stores the excess so

when we eat carbohydrates then there is an enormous response of insulin because

that purpose of that carbohydrate is part of it is fuel in the moment but

most of it gets converted into fat that we can put in storage and use for later

protein also has a moderate insulin response because protein also gets

turned into tissues we use it to build tissues and muscles but fat doesn't have

any insulin response to speak of it's virtually zero because fat doesn't get

turned into storage or into tissue it is already the form that the body needs it

which is fuel so when we eat carbs we want to turn it into fat for future use

but the fat itself is already fuel so it doesn't have an insulin response to

it everything that you eat is to become blood sugar one way or another and the

body likes it to be in a very very narrow range and if you eat after a meal

it should be somewhere between 80 to 120 if it's been awhile since you ate then

it should be somewhere probably between 75 and 95 a fasting blood glucose and

that's a very very narrow band that means that at any given time you have it

about one teaspoon of sugar in your bloodstream so anything more than that

is excess and it has to be stored and that's what the insulin does and why

does the body want the blood glucose so tightly regulated because excess is

toxic to the brain and diabetic without insulin where the blood sugar go

through the roof they can end up in a coma or if they take too much insulin so

their blood sugar plummets they can also end up in a coma so on the one hand it's

toxic on the other hand it is too low to where the body the brain doesn't have

enough fuel to function that's why the brain functions the best it can do the

things it needs to do at a very steady supply it's like you throw a log on the

fire and it gives a steady stream of warmth for for many many hours

carbohydrates is more like you throw a can of gasoline on the fire and it all

burns up in an instant so if we want to capture that all that energy then we

have to be able to convert it to something else and store it so that's

what's happening so let's look at a normal situation with a cell so this

here is a cell and inside it I've written little triangles that are

supposed to be glucose that's not their normal shape but it's just easier to

draw that way and we have a small number then some of that glucose gets converted

into fat and some of the fat is circulating around on its own but in

both cases we have just enough for that cell to function for a while and then

outside the cell we have more glucose that's the blood glucose it hasn't

entered the cell yet and the red circles are insulin and the insulin is there to

assist the glucose to enter the cell so as we use up some glucose inside the

cell then it needs to be replenished so that the cell has fuel for its continued

function and this would be a normal situation it's tightly regulated it's a

flow and it's an ongoing process that gives the body what it needs and not too

much not too little but when we start eating a lot of carbohydrates and we

start eating many many times a day and we start eating snacks in between

now we have more carbohydrate we have more glucose so that's all of these

little triangles in the cell is jam-packed with glucose and when

the cell can't use that glucose it starts converting it into fat and it

starts storing inside the cell first as fat and then it starts spilling over so

that it gets into the blood and then it can get into other cells to be stored as

fat anything the body can't use at the time has to be stored and then outside

the cell we still have tons and tons of glucose there's an abundance there's an

excess of glucose outside the cell because we keep eating carbohydrates we

keep eating frequent meals so the body doesn't have a chance to burn through

the stuff that you ate at the previous meal or yesterday so the stuff just

keeps building up but remember in the bloodstream it's toxic the brain can't

handle that much glucose so that's an emergency and the body says hey we got

to get this glucose out of the bloodstream let's make a bunch of

insulin so the more glucose we have the more insulin is needed to push to open

up the door for that glucose to get into the cell but the cell is already full

where is it going to go and this is where the cell becomes insulin resistant

because there is a excess of glucose inside the cell there's an excess of

glucose outside the cell because of the excess glucose outside there's also an

abundance of insulin called hyperinsulinemia there's too much

insulin and all that insulin is trying to push the glucose in but there is no

room and the cell is saying can't take anymore I don't care

how desperate you are to get rid of that glucose in the bloodstream we have all

we can handle that is how insulin resistance happens

and the problem now is because the insulin is a storage hormone it's an

anabolic hormone it works primarily to put things inside the cell rather than

allowing them out then we have all of this fat inside this cell and an inside

a bunch of other fat cells and inside the liver but we can't get to it because

there's too much insulin insulin is a storage hormone it's a one-way hormone

it puts things in it doesn't allow things to get back out so if we look at

the top reasons of why this mechanism happens then it has to do with one blood

glucose when we eat a lot of carbohydrates then we're driving up

glucose on a regular basis but that is typically not enough because there are

lots of cultures around the world that have subsisted on a high carb diet

they've eaten potatoes they've eaten corn they've eaten rice at very very

high levels but they still don't develop insulin resistance or at least not

significantly or at least not in young ages so the second thing that's

required is frequency and if you just eat a couple times a day you could

probably live a long life and eat high carb and not develop insulin resistance

the third factor though is the key and this is where our societies have changed

so much and so quickly and the third reason is sugar because sugar is a

special thing sugar exists in nature in very very limited quantities its present

in vegetables its present in milk its present in fruits but in small

quantities but when we refine it when we start adding it when we extract it a

white crystal stuff and put it in a bag and we add it to catch up and to

dressings and to cookies and ice cream now we're getting many many many times

more than we ever could from nature and what's the problem with

that the problem with sugar is that it is 50% glucose and 50% fructose and the

fructose is a special kind of sugar the glucose can go straight into the

bloodstream and it can be dispersed and every cell in the body can use the

glucose so if you're weighing 200 pounds then you have 200 pounds of cells that

can use glucose so that glucose gets evenly dispersed and it gets burned off

by those cells but the fructose can only be metabolized by the liver so now the

sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose so if you ate a hundred grams of sugar you

got 50 grams of glucose to go evenly but you also have 50 grams of fructose that

can only be metabolized and transformed by the liver and the liver even though

it's a sizable organ it's somewhere around three pounds so the liver now is

getting 70 times more sugar than the rest of the body on average and that is

the overload that breaks the camel's back and the liver is your primary

metabolic organ it's supposed to do hundreds of different things it converts

one thing to another it detoxifies you it handles your proteins it changes

blood blood sugar it detoxifies alcohol it makes glycogen and does all these

different things and now we just threw a 70 times bigger load of sugar onto the

liver so this the the packed cell this is what happens to the liver and so

sugar accelerates insulin resistance many many many times it is even you

could go so far as to say it's difficult to get insulin resistance without sugar

but once you have insulin resistance now you kind of broke the machine you

have a certain carbohydrate tolerance built into the machine but the sugar

broke it and once it's broken now you have to backtrack you have to go much

much further you have to be much much stricter to reverse it then you would

have to be to maintain it and then in the light 1900s I don't know the exact

date 70s 80s somewhere they figured that you know sugar is conceivably the worst

food ever devised by mankind but let's see if we can make it a little bit worse

let's see if we can really ramp it up and create some poison on steroids if

you will and that's when they figured out how to make high fructose corn syrup

because now they developed a cheap sweetener that has a higher rate of

fructose so fructose is the stuff that poisons the liver because they can't go

anywhere else and high fructose corn syrup is anything that has higher than

50% fructose so they just increased the horrendous portion of sugar even a

little bit more and now we're seeing and then you combine that with the low fat

diet and you scare people from fat and all of a sudden we have an epidemic of

epic proportion of insulin resistance and diabetes and obesity and so forth so

there are many ways of figuring out if your insulin resistant and we're going

to talk more in later videos but one of the basic things is to measure your a1c

your a1c your hemoglobin a1c is a three-month average it's a way of

measuring what your blood sugar is on average over a period of three to four

months and if it is below five point three then in my opinion it's good it's

okay you are insulin sensitive and in the medical world if it is between five

point seven and six point four then you are pre

diabetic then your insulin resistance equals pre-diabetes and if it's over 6.5

then you have diabetes and according to current numbers I don't have the exact

ones but approximately 20% of the population is diabetic and according to

official number somewhere around 30 percent are insulin disease resistance

or pre-diabetic what does that mean it means if you don't change something if

you just keep doing what you're doing then if you're pre-diabetic you are more

than likely to become diabetic at some point in time and the official

guidelines suggests that you're okay all the way up to 5.7 but it kind of it's

obvious that it doesn't start at 5.7 you don't just all of a sudden end up there

it's a slippery slope so I would say that you want to start paying attention

as soon as you get over 5.3 now you know that you're developing you're starting

the early signs so instead of waiting for the full-blown diabetes or the

severe insulin resistance why don't we start working at it when you have mild

or slight insulin resistance and just to give you an idea of how widespread this

problem is then you could just look around and imagine the number of

overweight people which is somewhere around three-quarters of the population

in the United States and that matches very very closely to these numbers 20%

diabetic 30% insulin resistant and in my opinion 30% and I'm guessing at the

number of people that have that but just based on overweight people and

lifestyles I would say some around 80% of the population have mild to severe

insulin resistance or diabetes and again if you don't change something then that

pre-diabetes that insulin resistance will continue to get worse and why

should you be concerned because pre-diabetes and

biddies are associated with weight gain increased blood pressure increased risk

of stroke and increased risk of cardiovascular disease so all of the

stuff that kills the most people is associated with insulin resistance and

pre-diabetes when is the best time to stop it when

it's full-blown or in the early stages the answer is pretty obvious so let me

ask you something based on what we've talked about based

on your current understanding of based on what we talked about does this have

anything to do with food and if you paid any attention I think you would say that

yes it has everything to do with food and why am I asking that because when I

went to do get my own blood test done there was a little flyer on the wall

from the CDC government agency Centers for Disease Control and they had a

screening test where they wanted to check and have a little questionnaire to

see if you were insulin resistant and here's what they were asking have you

had a baby that weighed over nine pounds at birth then give yourself a point do

you have a sibling with type-2 diabetes give yourself a point do you have a

parent with type-2 diabetes give yourself a point are you overweight

give yourself five points are you under 65 years of age but you do little to no

exercise then give yourself five points are you between 45 to 64 years old give

yourself five points are you over 65 give yourself nine points and then

they're saying if you are three to eight points then you should watch your

lifestyle you should eat low-fat food you should

eat high grain food you should try to be active don't smoke and lose weight isn't

that great advice eat low-fat because that has no insulin response eat

high grain because that has the most insulin response be active is a good

idea because activity helps the body burned through the glucose that's in the

muscles and the muscles can get the glucose from the bloodstream with less

insulin when you're active so that is a good idea and of course don't smoke

that's not a new thing that's good advice and then they say lose weight and

you're screaming after understanding this I would love to but I can't because

I'm insulin resistant alright they're getting everything backwards the insulin

resistance insulin is a storage hormone it's the insulin that stored the weight

and it's the insulin that keeps you from burning it so that's useless advice

because it's sort of just stating the obvious you would if you could and if

you're nine points or more which the only thing you have to do is to be over

65 to get nine points then you should see your doctor because you're probably

insulin resistant and they're right there the statistics point to that fact

but what they're missing is there's not a single question here about food how

many sodas do you drink how much sugar do you eat do you eat processed foods

none of that all of this means is if you had a baby over nine pounds you produced

a lot of insulin because you ate a lot of carbs if you have a sibling with

type-2 diabetes they ate a lot of carbs so probably you eat a lot of carbs if

you had a parent with type-2 diabetes they ate a lot of carbs so you probably

ate a lot of carbs if you are overweight then you probably ate a lot of carbs if

you are let under 65 and you don't exercise then you probably ate a lot of

carbs but you didn't exercise to give your body a chance to burn it off and

by the time to develop insulin resistance now the exercise is still

beneficial but it can't really fix the problem if you're 45 to 64 then that's

how long you've been alive eating carbs and if you're over 65 years old then

you've had more than 65 years to eat carbs this is what they're saying but

there's no question about food in here and then they tell you eat low fat high

grain etc so based on that based on that complete ignorance it is no mystery why

we have 80 percent overweight people and 80 percent insulin resistance and why

the top killers are things like cardiovascular disease stroke and

diabetes we have to start understanding that it's a storage problem the cells

have too much fuel and in the presence of insulin they can't use it and what's

the medical solution is to give people things to push even more to help the

body push more sugar into the cell to be converted to fat that's the solution and

when the body can't keep up anymore and when the metformin and the glucophage is

aren't enough then we inject them with insulin to try to push even more inside

and it's the exact opposite of the solution so that's how insulin

resistance works we're going to do some more videos on it so that we can expand

and and provide more detail and specific situations if you enjoy this kind of

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tell by now this is a big problem please share this information with anyone that

you care about because it could save their life thanks for watching