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INSULIN RESISTANCE
By
Ron Rothenberg, M.D.
What is the major cause of almost all illness? Is it poor diet? Is it lack of exercise? Is it genetics? Is it declining hormone levels? Is it Glycation, the effect of sugar on your DNA and production of AGE's (Advanced Glycation End products)? If you answered "yes" to all of the above you are correct. Of course there are other causes as well, such as free radicals and telomere loss.
Why do the problems listed above cause illness and the degenerative disease of aging? The common factor is Insulin Resistance.
Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas that is essential for life. It carries the glucose (sugar) in the blood into the cells. The cells need glucose to produce energy to perform whatever function they do. For example, heart cells pump and brain cells think.
Type I or childhood onset diabetes is the result of the pancreas not producing insulin. Without insulin replacement, type I diabetes is a fatal disease. We all need some insulin.
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Type II or adult onset diabetes is actually the opposite situation. The pancreas makes insulin but the cells become resistant to the action of insulin. So the pancreas makes more insulin. Persistent elevated levels of insulin increase insulin resistance and a viscous cycle is created. Type II diabetes is a model of premature aging.
Insulin is the storage hormone and in addition to bringing glucose into the cells, it stores energy as fat. Our Paleolithic ancestors especially needed this fat storage. Famine was always around the corner and if you could store fat when you ate carbohydrates, you might live through the famine and survive to reproductive age, where your DNA would get passed on to the next generation.
So, it was a survival advantage for our ancestors to be resistant to insulin and to store fat and even to have type II diabetes. The complications of Type II diabetes really did not matter then, since life was hard (saber-tooth tigers, infectious disease) and life expectancy was only to 20 years of age. People usually didn't live long enough for the diabetes to become a medical problem.
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Even if we do not develop type II diabetes, our insulin resistance increases every year as we age unless we faithfully follow an anti-aging program. With insulin resistance we store more and more fat when we eat carbohydrates, especially the high Glycemic index carbohydrates. I'm sure you know the "hit list" by now: Bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, sugar, corn, carrots, bananas, pineapples, mangoes….
With increasing insulin resistance comes increased fat storage especially "visceral fat" which is the fat around the internal abdominal organs. This is associated with increased cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes and type II diabetes.
In this month's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism there is a fascinating study from Stanford and UCSF School of medicine.
Insulin Resistance as a Predictor of Age-Related Diseases RANCESCO S. FACCHINI, NANCY HUA, FAHIM ABBASI, AND GERALD M. REAVEN. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 86(8):3574-3578
(continued on page two)
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