Diabesity Epidemic Part II: Why Conventional Medicine Makes It Worse
This may surprise you, but many of the methods used to lower blood sugar such as insulin or oral hypoglycemic drugs actually make the problem worse.Type 2 diabetes is a disease of too much, not too little, insulin. Insulin is the real driver of problems with diabesity. That means you don't simply need more insulin in your blood to lower your blood sugar. Instead, what you need to do is treat the underlying causes that gave rise to the high blood sugar and insulin in the first place. And that is insulin resistance. Insulin Resistance: The Real Cause of Diabesity Insulin resistance occurs when your diet is full of empty calories and has an abundance of quickly absorbed sugars, liquid calories (ii), and carbohydrates (like bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes). When this happens, your cells slowly become resistant to the effects of insulin. You need more and more to do the same job of keeping your blood sugar even. Thus you develop insulin resistance. High insulin levels are the first sign of a problem. The higher your insulin levels are, the worse your insulin resistance. As a result your body starts to age and deteriorate. In fact insulin resistance is the single most important phenomena that leads to rapid and premature aging and all its resultant diseases including heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer.(iii),(iv) As your insulin levels increase it leads to an appetite that is out of control, increasing weight gain around the belly, more inflammation and oxidative stress, and myriad downstream effects including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, low HDL, high triglycerides (v), weight gain around the middle, thickening of the blood, and increased rates of cancer, Alzheimer's, and depression. These are all a result of insulin resistance and too much insulin. Elevated blood sugar is not the source of the problem. Understanding this has a profound impact on the whole way we think about diabesity. It's not simply a matter of shifting our focus from one type of medication to another. This completely alters the fundamental way we understand the disease. In fact, in some sense, diabesity isn't a "disease" at all. It's simply a continuum that stretches from optimal health to full-blown illness. Let me take a few moments to explain this, because it is essential for you to understand if you want to fully realize the potential of this new paradigm to prevent or reverse diabesity. The Continuum Concept Most medicine is based on clear-cut, on-or-off, yes-or-no diagnoses. Most conventional doctors are taught that you have a disease or you don't, you have diabetes or you don't. There are no gray areas. This approach is not only misguided, it is dangerous, because it misses the underlying causes and more subtle manifestations of illness. Practicing medicine this way completely ignores one of the most fundamental laws of physiology, biology, and disease: The continuum concept. There is a continuum from optimal health to hidden imbalance to serious dysfunction to disease. Anywhere along that continuum, we can intervene and reverse the process. The sooner we address it, the better. When it comes to diabesity most doctors just follow blood sugar, which actually rises very late in the disease process. Conventional medicine tells us if your blood sugar is 90 or 110, you don't have diabetes; if it is over 126, you do have diabetes. But these distinctions are completely arbitrary, and they do nothing to help treat impending problems.
The truth is the road to diabetes starts as early as childhood. By the time you get diagnosed with diabetes, your problems with insulin and blood sugar could have been detected twenty to thirty years earlier.I remember one patient, Daren, came to see me with mildly elevated blood sugar. I asked Daren if he had seen his doctor about this. He said, "Yes". I then asked "What did your doctor say?" Daren's doctor told him, "We are going to wait and watch until your blood sugar is more elevated, then we are going to treat you with medication for diabetes." Given our current level of scientific understanding of diabesity, I find this concept of watching and waiting until more serious disease occurs unfortunate, misguided, and in some cases it's deadly. It is also why diabesity is so woefully and inadequately diagnosed and treated. Millions of Americans are suffering needlessly from chronic symptoms. Nearly half of all diabetics are undiagnosed. Nearly ALL of the 100 million Americans with pre-diabetes are undiagnosed. Why? Most doctors just don't know how to diagnose it, or what to do about it, because there is no good drug treatment. The truth is the road to diabetes starts as early as childhood.(vi) We now know that there is an epidemic of type 2 diabetes in children as young as eight years old (vii), and pediatric diabetic specialists who used to only care for type 1 diabetes, now find their offices are overwhelmed with cases of type 2 diabetes. By the time you get diagnosed with diabetes you have had problems with insulin and blood sugar that could have been detected twenty to thirty years earlier. That is, if you knew where to look, which most doctors are not trained to do. Insulin resistance and diabesity is often accompanied by:
- Belly fat
- Fatigue after meals
- Sugar cravings
- High triglycerides
- Low HDL
- High blood pressure
- Problems with blood clotting
- Increased inflammation
- What is causing our insulin resistance?
- How can we address the fundamental underlying problem of our bodies resisting the effects of its own insulin?
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