Tag: diabetes Posts

It’s widely recognized nowadays that many people have a condition known as insulin resistance. Internally, their cells have become desensitized to insulin, which ultimately forces the body to create more of it in order to meet the cellular demands on the body (insulin is required to move glucose into the cells for usage). Unfortunately though, high insulin levels lead to heart disease, type II diabetes, obesity (or a difficulty in losing weight), high blood pressure, and are potentially implicated in several cancers, including breast. This metabolic condition is known in the literature as “metabolic syndrome” or “syndrome x”, but unfortunately nobody has been able to determine a cause or a successful treatment for it. Exercise tends to re-sensitize muscle cells to insulin, but only temporarily. Reducing carbohydrates naturally reduces insulin levels, which helps most people lose weight and reduce the symptoms of hyperinsulinemia (chronically high levels of insulin in the […]

The American Heart association has just gone on record as recommending that sugar consumption be drastically reduced. I should point out that this is in stark contrast to their longly held assertions that saturated fat is the primary cause of heart disease, and carbohydrates essentially are harmless. So this is a warning to everyone that you should limit your sugar intake in the interest of good health. I personally wouldn’t be surprised at all if you’ll continue to see these ongoing shifts in policy, up to the point where the policy has completely changed to recommend that refined carbohydrates be cut-out or severely limited as well. I mean, if the research ultimately shows that refined carbohydrate (including sugar) was the significant contributor to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and the official position of the AHA was that these foods should form the basis of all heart-healthy diets, there could be […]

Gary asked me to write a follow-up post to my last entry, so here goes. I’ll also point out that I’m not a doctor, and this information is mostly my opinion based on all the research I’ve done over the years. In terms of Type-II diabetes and obesity, here’s what the research seems to show currently (which may change as research continues): Type-II diabetes is caused by insulin resistance at the cellular level, which in turn increases the body’s requirement for insulin. If the pancreas can’t keep up, additional insulin is required At it’s core, the prime defect in obesity appears to be a relative sensitivity difference between fat cells and muscle cells. That is, fat cells become slightly more sensitive to insulin when compared to muscle cells, which ultimately causes glucose in the blood to be directed away from muscle cells and into fat cells. This leads to a […]

There has been a lot of talk in the Twitterverse lately regarding diabetes, so I thought I’d write a small entry dedicated to it. While I don’t suffer from diabetes, I do a lot of research in the area of something called metabolic syndrome, which in a lot of ways directly relates to diabetes. Prior to around 1980 or so, there were two forms of diabetes. The lay public generally referred to these as juvenile diabetes, which many people essentially were born with (or diagnosed with at an early age), and adult-onset diabetes, which was usually diagnosed later in life. Nowadays we call juvenile diabetes Type-I diabetes, and adult-onset diabetes Type-II, mainly because it affects so many children as well. Nobody is really sure why, unfortunately. Some researchers argue it’s because we now live in what’s called a “Toxic Food Environment”, as evidenced by the fast food establishments on every […]

I was coming into work this morning, and I read this on the front page of the Vancouver Sun. This is pretty big news in the medical community. Apparently some researchers at UofT have found a way to reverse diabetes in Type 1 diabetic mice. This is exciting because it was always thought that type I diabetic people lost the ability to produce insulin because their own immune system completely destroyed the beta cells in the pancreas. However, the beta cells in these mice became active again once they had an injection. Here’s the original article. Also surprising is that this approach also seems to remove the symptoms of type II diabetes (sometimes called hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance). In Type II, the body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin. So, to reduce the blood sugar in your body, your pancreas has to secrete far larger amounts than normal. This […]