Tag: insulin-resistance Posts

The more research that’s published, the more evidence I seem to run into that indicates insulin resistance (and consequently obesity) seems to be related to oxidative stress and/or nutritional deficiencies. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the strange paradoxes that most theories generally can’t explain is why obesity often goes hand in hand with poor nutrition. That is, if obesity is caused solely by overeating, then we should see the lack of obesity in populations where food is scarce or nutrient poor. As several populations have shown us (most notably the Pima Indians), that isn’t always the case. Several current theories say that obesity is actually caused by nutritional deficiencies, which would jive with the observations above. Several vitamins/minerals that have been implicated in insulin control include chromium, vitamin C, calcium, and more recently vitamin D. The research around vitamin D and insulin resistance is actually fairly interesting. As […]

I’ve been writing about obesity and something called hyper-insulinemia for about as long as I can remember. For those of you who don’t know, many people nowadays have something called metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of symptoms including obesity, high blood pressure, elevated insulin levels, and high cholesterol. The main component of all of these is something called hyper-insulinemia (which is also called insulin resistance). What I just wrote is pretty much accepted as fact nowadays. What is still up for debate is a) whether insulin resistance is the cause or the effect of obesity and b) whether insulin plays a larger role in weight loss than originally believed. You see, there are two competing genres in this war on the bulge. On one side of the ring you have those people who believe a calorie is a calorie, and the only thing required to lose weight is a […]

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 […]

A few weeks ago I went into the doctor’s office to get a pile of tests done on myself. For those of you that remember, last year I came down with a clostridium difficile infection, which is a superbug that typically only affects people who end up in hospitals on broad spectrum antibiotics. When I was in the hospital last year with pneumonia, I ended up getting it, and it was a very nasty experience that took three rounds of antibiotics to get rid of. That being said, my stomach has never really been the same, and I frequently have an upset stomach or cramps still. Since C. Diff. has about a 30% recurrence rate (that is, in 30% of people who are cured, it usually comes back), I wanted to get another round of tests to make sure it hadn’t returned. Also, since C. Diff typically only affects older […]

I picked up a book the other day that I’ve been meaning to read for a few months now. It is a book by a scientific journalist named Gary Taubes entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) (although after reading it, I think a more appropriate title might be something like “The People’s History Of Diet And Nutrition.”) For those of you who follow nutritional research, you may remember Gary from a controversial article he wrote in 2002 in the New York Times called ‘What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?” In that article, he proposed an alternative nutritional hypothesis – that it wasn’t fat that ultimately caused obesity or led to the current epidemics of heart disease and diabetes, but it was instead largely influenced by dietary carbohydrates. If there is some truth in that hypothesis (and a great […]

Part of the reason I wrote the last article on insulin resistance is so I could continue to talk about that subject without continually explaining what it is I was talking about. Sometime around the year 2003, there was a pretty seminal study performed that had an undesirable, although extremely fascinating outcome. The researchers at the time were trying to guage the body’s insulin response to various foods. When they came to apple pie though, they were in for a surprise: Just half a teaspoon of cinnamon a day significantly reduces blood sugar levels in diabetics, a new study has found. The effect, which can be produced even by soaking a cinnamon stick your tea, could also benefit millions of non-diabetics who have blood sugar problem but are unaware of it. The discovery was initially made by accident, by Richard Anderson at the US Department of Agriculture’s Human Nutrition Research […]

Sylvain sent me this link today that basically concluded that one or more cans of diet soda can lead to health risks such as the metabolic syndrome “We found that one or more sodas per day increases your risk of new-onset metabolic syndrome by about 45 per cent, and it did not seem to matter if it was regular or diet,” Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, senior investigator for the Framingham Heart Study, said Monday from Boston. .. The study included nearly 9,000 observations of middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times. The study looked at how many 355-millilitre cans of cola or other soft drinks a participant consumed each day. The researchers found that compared to those who drank less than one can per day, subjects who downed one or more soft drinks daily had a: 31 per cent greater risk of becoming obese (with a body […]