Insulin Resistance as a root cause behind Chronic Diseases
Welcome to Active Human’s 11th newsletter.
As you know we are learning about root causes behind our lifestyle diseases.
5 major root causes behind most chronic and lifestyle diseases are:
Insulins Resistance
Inflammation
Oxidative stress
Oversensitive Nervous system (Stress and Anxiety)
Bad Gut health (Leaky Gut and Dysbiosis)
Most of the time they coexist or get interlinked or by the time you know about them, one builds another. But the good thing is they are the measurable root causes that can be corrected.
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Today, I want to deep dive into Insulin Resistance.
By now most of you know what is insulin resistance if not this previous newsletter explains it well. (link)
There are some known reasons why we develop insulin resistance. The most common are:
Sedentary lifestyle and not having enough functional movement spread across a day.
Food that spikes glucose and insulin too much and eating such food frequently.
Chronic stress puts our body in survival mode so the body starts storing more.
Hormones disbalance, low-degree infections, and inflammations in our body.
Why knowing about insulin resistance is important:
Once we develop insulin resistance, the same food which supposed to give us energy fails to give us enough energy, rather glucose starts converting to glycogen and starts converting to fats and starts storing in the liver and body.
Insulin is a hormone that facilitates other functions too, too much insulin in the blood will over-sensitize those biochemical processes in our body.
People with high insulin tend to get more kidney infections, have low immunity, gain unwanted weight, develop fatty livers, develop high blood pressure, and many more over a period of time.
So, how do you check if you may have Insulin Resistance? What are the signs:
Have more fat around your belly?
Have high blood pressure or blood triglycerides?
Have a family history of heart disease, Insulin resistance, or type 2 diabetes?
Have patches of darker-color skin or little bumps of skin (“skin tags”) at your neck, armpits, or other areas?
Have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS; for women) or erectile dysfunction (for men)?
Have fatigue even after eating a meal or have frequent urination.
One way to check Insulin resistance is to check an empty stomach blood insulin level (fasting insulin) and then 2 hrs. after breakfast (Insulin PP) the same day. Currently in India, Lab has not set a healthy range of fasting insulin and insulin PP but in functional nutrition, we follow fasting insulin < 5 μIU/ml and Insulin PP <30 μIU/ml is to be considered optimal. If your blood report has calculated Homa -IR2, then its value should be less than 1.8.
There are some simple clinically proven hacks to control and reverse Insulin resistance.
Exercise and functional movement: To make our cells insulin sensitive, we need to burn glucose stored inside them, exercise and functional movement spread across the day help a lot. You can pick 10k steps a day as your routine which is standard and works.
No sugary milk tea, no fruits, and no sweet things in breakfast: You are by default a little insulin resistant in the morning. High-carb breakfast will give you a lot of glucose in the blood which will not go inside cells and keep circulating for long, this will make you more insulin-resistant.
Eating order: Eat your salad vegetables first then protein and fats and then your carbs. This is proven to give much fewer glucose spikes. Vegetables have natural fiber which slows down glucose absorption.
Healthy Fats: You need healthy fats but not fried food. Because you don’t eat healthy fats that make you crave fried food. Fried food is made with oil reaching high temperatures like 180-220C where even starch and fiber break down and become simple sugars. Feed your body with healthy fats from nuts, peanuts, cashews, avocados, olives, and fatty fish.
Anti-Inflammatory diet: Whenever you can, choose an anti-inflammatory food, avoid food made in oils, avoid dairy, and gluten, and choose more vegetables that are easy to digest. (google anti-inflammatory foods and you will get an idea). Inflammation triggers stress and anxious behavior which makes us eat SOS foods (Salt, Oil, Sugar) which makes us insulin resistant.
Sleep: Your sleep quality determines your body’s Insulin response, if you have weak sleep, taking melatonin or magnesium supplements for a short duration helps. Spend time in the morning sun to get sound sleep at the right time. Sunlight triggers the serotonin conversion to melatonin in the pineal gland. Serotonin first converts to N-acetyl serotonin and then to Melatonin. This conversion cycle takes approx. 16 hours to complete so it’s important to start spending time in Sun as soon as you wake up.
Berberine supplement: This might surprise you, but the Berberine HCL supplement works on high cholesterol and high glucose effectively and is found to be safe. It also reduces inflammation and helps in many areas. It’s a bitter herb that makes our cells more insulin-sensitive.
Hope this year, you will work on your root causes and not on symptoms.
Note: At Active Human, we have started “Reverse Your Chronic Disease (RYCD) Module where we take a scientific approach to arrive at your root cause using blood report analysis (advance tests) and then set protocol to reduce and cure your root cause. It is a process and not a quick fix and it takes 3-6 months to understand and work on the root cause and start seeing results. If you know someone who has any kind of lifestyle disease, please help me spread the word and help them reach out to me at manishkbhagwani@gmail.com. We are a team of healers who follow a functional medicine and nutrition approach.
See you next Saturday.
Manish Bhagwani,
Human → Active Human