insulin resistance and diabetes what is the difference between insulin
resistance and diabetes and is insulin resistance the same thing as
pre-diabetes today we're going to talk about 14 facts that you have to
understand if you want to optimize your health or if you have loved ones or
wanting to improve any of these conditions stay tuned
I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you
want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works
make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss
anything instantly resistance pre-diabetes and
type 2 diabetes is what we're gonna talk about today the number one thing to know
is that it affects 30 million people in the u.s. that's about 10% of the
population with full-blown type 2 diabetes out of those people 25 percent
don't know that they have it so as high as the numbers are these problems are
still under diagnosed number two 84 million people
another 84 million on top of that have officially insulin resistance that means
that they are over five point seven on the a1c and out of all those people
ninety percent don't know that they have it so even though they've done some
research they still don't understand really how big of a problem this is and
the people who have it don't know they have it so they're not changing they
don't know to change anything insulin resistance is also called pre
diabetes or pre type-2 diabetes because very often or even typically if you have
insulin resistance then within five years it will have progressed to type 2
diabetes so we need to understand that these are progressive mechanisms we wear
out the body and if you want to get a true idea of how big this problem is
then understand the number one cause of weight gain is
insulin resistance so it's not like every obese person has insulin
resistance and every skinny person does not but there's a pretty close
correlation between the two and officially eighty seven point five
percent of the people in the United States are overweight so that should
give you kind of an idea of how big this problem really is that whether wherever
we we draw the line for what we're gonna call insulin resistance eighty seven
point five percent probably have a significant degree of insulin resistance
number five there is a big drive from official government agencies to identify
to diagnose the problem but when people are identified and diagnosed and treated
then they add on on average if they get diagnosed at age 50 it will add on on
average a hundred eighty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
their healthcare costs during a lifetime and they will end up having an eight
year shorter life span than they would have without the diabetes so there's the
problem that's sure we want to find out we want to identify we want to
understand the problem but even when they find it
it just becomes expensive and people still don't live normal full lives so
getting it diagnosed and treated is not a fix in any way fact number six it is
the number one cause of amputations amputations of toes and feet and fingers
and so forth it is the number one cause of blindness and it is the number one
cause of kidney failure leading to dialysis it is the number seven overall
cause of death but once we understand that it is the causative factor it's the
primary causative mechanism in what's called metabolic syndrome or syndrome
X which essentially is associated with
higher blood pressure increased cardiovascular disease and increased
stroke that it's basically the causative mechanism of all those conditions then
we understand that it's not really the number seven cause of death it is by far
the number one cause of death because it's contributing to many of the other
higher ranked conditions when we look at the prevalence by age group then we see
that people between 18 and 44 only 4% have type 2 diabetes and that might seem
like okay well that's a good number but realize that 50 years ago the people in
this age group had close to 0% type-2 diabetes and then when they between 45
and 64 now it is 17 percent almost one in five is like one in six when they're
over 65 one in four twenty four percent have type-2 diabetes so realize that
when these people when the 65 year olds were teenagers then there were virtually
no people that had type 2 diabetes that was a disease reserved for middle age
and up 50 and up younger people hardly ever had it because it took so long to
develop and when we look at it today and the youngest group then 200,000 kids
have type 2 diabetes something that was unheard of fifty years ago and in the
age group 10 to 19 the the rate is growing by 4.8% every year so it's it's
accelerating it's not just growing steadily it's an accelerating growth so
when we talk about insulin resistance and diabetes we need to understand that
it's a continuum it's a continuum of insulin resistance all the way from just
having a little bit of extra insulin to the point where your system is
completely broken and the is just spilling out into the urine
because the levels are so high the kidneys can't contain it so think about
it this way the green here is this is blood glucose and this is insulin so
green is normal that means we eat something our blood sugar goes up a
little bit and then insulin goes up to match it and the insulin of course
lowers the blood sugar that's the purpose of insulin to guide the sugar
out of the bloodstream and into the cells and then when the blood sugar is
normal insulin comes down to a very low level again so that would be something
like a normal fasting blood glucose of about 80 and a fasting insulin level of
three but then if we keep eating foods that stimulate a lot of blood sugar so
this is primarily carbohydrates and sugar then we get higher blood sugar
this is the orange so now we get greater blood sugar swings and with higher blood
sugar so instead of normal the blood sugar would rise this much now the blood
sugar Rises that much and now we need a higher dose of insulin to guide that
blood sugar out and then the blood sugar comes down and insulin comes down but it
doesn't come down all the way because the cells are starting to become insulin
resistant the cells are saying hey we've have too much fuel and the purpose of
the insulin is to drive that fuel into the cell but if the cell has had enough
it's going to start resisting so with a green with a normal situation we have
blood sugar go up insulin comes up and they both return to baseline but with a
little bit of insulin resistance now the blood sugar goes up and the
insulin comes up higher and the blood sugar comes back to normal but the
insulin doesn't so now we're starting to get insulin resistance but we can't tell
from Joe looking at the blood sugar and then
we're looking at when we're starting to wear the system out if we keep doing
this for 20 30 40 years and this why we see these numbers increasing with age
because it takes decades to break the system unless you're just totally
totally abusing the system and then you start seeing some cases here even in the
kids once we start having severe insulin resistance and diabetes now the blood
sugar goes sky-high the insulin goes way way high but even
with that super high insulin the blood sugar still won't come down and the
insulin stays up and that would be the red arrow here so it's a continuum
insulin resistance and diabetes are not two different things they're just
different degrees of the same thing so you go all the way from insulin
sensitive to mildly insulin resistant to moderate to severe ly insulin resistant
to full-blown diabetes when you have broken the system and even with all that
insulin it still can't get the blood sugar down below a hundred and eighty so
now we have sugar spilling over in the urine and that's where the name comes
from diabetes mellitus or mellitus and what that num name means diabetes means
flow-through and Meletus means sweet so they used to actually diagnose diabetes
with tasting the urine and if it was sweet they know they had diabetes that
before any sophisticated tests but that's the mechanism that's where the
name comes from when the blood sugar rise is so high that it pushes out
through the kidneys where the kidneys can't reabsorb it because there's just
so much of it then we're starting to totally break the system now we're
getting kidney damage and we're getting inflammation and we're starting to set
ourselves up for all these long degenerative problems that result in
amputations and blindness and kidney failure so that's the continuum of
insulin resistance and we need to understand that out of the two factors
the blood glucose and the insulin the insulin is the real problem that first
of all the blood glucose doesn't necessarily change for the first 10 20
years but in the long run it's still the insulin that is the big problem when we
understand that it's not a blood sugar problem now we can start addressing it
we need to reduce the insulin we need to stop eating the foods that trigger the
most insulin we need to give the body a chance to burn off some of that fuel
before we put more in and if we understand that then we unfortunately
also understand that treatment is going to make it worse because the cell is
already overloaded the cell already has too much fuel we packing it full of
sugar the sugar turns into fat and the cell is bursting at the seams that's why
when it's full it becomes resistant but the treatment is aimed at the blood
sugar the treatment is aimed at pushing more sugar into the cell but it already
has too much so whether you take something that like metformin that's
supposed to make your cell more insulin sensitive that can help the insulin
short term because the cell will allow it in without you
creating crazy amounts of insulin but you're promoting the process of
overloading that you are still making the problem of overloading worse you're
still driving the insulin resistance because you're packing the cell even
more and once the problem is so bad that no amount of the body's production of
insulin can keep up then they start injecting insulin but
because they think that the glucose is the only problem the real problem is
insulin and they're treating the insulin problem with more insulin so even though
they can't control blood sugar a little bit they will make your diabetes and
your insulin resistance and your metabolic syndrome worse they'll drive
more blood pressure more cardiovascular disease and more stroke the cause the
blood sugar is just the effect it's just rising because the body can't keep up
you gotta help the body keep up by not overloading it and if you understand
that then we get to the number 14 fact that you have to understand is that it
is 90 plus percent reversible there's always going to be a few cases that are
just too far gone but the vast vast majority of these cases can be reversed
it is an overloading problem of things that trigger insulin primarily sugar and
carbohydrate and if you stop adding them so much and so often the body will have
a chance to burn something off if you keep eating sugar and carbs and you keep
taking things that will enhance the loading of these things into the cell
then you're going to just perpetuate it and keep making it worse a couple of
quotes to illustrate this when I looked at the definitions for diabetes mellitus
they say it's sometimes called a sugar diabetes it's a condition that occurs
when the body can't use glucose normally but what is normal is it what we've done
for the last 50 years or what we've done for the last hundred and fifty thousand
years right so our DNA is way way old it hasn't
changed in modern times so whatever our ancestors ate is what we are adapted to
but and that was normal we might have found a little bit of fruit a few
berries beehive a couple times a year we ate maybe
ten 15 maybe 20 grams of sugar per day today the official guidelines tell us
that the body is supposed to process glucose normally that means getting
about 70 grams of carbohydrate which turns into sugar from grain another 75
grams from fruit which they say can be fresh frozen canned or dried they tell
us to eat low-fat or fat-free dairy three cups a day that'll give us another
40 grams of sugar and then they say don't eat more than 10% of your total
calories from sugar that from added table sugar that's another 50 grams so
235 grams of sugar or grain which will turn into sugar in a few minutes that is
probably ten times the amount that your body is designed for 10 times the amount
that it can keep up with long-term so if you eat this amount your body can
tolerate it it will take a while before you break your carbohydrate processing
machine and in some people it breaks after 10-15 years and in some people it
breaks after 3040 years but we're on pace to getting basically the majority
of the population being diabetic as when we get older so we have to rethink what
normal glucose processing is the body is not defective it only breaks when we
abuse it the second quote I wanted to mention was diabetes is a serious
disease that can often be managed through physical activity diet and the
appropriate use of insulin and other medications to control blood sugar
levels this is still the official viewpoint that it's appropriate to use
insulin and medication to control blood sugar and when they talk about
controlling it or managing it with diet they're talking about eating this kind
of diet so as long as we believe that that's normal and they're treating it
with drugs and insulin is appropriate we're not going
to change anything we might lower the percentage of people who have high blood
sugar by forcing more of it into the cell but in the process we are going to
increase insulin resistance where you to increase metabolic syndrome and we're
gonna promote all the problems associated with insulin resistance and
diabetes so how do you reverse it I've made several videos that go into a lot
more detail I think you'll really enjoy those but basically you want to eat less
sugar less carbs you want to eat fewer meals you want to get some exercise and
you want to work on reducing your stress all those things are factors that drive
insulin and insulin resistance by reducing them you'll give the body a
chance to recover if you're new to the channel and you enjoy having things
thoroughly explain and understand them so you can help yourself to better
health make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that we can
keep this content coming your way and please share this content because
most people you know fit into these categories that we've talked about today
and unless you tell them they may never find out thanks for watching