Insulin, Insulin Resistance and It’s Outcome
I spent a good deal of my life having a love-hate relationship with insulin. In 1987 my then 7 year old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, this is a completely different beast to Type 2 Diabetes which I believe should be given a completely different name. When you have Type 1 Diabetes your life depends on injecting the hormone insulin into your body several times a day.
The biggest problem we had back in the 1980s was that we had to rely on endocrinologists to guide us. The internet was not yet even a twinkle in societies eye and the medical people who now complain about people googling health issues had complete reign over treatments and rationalisations.
Looking back now I cringe realising how little I knew about the condition and for that matter about the body and it’s functions. The Type 1 Diabetic’s diet was all about “exchanges”. The idea was to balance the insulin with the carbohydrates.
Put in a very simplistic manner the basic principle is that the pancreas produces insulin to act as a “key” to allow it to open the “door” of the cell to allow the glucose to enter the cell where it is metabolised into energy. You knock back a few carbs and your insulin spikes, your pancreas creates enough insulin to to regulate the blood sugar and as we were led to believe all was well. When it came to injecting insulin the amount was based on the guidelines given to you by the endocrinologist, the blood glucose levels and common sense. It was a delicate balancing act which was easy to get wrong which could result in a hypo. This is where the blood sugar goes so low that the Diabetic has a deficit of glucose and the body and brain start shutting down. Only those who have a diabetic friend or family member would know how terrifying this can be. I could write a book full of stories about the effects of high and low blood sugar on my son’s life.
My son passed away from the ravages of Diabetic mismanagement in 2012 when he was 32 years old.
Not knowing what is going on “under the bonnet” is deadly. Over the decades there have been many different diets and viewpoints about what and when to eat, most of them were misguided. But for most of my life I got up and ate toast or muesli, sometimes carrot juice or even worse orange or apple juice, occasionally eggs, which by the way were supposed to be detrimental to one’s health if too many were consumed. The point is that most of my breakfasts were full of carbohydrates, glucose, fructose all of which caused my blood sugar to spike which resulted in a surge of insulin to knock it back down again. Then before I knew it I was feeling peckish again by mid morning. By the mid afternoon I would regularly feel all fuzzy, foggy and tired due to what I called hypoglycaemia, which by the way I didn’t really understand well enough to do too much about.
This was all about a lack of knowledge. Deadly when left to drag on unchecked over decades.
Throughout the 90s when I was in my 40s I became an exercise and raw food addict. This kept me healthy, fit and lean. As the 90s came to an end and we crossed the crest of the 2000s I stopped eating so well and stopped my intense exercising and gradually started putting on weight. Slowly but surely the grams and then kilos started stacking on which resulted in a weight gain of over 25 kgs in a 20 year period. The end result was obesity, high blood pressure, fatty liver, tiredness, brain fog and eventually cancer, which by the way I have handled with a successful dietary strategy and lifestyle.
Little did I know that the underlying cause of all of this was what is called “insulin resistance”.
