Tens of millions of Americans suffer from insulin resistance, and most of them don’t even know it. Left unchecked, insulin resistance can lead to heart disease, cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and lots of other bad health outcomes. But before I can get into explaining how you can know if you have this condition, and what you can do about it if you do, I first need to explain what insulin resistance is.
Typically if you are healthy and eat a meal, your blood sugar will start to rise just after digesting the food (especially if the meal contains a lot of carbohydrates). Your pancreas will then release the hormone insulin into the bloodstream. Insulin signals cells throughout the body to ingest the glucose, thus 1) providing fuel for the individual cells, and 2) clearing glucose from the bloodstream, so that the blood glucose level rapidly returns to normal.
In insulin resistance, the body becomes “immune” to the effects of insulin. This happens for lots of reasons, with some of the most common including poor sleep, emotional stress, environmental pollutants, lack of exercise, disrupted circadian rhythm, and poor diet. The result is that in order to keep the blood sugar in a normal range, the body has to pump out higher than normal amounts of insulin.
There are two problems however with having elevated insulin levels.
First off, as the insulin resistance worsens, the body may eventually lose the ability to keep up with the demands placed on it, and the blood sugar can start to rise. Left unchecked, this will eventually progress to type 2 diabetes.
Secondly, even if you never progress to having type 2 diabetes, having chronically elevated insulin levels is in and of itself a risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, fatty liver, certain cancers, fertility issues, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
How can you tell if you have insulin resistance? And how can you fix it if you do? I will touch on those topics in my next two blog posts.
