In India, based on sampling studies on diabetes, some 32% of any tested sample drawn randomly from an Indian ethnicity will turn out to be properly diabetic (defined as having average daily blood sugar >125, and HbA1c>6.5). The rest of us THINK that we don’t have this disease, but we’re just still in the yellow part of the spectrum.
In the US, fully 88% of the population is pre-diabetic, even among children, where Obesity is now hitting the roof.
That’s because Diabetes is just a symptom, the actual disorder is Insulin Resistance.
So What Is Insulin Resistance?
We used to be monkeys, who mostly ate the leaves from the floor of the forest: foragers & scavengers, actually. After we discovered fire & tools, we started to hunt and got an efficient source of protein. This led to the development of our pre-frontal cortex (PFC), the fore lobe of the brain.
Apes spend up to 9.5 hours per day foraging for food, while we are done in about half an hour. These “efficient calories” in our food, allowed our brains to consume fully 25% of the total energy used by our bodies, which allowed us to focus on things other than foraging for food….
Came agriculture, some 10,000 years back: and we started to produce those foods that were EFFICIENT to produce & store, NOT the food that was nutritious for us.
So agriculture did not improve the availability of nutrition for us, it just increased the availability of what looks like food but isn’t. For example, what we really need is some 84 micronutrients & a lot of fiber, which goes to feed the good bacteria in our Gut Biome. It’s those 640,000 kinds of bacteria that keep us alive, and sane. The Gut Biome is part of the Para-Sympathetic Nervous System (PNS), which regulates our endocrines, our moods & even our sub-conscious brain.
The Para-Sympathetic System controls our “rest & digest” system, while the better-known Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) controls our “fight or flight” responses. We are, therefore, mostly a symbiotic system interdependent upon the microbes in our gut…the small intestine, mostly.
Post the development of Agriculture, we started to shift our diets to grains & primarily carbohydrates, from soluble & insoluble fiber (green leafy vegetables) & proteins (meat, eggs & fish). Carbohydrates, which were the occasional “sugar kick” that we got once in a while, now became our primary source of “nutrition”…….
A basic idea that we must all learn, is that ALL NUTRITION HAS A COST……so Nutrition is embedded in the 84 micronutrients & minerals, while the “calorie cost” is the calories that come attached to this Nutrition.
A common misconception today is that Calories (i.e. energy) are the objective of eating, not Nutrition. This needs to be inverted, and we need to focus on getting in the nutrients while looking at the embedded calories as “cost”.
There are 3 macro-nutrients: fats, proteins & carbohydrates. The nutrients are packaged with one of the other of these macro-nutrients, this is also not one of the things now lost to our public consciousness.
Our bodies are primarily fat-processing machines, proteins are needed to build tissue & muscle, and carbohydrates are the “auxiliary” macro-nutrients, not really necessary for survival, but useful once in a while to provide a burst of energy. But all this is in a context of a chronic food deficit & famine, which was common until a century back.
Today, we have a food surplus. It’s the MNC Food companies that have propagated the canard that we “live to eat”, and that we should eat 6 times a day, and 70% of our diet should be carbs. Big Food is poisoning the world, to feed their coffers.
So our bodies are really petrol engine that has been running on kerosene, some of our bodies have NEVER in a lifetime seen the genuine fuel that we’re meant to run on: we’ve been running all our lives on carbs when we should be running on fat-processing. Our poor livers have never seen the energy deficits that allow them to switch on their fat-processing, they’re constantly exposed to the surplus energy that tells them to “store fat”.
So Fat Adaptation, an earlier natural state of existence, is unknown to most urban livers, which face a constant barrage of surplus energy coming from a surfeit of carbs.
So What Have You Learnt So Far?
-1). That our bodies have not evolved much beyond the monkeys that used to eat off the forest floor.
-2). Hamburgers & donuts are pure poison, your body goes into shock every time you put this processed synthetic food into your body. You’re being poisoned to death, not very different from the cigarette companies that are now forced to show you the macabre effects of long-term smoking. So now, sugar is the new smoking.
-3). This consistent bombardment every day, of large amounts of “food” is not Nutrition, but poison….
-4). So first of all, learn to give your body a rest. The most important, but forgotten tool available to you is FASTING…..it was your natural state of existence, you got to eat only once in a couple of days. That body is now stuffed with poison 6 times a day….
-5). Your cells are designed to live in an environment with 4.5-5 grams of sugar in your bloodstream at any given point in time. And we load 125 grams of sugar onto this system when we have a single burger + fries + coke, as an inter-meal snack. How long do you think our bodies can take this constant poisoning?
-6). After long years of this, your cells will pack up. First, your liver will innocently believe that all this surplus energy is useful, so it will “store fat”. But it will soon run out of space to keep this fat: we have nearly 100,000-200,000 calories stored in the belly of a ‘normal’ urban citizen. That’s about 100 days of energy supply. We can go that long, without food, before we start facing shortages of energy.
-7). This “resistance” of the cells to the effects of Insulin (the “store fat” hormone, which converts the excess sugar in the blood to fat, and is used to ‘control’ blood sugar), is called INSULIN RESISTANCE. This is the real ‘disease’, a lifestyle disease that needs to be reversed, NOT high blood sugar, which is merely a symptom, that shows up when the body breaks down, trying to handle the flood of extra energy that comes from the carb-intensive diets of today.
-8). So Diabetes is merely high blood sugar, a symptom that shows up AFTER long years of Insulin Resistance, that builds because of faulty diet & nutrition habits. Allopathy tries to “control diabetes” with aimless & senseless medication while ignoring the underlying problem, which is faulty nutrition, diet & lifestyle. It’s a conspiracy of Big Food & Big Pharma, but that’s a different story.
-9). There’s no “good” blood sugar level, there’s just a common level of blood sugar. Almost EVERYONE in society, especially urban society, is a victim, just at different points of the spectrum. Those with high blood sugar are called Diabetics, while the others are just Diabetics-in-the-making.
-10). So learn to make a distinction between Insulin Resistance & Diabetes: the former affects everyone, and comes from faulty Nutrition habits, while the latter is merely a thermometer reading that finally tells you that you now have a fever. You don’t treat the temperature, you’ve got to find the reason for the fever.
So Now What Do We Do About It?
…..contd in the next article.
