Some of you still haven’t even heard of “Metabolic Syndrome” or don’t really understand it.
Most don’t know enough about insulin, blood sugar, and its wide-ranging effects on life (and it’s calamitous causes of misery and death). This is presently the most important issue in health for most people.
To cover this vastly important subject in a short piece is a challenge. Our health workshop is pressed to cover it thoroughly in an evening.
Simply: if you eat too much (usually of carbs) sugars, or starches, at meals or snacks, your body is compelled to produce a quantity of insulin, from your pancreas into your blood, to “handle” and distribute your rising blood sugar. That, incidentally, makes people fat.
Handle it, unfortunately, it really can’t. As a result, insulin goes very high (in your blood and in your cells), and circulating sugar in your blood does too.
Often times, though not always, the individual’s stomach will get bigger, fatter. An enlarged waistline is the usual marker of Metabolic Syndrome. The person is in trouble, and over time that trouble worsens. Energy problems and fatigue are typical early signs.
Insulin is not a hormone you want to see rise to higher levels. Insulin causes things we don’t want to happen. It causes your body to build cholesterol. That’s right: build it! You can be on a cholesterol-free, fat-free diet, and have soaring blood cholesterol. Why? Because in the presence of elevated insulin, the body makes cholesterol out of sugar or starch. It makes it out of sweets and breads, or even granola, carrot juice, rice or beer.
Avoiding eating cholesterol is no real route to lowering your blood’s cholesterol, although it was thought to be so. It is important to have your blood not have too much cholesterol or unhealthy fats circulating in it. Why? Cholesterol and its associated bad fats in the blood form the base of plaques, the junk that clogs arteries. Along with stress and other causative factors, plaque fragments which break up and float free from the artery wall form the mechanism of heart attacks and strokes. Did you notice the top two causes of death were named in the last sentence?
As if that weren’t enough! Insulin is the fat-storing hormone. That’s why it makes us fatter (usually). Thus the increasing waist-size. Watch that belt! To add to the mix: If you are overfat, the amount of fat you have put around your belly is mirrored by an equivalent amount of fat deposited in your Liver. This is the new understanding that those up-to-date know, the problem known as NAFLD, Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Not a trivial problem, it is. One with serious health consequences.
It also diminishes oxygen flows and has wide-ranging hormonal effects. People with blood sugar problems (that’s another way of describing all this), usually compromise their adrenal glands, too. That opens another Pandora’s Box.
A quick summary of low adrenal function: Headaches, pains, aches, arthritis, inflammatory and auto-immune disorders, weak or injured knees, fatigue, lowered immunity, fuzzy thinking, memory loss, anxiety/depression, chronic inflammations like colitis and dermatitis. And that list isn’t near complete!
Not important enough a subject to interest you? Rising insulin levels mean that you are on a path that, taken to its end, is the destination called “Diabetes”. Many doctors still seem to act as if they believe that diabetes is something one day you don’t have, and the next, “Poof”, you do. That’s not the least bit true.
Diabetes (“adult onset”) is caused usually over years. There are new tests that tell where one is on that road. Testing your fasting blood insulin is one. When problems are occurring, it’s too high. Another is the HgA1C test that sees how caramelized your red blood cells are from the sugar they are bathed in over their 90-day lives.
12% of American adults are now diabetics, and still that number is steadily rising. Prediabetes affects 38%. Which means half of our adult population is diabetic or prediabetic! Diabetes is an epidemic problem. It’s one end-effect of Metabolic syndrome, (rising blood sugar and high insulin). It’s a catastrophic disease, very destructive and deadly. It still causes blindness, nerve destruction, kidney failure, and more. Because it is the extreme end of Metabolic Syndrome, it comes with all the deadly other consequences spoken of earlier. It is noted as the most expensive disease for an HMO health insurer to pay to treat! There are new methods in treating Diabetes used in my office, which many doctors still haven’t learned to apply.
The use of specific nutrition identified by my testing and specific chiropractic adjustments to correct the abused body areas and “circuits” in the nerve system lets you experience record changes in getting your body back on track and healthy.
If Metabolic Syndrome only covered the cause of heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, fat metabolism “illness” and diabetes it would be the most important subject in medicine. Since those first three represent less than half of the total list of effects caused (although the most deadly three), the subject is much more important than even that.
Does it surprise you as much as me that most doctors still are not competent nutritionists? That they don’t often test for, prevent, or correct Metabolic Syndrome? When this is the real scientifically proven cause of such a huge part of doctors’ daily work, (and the cause of early summoning of the mortician too)?
We each need to learn how to eat right. And exercise right. As well as exercise our (often not easy) need to discipline ourselves to not overeat. And to know how much carbs we need, and limit them. We also need to monitor the size of our waistlines. And to learn how advanced chiropractic and natural techniques can get us back to real function.
Some of you need also to have your arterial plaque tested, a Calcium score of your heart arteries. (CAC test) When it is bad and your arteries are clogged, you need us to help you remove the plaque!
To learn more, I invite you to watch my seminars (on YouTube, under Dr. Arlo Gordin): Energy and Blood Sugar is an excellent explanation. I would like my friends to live happily and healthily, and I believe that education is the most needed element to improve the lives of all of us.