This is kind of interesting regarding hyperinsulinemia with respect to western diets and pre-western contact diets:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.ca/2008/08/cardiovascular-risk-factors-on-kitava_17.html
"We can guess that total fat, saturated fat and carbohydrate do not cause hyperinsulinemia, based on data from the Inuit, the Masai and the Kitavans, respectively. We can also guess that there's not some specific food that protects these populations, since they eat completely different things. Exercise also can not completely account for these findings. What does that leave us with? Western food habits. In my opinion, the trail of metabolic destruction that has followed Westerners throughout the world is probably due in large part to industrial foods, including refined wheat flour, sugar and seed oils."
Nosher,I've been uncomfortable with this thread and didn't want to really add anything until I could really take it all in, which ain't going to happen soon.
Ok I do take the thread seriously because what it implies that excessive insulin can do great damage. I don't want to use the list above, but many of my symptoms were taking me to be very ill! I have excepted that and I have to live my lifestyle because of it!
Through my experience, I know that insulin causes fat to be stored around the body. The fact that something that is supposed to help you can kill you if not treated properly, it is a long term killer and the science is somewhat behind the conditions caused by it.
We use insulin to treat all types of blood glucose disorders, I even take a gliptin that produces more insulin because of my glucose, glycogen and glucagon imbalance.
So why doesn't it cause more damage if we don't eat carbs?
There must be a relationship between carbs, sugars and digestion process that gets rid of the excess insulin?
Am I too concerned about this thread and the excess insulin production, do I have anything to be worried about?
If the majority of the population is abnormal, am I normal and not weird!
Nosher,
I don't know where this takes us either - that's why I posted it so fully - but the thing about excessive insulin harming us is about *excessive* insulin, no? I take this to mean, just for me and my children, that getting one's insulin TDD down as low as one can manage - the best one can actually practically do - is good. And that I should try hard to find clever ways of getting my family's insulin resistance down too.
As I read it, Kraft is talking about huge levels of over-produced insulin washing around because the insulin receptors aren't working. If we're working on getting our IR down, that's good work isn't it? And we can only try.
There's no contract that if we are good, this horrible disease will honour the bargain and let us off. Is there.
Especially if you have an autoimmune version...There's no contract that if we are good, this horrible disease will honour the bargain and let us off. Is there.
So I did a little googling with respect to elevated plasm insulin and it turns out elevated insulin levels (without elevated blood glucose) are associated with:
- increased cancer rates,
- stroke,
- atherosclerosis,
- coronary artery disease,
- high uric acid (gout?),
- hypertension,
- elevated plasma triglyceride levels,
- PCOS,
- acne,
- skin tags,
- male balding,
- juvenile-onset myopia,
- ischemic heart disease, and
- probably other nasties that I didn't get to.
Looking at that list I think one could lump them together as "Western civilization diseases".
In other words, many of the people with elevated insulin levels lucky enough not to get type 2 diabetes may not be so lucky after all.
So I did a little googling with respect to elevated plasm insulin and it turns out elevated insulin levels (without elevated blood glucose) are associated with:
- increased cancer rates,
- stroke,
- atherosclerosis,
- coronary artery disease,
- high uric acid (gout?),
- hypertension,
- elevated plasma triglyceride levels,
- PCOS,
- acne,
- skin tags,
- male balding,
- juvenile-onset myopia,
- ischemic heart disease, and
- probably other nasties that I didn't get to.
Looking at that list I think one could lump them together as "Western civilization diseases".
In other words, many of the people with elevated insulin levels lucky enough not to get type 2 diabetes may not be so lucky after all.
Don't call me Lucy!Bang on point Lucy - hyperinsulinemia rules the chronic disease roost !
ooops sorry - dunno where I thought I saw Lucy - thanks for getting Kraft's work out there !Don't call me Lucy!
I just found a discussion of this 1990 paper, which seems to be saying that radioimmunoassays of plasma insulin overstate insulin levels because they include proinsulin, which is a precursor to fully formed insulin but isn't biologically active, and which is also over-produced in relation to insulin by both T1Ds and T2Ds. That article is behind a paywall so one can't see if it discussed Kraft. One of the authors was John Yudkin, he of Pure, White and Deadly, so far ahead of his time. OTOH if it isn't discussing Kraft, it may be that it's discussing a different radioimmunoassay technology. One of Kraft's gripes was that procedures were not standardised and therefore were not comparable, so somewhat meaningless.
I don't pretend to make claims about what the detail of this means.
Edit: From the title of this 2007 article,'''Insulin immunoassays: fast approaching 50 years of existence and still calling for standardization,' enough said.
How could Kraft's evidence possibly be bettered, Ruth? Nor would I describe the medical community as evidence-based. Closed-minded, rather.
Yes, it's the question 'What is normal' where the importance of his research lies. It certainly tells us something - the question is, what, isn't it. My best make of it so far is above: we redefine diabetes as the later end of a disorder of insulin metabolism.
Well, I am happy to see you can listen to Tim on why he might be wrong about "normal" now, so I'll leave that point.
I'll also point out that your definition of "diabetes" leaves a bit to be desired biologically. In my case, and in the case of most Type 1s, it is part of an autoimmune disorder, which has several other elements, the insulin issue being only one of the symptoms of my autoimmune disorder. Certainly it is the part on which people tend to concentrate because it's the part likely to be fatal first. But it's not the only part.
I tend to take a wider view of my health and my autoimmune disorder. It's not just all about insulin and blood sugar.
Well, I am happy to see you can listen to Tim on why he might be wrong about "normal" now, so I'll leave that point.
I'll also point out that your definition of "diabetes" leaves a bit to be desired biologically. In my case, and in the case of most Type 1s, it is part of an autoimmune disorder, which has several other elements, the insulin issue being only one of the symptoms of my autoimmune disorder. Certainly it is the part on which people tend to concentrate because it's the part likely to be fatal first. But it's not the only part.
I tend to take a wider view of my health and my autoimmune disorder. It's not just all about insulin and blood sugar.
So, for example, the micro-focus on insulin tends to leave out the wider genetic aspects of diabetes and its interrelation with other disorders. Her's a very nice example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26209325
This relationship was first remarked on in the nineteenth century, in fact.
There are other possible factors to take into account. As well as the genetic aspects of immune disorders, there are the environmental "triggers". People tend to assume that gluttony is the "trigger" for Type 2, but in my opinion it is much more likely that, like Type 1 and schizophrenia, the guilty culprit is probably a virus. We get it, it seems to pass, but it triggers the disorder. We know, for example, that you are much more likely to get schizophrenia if you live in a city. Both Type 1 and Type 2 have exploded in the last century, all over the world. From an epidemiological point of view, that suggests that urbanization, and therefore contact with more viruses, etc at least correlates with that spread.
So, yes, I'm not particularly convinced of this guy's genius. I think he's missing the main point.
And you ask "then if this pattern had always existed, the lifestyle diseases associated with insulin resistance – diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, some cancers – shouldn’t have peaked in the twentieth century.)"
Well, that would be true if all that had not coincided with the discovery and spread of antibiotics. People who would previously have died young of infectious diseases now survive to die of other things.