I've got the D

[DCUKMod]

Fair questions

I'm not a scientist per se, but have studied it personally for a number of years. I'm still a rank amateur, and don't pretend to be otherwise. My interest in the forum came from a recent bout of illness (about 5 weeks ago), followed by some bad/sporadic eating, and then I found a blood glucose meter I had at home, and tested myself over the course of a couple of weeks after illness, and found that my fasting BG was up above 10 on multiple occasions. One day it was 12. And my BG was spiking massively after meals for about 2 weeks (again, around 10-12 quite often). I was testing myself around 4-5 times a day, and found that I rarely got below 6, and was often at 8 mmol even a few hours after meals.

So I did some googling, and found various web pages, and forums, which were basically saying I "have diabetes". And frankly, I found most of the pages to be nonsense. And then started reading more about insulin, insulin resistance, and the link to the incredibly lucrative insulin industry, and started testing various things out. I began tracking calories, meal timings, and adding in various supplements I was reading about: magnesium, biotin, aspirin, upping my dose of thyroid hormone, sodium, potassium, fixing breathing patterns etc... and found my fasting BG and postprandial coming down quickly to "pre-diabetic" to "normal" levels. My fasting BG this morning was 5.5, for example, and 1.5 hour postprandial on a meal today was 5.8. So whatever I'm doing is working. Not had hba1c measured yet, but I will. It's clear that insulin is not the only thing that affects BG, yet most of the sciencey pages only talk about it. It seems weird.

So i'm sorta here to figure out if I "have diabetes" like a website said based on my BG numbers from a few weeks ago, (and apparently today don't have diabetes!), and see what other people are doing. I'm quite shocked that the solution seems to be "don't eat much glucose", since it doesn't treat the underlying issue. It's like saying "I used to get sore from going to the gym, but i'm over that now, since I no longer go to the gym". No one talks about glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, the Randle cycle, CO2 production, lactate, cortisol, adrenaline, calcium, oxidative metabolism, thyroid etc. It's all LCHF. It's weird. I'm not here to preach, I just find it interesting for some reason. I tend to get quite into a topic for a while, then move on

But I guess if I can't keep my BG under control, or the hba1c comes back bad, then I'll have to reconsider my positions!

May I ask a fundamentally basic question? Why did you just happen to have a glucose meter hanging around at home? It's not something we usually hear.

You've covered a lot of ground in 5 weeks.

It would be helpful if you could complete your profile with some information, which will help members interact with you. To do that, just click on your account at the top of the page, and go to the various headings there. Thanks.

 

[torchman2]

Or you could just cure your diabetes with an aspirin and regular meal times like torchman did?

Just kidding. All in good spirits

Yeaaaaaah

Your 2 replies have not exactly been useful to the discussion. Or do you just want the status-quo to continue and no new ideas be added? I'm happy to enter into a discussion/debate (I thought that's the point of forums), but you seem to just want to be silly.

Just a cursory search of google would have provided you with some data on the aspirin connection that you scoff at:

https://www.jwatch.org/jw200109140000006/2001/09/14/aspirin-sensitive-pathway-insulin-resistance:

"For more than 100 years, it has been known that high doses of aspirin lower blood glucose concentrations. "

"the team showed that aspirin acts on IKKβ, and not cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1) or COX-2, to improve insulin sensitivity: "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC150979/

"High-dose aspirin treatment resulted in a ∼25% reduction in fasting plasma glucose, associated with a ∼15% reduction in total cholesterol and C-reactive protein, a ∼50% reduction in triglycerides, and a ∼30% reduction in insulin clearance, despite no change in body weight."

"Insulin resistance is a primary factor in the development of type 2 diabetes, and recent studies have implicated fatty acid activation of a serine/threonine kinase cascade in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance"

--> ie if you are in ketosis, you have not cured your insulin resistance, it's still highly active (or more so, since you are now only oxidising fats). You just are not testing out your insulin response system, through the removal of glucose.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4587882/

"However, it is chronic insulin resistance that appears to be directly or indirectly related to diet-induced inflammation. The mechanisms at the molecular level are complex and manifold. They are based on the ability of increased cellular inflammation to interrupt insulin’s action by disrupting signaling mechanisms within the cell in particular by the enhancing the phosphorylation of IRS.

The primary suspects appear to be inflammatory mediators including the inflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) as well as inflammatory protein kinases such as c-JUN N-terminal kinase (JNK) and the IKK complex"

NOTE --> Luckily, you can get a cheap blood test done for TNFα, which would show if you still have chronic inflammation despite not having BG spikes.

"The suggestion that inflammation may be related to insulin resistance came more than a century ago when it was observed that certain anti-inflammatory drugs (salicylates and aspirin) were effective in reducing the hyperglycemia observed in diabetes"

 

[Member496333]

You can’t cure insulin resistance with glucose. Respectfully, that is the last I will say

 

[torchman2]

Thanks, it's nice to have an actual discussion about this

Some comments on your post:

High glucose does not come first. It all starts with high insulin levels. This in turn creates insulin resistance. Insulin resistance requires even more insulin to "clear" the ingested glucose from the blood stream. Vicious circle.

Insulin is not the only thing that clears blood glucose. It should be converted to CO2 and water, producing ATP, or it is fermented to produce lactate and lower amounts of ATP:

The worst outcome of this, is that lactic acid needs to be converted, which is done in the liver, and turned into glucose.

This is also why intense exercise can make your BG spike, because the exercise produces even more lactic acid which needs to be converted to glucose in the liver.

Many other things will impact BG, such as potassium: "Lower levels of potassium have been found to be associated with a higher risk of diabetes in some studies. "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197792/

Meanwhile, as insulin is a fat carrying hormone various things happen and weight gain ensues in many people. (not all). The weight gain is a symptom, not a cause.

This is too simplistic. Fat gain (especially liver fat) can come from de novo lipogenesis (DNL), which is triggered because of the insulin resistance, which means that excess glucose cannot be converted, or triggered through taking in a caloric surplus which includes carbohydrates. The body can convert carbohydrates into fat through DN: this is the main source of NAFLD fat accumulation in the liver. But this comes from excess calories, mixed with fat and carbs at the same time. I saw another post on here where the person talked about eating too much sugar from cadbury's chocolate: but chocolate is fat dominant, not sugar dominant. The post mentioned eating 500g of chocolate, which is around 1350 calories from fat, and 1000 from sugar. But the sugar gets the blame for some reason, not the fat.

This is why a mixed high fat AND high carb diet causes 2 problems:

1) total energy intake is higher, meaning there is more likely to be excess glucose above the amount needed
2) in the presence of high fat, the body will turn to FFA metabolism (Randle Cycle, see below) over glucose metabolism, meaning that there will be more excess glucose as it is not being metabolised, fat is.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6519769_Free_fatty_acids_and_insulin_resistance
"Dysregulation of free fatty acid metabolism is a key event responsible for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. According to the glucose-fatty acid cycle of Randle, preferential oxidation of free fatty acids over glucose plays a major role in insulin sensitivity and the metabolic disturbances of diabetes mellitus. "

The reverse situation is one of the reasons that the fruit-eating vegans don't get diabetes: because they take in virtually no fat, there is no Randle Cycle competition to metabolise fatty acids, so more of the glucose is metabolised upfront, without the need for Insulin. Other reasons include the high potassium intake that fruit vegans take in (discussed above).

 

[Krystyna23040]

OK, i'm still reading about this, so my opinion below is definitely not fully-formed, and will probably be contentious

But I would say that Diabetes is diagnosed by too much glucose in the body. That's a symptom of the issue, not a cause. The solution is to train the body to metabolise glucose through proper oxidative metabolism, not simply remove glucose.

As my post above said, it's the equivalent of saying "i get pain after doing weights at the gym. So the solution is not to go to the gym any more". Rather than training yourself to be able to handle doing that weight training. Thoughts?

If you train your body to metabolise fat/fatty acids, then by definition you remain insulin resistant. Randle Cycle etc..

Anyway, it's late!

My feeling is that I have a body that does not handle glucose very. Over 40 years ago I was having what I assume were hypos. There was a campaign at the time where you could get your bloods checked for diabetes and my reading was 2.

A friend was a nurse and she tested me with a meter and she confirmed that I was having lows. It did resolve - I assume when I became resistant to the huge amount of insulin my pancreas was producing in response to the carbs I was eating.

About 20 years ago I was diagnosed with fatty liver which I assume was again from the carbs as I don't drink alcohol. Again absolutely no advice on how I could reverse it.

So my gut feeling is that my particular body does not handle glucose very well so avoiding it is a good strategy for me. I have a friend who is a celiac and avoids gluten because her body does not handle gluten very well.

I have another friend who lives on carbs, is 6 stone heavier than me and whose blood sugars are better than normal. As she is in her 70s and has been overweight all her adult life - it doesn't look that likely she will develop diabetes. So my feeling is that it is highly likely that genetics plays a large part in how our bodies work (or don't work).

So although I am very interested in trying out ways to improve how my body handles the carbs - the most important thing I can do for my body is to stay low carb/keto.

 

[Brunneria]

The reverse situation is one of the reasons that the fruit-eating vegans don't get diabetes: because they take in virtually no fat, there is no Randle Cycle competition to metabolise fatty acids, so more of the glucose is metabolised upfront, without the need for Insulin. Other reasons include the high potassium intake that fruit vegans take in (discussed above).

There are a great deal of points about your post above that I disagree with - mainly because you are focusing on the wood, not the trees, but no one (least of all the original poster of this thread) wants to be pedanted to death with a blow by blow science-fight.

In fact, the only thing I am really interested in querying, is how on earth you decided that 'fruit-eating vegans don't get diabetes'.
This is the kind of sweeping statement that vegan propagandists are using.
It has no basis in science, and is obviously a nonsense.

There are many kinds of diabetes (as I mentioned to you before), and eating fruit and avoiding animal products will NOT protect from all or any of them. To prove your statement would involve contacting every fruit-eating vegan on the planet and checking each one of them. Obviously this won't happen.

 

[Brunneria]

I am very sorry @Twisticles but I am about to close your thread, because if I don't, I can see it devolving into a bickering match on a topic that is not relevant to your original question.

If @torchman2 wishes to continue his posting on this subject, he is welcome to start his own thread and discuss it there.
If anyone else wishes to start other threads, they can do that too.
However, this thread is now closed.