Read The UltraMind Solution Online
Authors: Mark Hyman
The UltraMind Solution (46 page)
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Scoring Key—Insulin
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If you want to be depressed, tired, anxious, hyperactive but unfocused, and lose your memory, not to mention pack on belly fat, clog your arteries, fuel cancer cells, and get dementia, then keep eating the way you do (if you are one of the average Americans who eats 158 pounds of sugar a year).
Sugar promotes high levels of insulin (I’ll tell you how in a moment). And too much insulin is the number-one cause of our chronic disease epidemic and a major unrecognized factor in mood disorders and dementia.
Let me tell you a story of a man who came to me. His story may be all too familiar to you ... but it can have a happy ending for you, as it did for him.
James was a forty-six-year-old Wall Street executive who came to me for a cardiac stress test. He was a hard-driving, don’t-look-up type of guy who was convinced he was dying of heart disease.
Every day, sometime in the late afternoon, he would experience the sudden onset of sweating, a racing heart, anxiety, and shortness of breath. In other words, he thought he was going to die!
In reality, he was just having panic attacks—severe onsets of anxiety that make some people feel like they are going to have a heart attack.
He was thick around the middle and after listening to his story and taking one look at him, I said, “You don’t eat breakfast, do you?
“And you feel tired after eating so that is why you skip food during the day—to keep sharp for work—and when you feel like that you go for the vending machine or a soda and get a quick sugar fix and in a few minutes you feel better.”
Shocked, he said, “How did you know?”
I explained to him that he was fighting with his genes and was insulin-resistant. This caused his insulin levels to rise, pushing his blood sugar very low, leading to wide swings in blood sugar and, ultimately, overall low blood sugar (hypoglycemia). That was responsible for his symptoms.
In other words, his hormones were severely out of balance and he was having panic attacks because of it.
He couldn’t control his metabolism of carbohydrates because he had too much insulin in his blood. As a result his blood sugar was out of balance, leading to all his symptoms of anxiety,
and
taking him down the slippery slope toward brain aging, dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and more.
James is not alone.
Over 100 million Americans suffer from this condition we call
insulin resistance
. It affects many varieties of people and is not exactly the same in everyone, but the ultimate consequences are the same: depression, dementia, fatigue, weight gain, heart disease, and cancer.
Most afflicted have extra fat around the middle. (To find out if this applies to you, check your waist-to-hip ratio. This is the measurement around
your belly button divided by the measurement around the hips. If it is greater than 0.8, you likely have insulin resistance.)
You may be tall or thin, short or fat, or any combination and still have insulin resistance.
While waist-to-hip ratio is a good indicator, the only sure way to know if you suffer from this condition is with an insulin-response test. This is done by measuring both your fasting blood sugar
and
your insulin levels, then measuring them again one or two hours later, after taking a 75 gm sugar drink. Your doctor can give you this test.(You will find some information on insulin testing in Part IV. I have also included an extensive section on testing in
The UltraMind Solution Companion Guide
. Go to
www.ultramind.com/guide
and download the guide to access that information.)
Insulin resistance is not a genetic defect, an error in our development, or a mistake by God. It is simply a result of the fact that we have strayed from eating in harmony with our genes.
SWAMPED WITH SUGAR THE MANY NAMES OF INSULIN RESISTANCE |
When we eat too much sugar or refined carbohydrates, don’t exercise, and are too stressed, our bodies change. At first we pump out more insulin to keep our blood sugar even. Then our cells must have more and more insulin to keep our blood sugar even. That is called insulin resistance, and it is a condition I will discuss more in a moment. Keep eating sugar and over time you develop a collection of other problems—a fat belly, slightly high blood sugar levels (over 90), high triglycerides (over 100), low HDL (less than 60), high blood pressure (higher than 115/75), and inflammation in your blood. This is then called a “syndrome,” specifically, “metabolic syndrome.” This syndrome is also known as “prediabetes,” because it doesn’t meet the strict criteria for diabetes, which is a blood sugar over 126. But damage occurs to your brain and your blood vessels even All of these different “conditions,” or “illnesses,” are actually the result of one simple problem—eating too much sugar (or anything that quickly turns to sugar, like processed foods or products made from flour). Forget the fancy terms. Eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates in any form is bad for your brain and your body. Period. |
Historically, we ate the equivalent of only 20 teaspoons of sugar a year as a hunter/gatherer species.
1
Now we eat 158 pounds per person per year, or about 50 teaspoons or half a pound each day.
2
The average schoolboy has 34 teaspoons of sugar a day.
Figure 11: Rise in sugar consumption 1800–2008
We evolved in a world without supermarkets, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants. We had to work for our food and had limited access to refined foods or excess calories.
Now we spend more money on processed and junk food in convenience stores at gas stations than on gas. We spend more on fast food than on new cars, new computers, and higher education
combined
!
In fact, our genes are preagricultural. We started farming only ten thousand years ago and started refining flour only about two hundred years ago with the discovery of the steam engine–powered flour mill. The food industry has “progressed” a great deal in the last hundred years.
Our genes have not kept up with these technological innovations.
Yet fifteen thousand low-fat foods (a.k.a. high-sugar, high-calorie foods) that we are not genetically designed to properly metabolize came onto the
marketplace over the last fifteen to twenty years. The consequence? We have created an epidemic of increasing obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and brain disorders.
The scientific foundation for the low-fat movement was shaky from the start. Unfortunately, Madison Avenue marketing companies overpowered medical science to the detriment of us all.
Our bodies normally produce insulin in response to food in our stomach, particularly sugar. Our genetic code evolved at a time when we were eating twenty teaspoons of sugar a year. That means our insulin response is designed to handle
vastly
lower levels of sugar than what we consume today.
Our poor bodies respond to our new diet of low-fat, highly processed, and refined foods the only way they know how: they keep pumping out insulin in response to this overload of sugars.
Eventually we become resistant to all this insulin in our blood, just as we would become resistant to a drug. The body needs more and more of it to do the same job it once did with far less. So our insulin production system spirals out of control, pumping ever more into our bodies.
All this insulin tells us we are starving (that’s literally the message our bodies get), so we crave foods with high-sugar content—the very same foods that caused the problem in the first place.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if insulin metabolized only sugar. We once thought that was insulin’s only role—to help sugar enter your cells to be metabolized, transforming the stored energy of the sun (in plant foods) with the oxygen we breathe into the energy we use every day to run our bodies.
Here is what too much insulin
really
does to your brain, your body, and your health:
Now we recognize insulin as a major switching station, or control hormone, for many bodily processes. It is a major storage hormone—fat storage, that is.