She was the girl next door. Sadly, this Hollywood icon passed away from complications from this modern plague, Type 2 Diabetes.
Nearly 21 million Americans have Diabetes, but one third of these people do not know it. We’ve all heard of Diabetes, but what exactly is it?
Type 1 Diabetes is when the pancreas no longer makes insulin. Type 2Diabetes is when the cells of the body resist insulin’s action. The pancreas makes extra insulin but cannot keep up.
Normally, your body produces a hormone called insulin, which escorts the glucose (sugar from food or foods that break down into sugar) out of the blood and into cells to be used as energy. With Diabetes, either your body doesn’t make enough insulin or doesn’t efficiently use the insulin it does produce. When glucose builds up in the blood, it can damage the tiny blood vessels in the kidneys, heart, eyes, and nervous system.
While Type 2 Diabetes used to be termed “an Old Man’s Disease,” we now see it in young children. What is so different 30 years ago? You guessed it-our diets. Most Americans consume the Standard American Diet (SAD!) of mostly processed foods, flours and sugars. These processed foods break down into sugar or glucose. When the body is constantly being bombarded by the need to produce insulin to handle this major influx of sugar, it gets overworked.
Think of it as a car that has overheated. It has been forced to work too hard and finally breaks down. Similarly, Type 2 Diabetes results when the pancreas gets “overheated” from having to deal with much more than it was designed to handle and begins to stop working.
This condition is what has led to our growing population of Insulin Resistant conditions that we now know is a food disorder.
The primary sign of insulin resistance is when a man’s waist measurement is greater than or equal to his hip measurement. In a woman, the sign is a waist that is 80% or more of hip measurement. This is because of the way insulin deposits fat–usually (although not always) around the stomach.
When a person is insulin resistant, carbohydrates (simple and complex) are metabolized into fat (rather than energy) and stored as fat cells. When all the ells are full of fat, the fat starts being stored in the blood stream, causing clogging of the arteries.
Insulin, in addition to being a digestive hormone, is secreted in response to stress. The more insulin your system requires, the more likely you are to overcome insulin resistant. Ultimately, if we live long enough, everyone becomes insulin resistant.
The big lesson here: high levels of carbohydrate consumption and/or stress trigger insulin, leading to insulin resistance, elevated blood fats, clogged arteries, blood clots, etc which may lead to Diabetes.
The easy solution is to ditch the soda, fruit drinks/juice, processed foods and cut down on flours and sugar. Add more one-ingredient foods such as fruit and vegetables and clean protein with each meal.
Sadly, this Modern Plague can actually be easily reversed by simply feeding the body what it was meant to eat.
