Dr. Hallberg on Carbohydrate Intolerance, Insulin Resistance and Reversing Diabetes (Ch 2)

okay now let's talk about carbohydrate intolerance and insulin resistance when we hear these terms a lot but what do they actually mean well in order to understand let's start with insulin insulin is a hormone our fat storage hormone you can't store fat without insulin now one of the other really important things about insulin is insulin is what helps us dispose of blood sugar from our circulation into the cells where it can be used so when we eat insulin rises different amounts depending on what we eat to help us dispose of blood sugar so it's important to understand what the insulin response is to the different macronutrients and what we see is the same thing that happens with blood sugar which makes sense because if our blood sugar is rising our insulin is going to need to go up as well to dispose of that blood sugar pushing it into the cells so what we see is that with carbohydrate consumption insulin goes up a lot Peaks quickly and drops fast with protein it gets a lot better look at what happens when we consume fat nothing there's not an insulin response that's going to be important as we make our food choices what actually happens with insulin and blood sugar when we eat the first thing that I think we need to start with is understanding how much sugar is actually in our blood or our circulation at any given time the average adult believe it or not has five liters of blood running through their circulation at all times if you think of a two liter of soda I mean this is a lot of blood and in that blood their sugar but actually the now sugar is a lot less than most people think so an average blood sugar most people realize a good one would be less than a hundred but less than a hundred what what does that mean in a context that we can wrap our head around if you do the math on this what that means is five grams of sugar dissolved in five litres of blood not much especially when you realize five grams actually is just a teaspoon what's supposed to happen after we eat is lugg sugar starts to rise insulin Rises and helps us dispose of sugar into cells where it can be used but remember I said that's what's supposed to happen in a system that's functioning normally but now let's get into insulin resistance and the food choices that we make now most of you realize that a soda is not a good food choice right we can all accept that a can of sugared soda is not gonna be healthy for us we know it's gonna cause our blood sugars to rise why it's full of sugar other carbohydrate food choices that we sometimes think are healthy for us our full of just as much sugar believe it or not if we compare a can of soda to a cup of brown rice the brown rice has more sugar than the can of soda more it's amazing let's take a look at what happens if we eat a cup of brown rice you might have thought that was a good choice for two reasons number one it's low fat number two it's actually pretty low calorie a cup of rice only has about 200 calories foods that we think are healthy for us we've been told are healthy for us if we have insulin resistance they're still not a good food choice so for someone who consumes a cup of brown rice but is insulin resistant here's what we find believe it or not a cup of brown rice contains 45 grams of carbohydrates that's 9 teaspoons of sugar you remember in our system there's one teaspoon what is our system to do with nine teaspoons rushing in from a supposedly healthy food what our body does is insulin levels rise and as insulin levels rise it helps push the sugar into the cells so that our body can keep the 1 teaspoon at a teaspoon that's what's supposed to happen but in someone who is insulin resistant insulin isn't doing its job so as those 45 grams come rushing into our circulation we're unable to dispose of them as we should and so our body's response to that it's just make more and more insulin our insulin levels they rise and they rise we're carbohydrate intolerant so we have to be very cautious here and not presume that some of these healthy carbs are actually just that because when the carbohydrates are high and we are insulin resistant they're gonna cause a problem either way they haven't get high enough we can dispose of the sugar for a while but years maybe even decades later our system can't keep up any longer and our blood sugars start to rise that's now diabetes let's talk about carbohydrate tolerance vs. carbohydrate intolerance so some people have a high carbohydrate tolerance what does that mean when they consume foods specifically carbohydrates their insulin levels will rise they need to to dispose of the sugar coming in into the cells but they don't need that much insulin because their carbohydrate tolerance is high now for people who have a low carbohydrate tolerance who are carbohydrate intolerant if they consume the exact same food let's say a cup of brown rice what's gonna happen with their insulin levels they're gonna go up dramatically because their body is resistant to the insulin and therefore they need a lot more of it a lot more insulin a lot more of our fat storage hormone to dispose of the same amount of carbohydrates so what we see here two very different things high carbohydrate tolerance low carbohydrate tolerance and with low carbohydrate tolerance this is driven by insulin resistance causing our body to need to make much more insulin much more fat storage hormone and what does that do it puts us into a vicious cycle so for someone who has a low carbohydrate tolerance if they eat carbohydrates over their tolerance what happens is they need more insulin so our body releases more insulin and this actually leads to the insulin resistance getting worse and around and around we go and people get stuck in this they get stuck in this vicious cycle when they have a low carbohydrate tolerance driven by insulin resistance

Channel: Virta Health

Views: 119,124

Keywords: diabetes, type 2 diabetes, reversing diabetes

Id: ldzaLP8oAHw

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2017