The Myth about Blood Sugars and Diabetes

hey dr. Berg here in this video we're going to talk about blood sugars okay very very very important yet very misunderstood if you have diabetes if you have hypoglycemia which is low blood sugar if you're concerned about preventing those you want to watch this video now here's how it works the law of the body is that no matter what the body must maintain a certain level of sugar in the blood okay so the blood sugar level will call it glucose level should always be right around 100 now if you want to know the unit's I think it's milligrams per deciliter but don't worry about that but there's blood testing units that you can test your blood and it should be right here now it does range between 80 and 110 but if that blood sugar goes too high okay that's called hyper glycemia that means that's diabetes okay if the blood sugar is too low that is called hypoglycemia okay so the goal for the body is to maintain blood sugar of 100 so it'll do everything it'll tear the body apart it'll turn it'll break down your muscle protein with one goal is to maintain normal blood sugar so everything that almost everything you eat eventually breaks down into glucose or sugar okay even foods that are not sugar even protein and fat will break down and then you're going to build it the body will build it back up into sugar so sugar is used for fuel and nourishment to the cells so the way it works is this you have this huge organ here called the liver the liver is on the right side of your body it's about 3 and 1/2 pounds the size of a football and then we have this tiny organ right here which is called the pancreas and that's right right here on the right below the left ribcage now these two organs reciprocate and what I mean by that is they they have a mutual relationship they coordinate they kind of control the blood Sugar's okay but the liver is the most ignored piece of the puzzle in diabetes which we'll get into simply because here's how it works the liver controls blood sugar when you're not eating and the pancreas controls blood sugars when you eat all right and they go back and forth and back and forth so what the pancreas does is it makes a hormone it's called insulin and it basically what it does is it gets the sugar out of the blood okay so it takes it out it reduces blood sugar okay so there's hormones that lower that sugar all right that's when you're eating because you just ate and you're flooding the blood with sugar even if you don't eat sugar because everything turns out into sugar eventually now when you're not eating we need to kind of raise the sugar so your liver will put sugar in to the blood okay so it goes in alright so and it does it through a hormone that's very similar to insulin but it does the opposite and they call that insulin like growth factor so it's an instant like one but IGF it don't even worry about that right now just realize there's the hormone that basically and where it gets the sugar is it gets the sugar from two sources one is the muscle and the liver okay and that that's basically stored sugar okay so in other words your body has stored sugar and the word for that is glycogen that's basically a bunch of sugars that's stored in the body so you can use it okay and it also gets it from fat alright so those are the two sources that you're tapping into so obviously that's the goal is to be able to lose fat or tap into fat but that's the purpose of fat is to act as a storage so you can use it when you're not eating okay or starving or exercising or fasting those things so the lever basically takes that fat and it converts it into sugar and it puts all this sugar back in the blood to keep that 100 but first it goes after the store sugar so this is number one and this is number two so in the presence of any stored sugar or any sugar at all this fat will not be used at all the body does not like to burn fat in normal situations unless there's no sugar there okay so the way it works simply is the pancreas regulate sugar it put pulled sugar out when you're eating and then when you're not eating the liver starts kicking in there and puts the sugar back in and starts to take this storage and start to put it back in the blood to maintain a sugar at 100 now let's talk about briefly what happens when that sugar gets pulled out of the blood when insulin goes up okay so there's three situations that occurred number one that energy of that sugar could be used as energy immediate energy let's say you're exercising so you're going to be using up your energy or doing a marathon the person's eating sugar and it's kind of burning up or number two it's being stored as sugar on that stored sugar in your liver and in the muscles so we want that to happen because if it's stored then it's not converted to fat okay so I'd rather have stored sugar than fat right because stored sugar is just gonna use for energy but we don't want too much so this certain amount of sugar that's stored in the body but in order to store this sugar right here what happens is that you need potassium alright without potassium you can't store sugar so for every sugar a little molecule you need one potassium molecule like that so potassium is like the glue to hold together so with low potassium levels the person will start craving sugar why because they can't store sugar so they crave sugar why because the sugars are going down and the body's telling you give me that sugar so the symptom of cravings means your body has a low blood sugar and it's really low potassium so what does have what happens in people crave sugar they go eat sugar right what they should consume is potassium now the problem that most people have is they don't really know how much potassium they need on a daily basis an average body needs 4700 milligrams that's a lot in fact one banana is 400 so you'd have to have 10 bananas that's not going to work so we really need our bodies need 7 cups minimum of vegetable every single day now if you're doing one cup or two cup it's not going to cut it and if you're taking a pill it's like 40 milligrams you have to have like a hundred of them so we want to do the vegetable so you can do the kale shake for breakfast as part of it and have your eggs whatever and then for lunch have this huge salad for dinner have some more vegetable but we really want to shoot for 7 cups and if you're at all interested in managing or improving your blood sugar issues this is a must especially if you have diabetes okay so we want to store sugar and then and also if there's too much sugar to be pulling out and that sugars not being used as energy and you don't have potassium guess what it goes right to fat so it's being converted to fat so that is one relationship between potassium and fat if you don't consume enough vegetables or potassium you tend to gain more fat all right so that's just those are the three things that occur with where the sugar goes after you consume sugar and the spike of the hormone insulin from the pancreas now the next point has to do with what is diabetes diabetes is a condition where your body has no longer been able to regulate the sugar in here and it comes from consuming obviously too much sugar that's the common cause but here's the thing diabetes type 2 is a less serious diabetes type 1 is a more serious type type of diabetes so type 2 is really a problem with the liver because what happens is the they take a drug called glucophage or another name for metformin and what all that does is it makes the cells in the liver more receptive or receiving more insulin so they work on the receptors in the liver ok receptors so they increase the conductivity of insulin so each receptor in the liver for insulin becomes magnified and there's 200,000 receptors for insulin for every liver cell that you have so if you could imagine really what diabetes type 2 is it's insulin resistant resistive whatever you want to call it so I guess the best analogy let's say you had a bunch of telemarketing people call your house over and over and over every day for a year you're not gonna pick up any more okay you're not going to keep picking up every time they call you're going to be a bit resistive to that communication so that's what diabetes type 2 is being very resistant resistive to insulin and then they take this drug called glucophage which basically makes it more it picks up the phone a lot more so then now we can receive that insulin communication and thus lowering the blood sugar okay so diabetes medication lowers the blood sugar so usually because these diabetes it's a high sugar state and the problem is that if you ever have a low blood sugar and you take these medications it's going to make it worse because you're going to go even lower so you don't want to take medication if it's too low or normal only when it's too high and the problem when the blood sugar goes low many times people are taking sugar pills which basically make the problem worse because now you're going to spike listen to hi we're trying to avoid that situation now type 1 diabetes is not a liver problem it's a long-term chronic problem of the pancreas and now the cells of the pancreas that make insulin are exhausted and they pretty much just stop working so there boy therefore no insulin is being produced therefore the sugar goes higher and higher and higher and higher and so then now they need insulin injections to lower the sugar and they have to keep taking through the day they have time release and all sorts of things so that is the difference between these two type 2 is the liver type 1 is the pancreas problem this is worse because now you don't make any insulin type 2 you do make insulin but it doesn't work on the liver so that's the relationship between the two and then the real underlying cause our bodies are not designed to consume a hundred and forty-nine pounds of sugar per year our bodies are not designed to consume as much sugars we're eating I mean even baby food is loaded with high fructose corn syrup you have all this juice that the kids are fed and what we consume the sodas and all that we have way too much sugar and the cells just are not designed to handle that and it puts it right into an exhaustive state so you have a lot of people going around in diabetes but you need to understand where the source is and so the next part I'm going to show you some even deeper information on that little cycle okay now check this out we talked about the liver and the pancreas and the hormone in the liver and the hormone the pancreas what's fascinating is that this hormone is a hundred times bigger than insulin as far as quantity of hormone in other words the ratio is a hundred to one as far as the work that's done the majority of work of establishing blood sugars is done by the liver yet very few people emphasize the importance of the liver and maintaining blood sugars it is this one of the most important things to keep healthy when you're trying to establish blood simply because the quantity of work that the liver does is is a hundred times bigger than insulin but everyone focuses on insulin now why well how did that happen why don't doctors know about this why don't they make this more available because if you and I found this I looked at the units that they measure this hormone in the liver it's called IGF the units that it's are different than insulin so in other words they measure this hormone what's called nano grams and this hormone by micro moles so they're completely apples and oranges so you cannot see this hundred to one ratio in other words is kind of like measuring metric versus inches or what is it Celsius versus Fahrenheit or gallons versus ounces you have when you're measuring two things that work together they have to be the same units and if they're not the same units you're going to miss the fact that this liver is a hundred times more important than the pancreas everyone's know what's the significant of that how can we use that information well all we have to do simply if we want to improve the function of the blood sugars and correct diabetic conditions is increase the liver if you just increase the liver by 20% you basically you take 80% of the stress away from the pancreas you you create an tremendous relief from that blood sugars and so the member of the insulin cells that are actually exhausted are overworking because all the sugar coming in there so what we're trying to do is reduce the stress on that cell to salvage that so the significance is all you have to do is improve the liver by a little bit to take a lot of pressure off this pancreas here simply because this is where this needs to do its lion's share and so that leads to what most people have is liver damage but it won't show up on a blood test so later in life so when you damage the liver by consuming too much alcohol or too much cook foods or junk foods or even not enough vegetables because the the way to repair the liver is through raw and that is why I start everyone out on the liver enhancement in my book chapter 10 because if you improve the liver function you actually can help a lot of different problems also age every decade you get older and you reach the age of 50 you lower this hormone called growth hormone now some of you have heard that the relationship between growth hormone and anti-aging well growth hormone is a major trigger for the liver to release this hormone right here that regulates blood sugars so really I GF insulin-like growth factor is an extension of growth hormone they're both almost identical and function so growth hormone does a lot for regulating blood sugars so we want to keep this high and so let's say you're not eating a lot of sugar well it could be that you're just getting older to the fact that liver is not receiving that growth hormone as much so there are things you can do to improve it but the fact that is the growth room when that goes down you have to be even better on your diet because you don't have the full capacity of that regulation of that liver function see growth hormone does three things it burns fat because it really mobilizes fat for the blood sugars it also helps you it's anti-aging and it it's it protects your proteins so it's called a protein spare hormone and what that means is that it prevents your protein from turning breaking down into sugar and use for fuel okay so it protects your protein what protein collagen so you you avoid getting this loose skin sagging belly all that and also it protects your cartilage in collagen in your knees and your shoulders and these other joints so it's a very important thing in protecting muscle protein breakdown that's occurring from the cortisol from the stress remember that cortisol hormone which is very destructive on your cells when you go through a lot of stress that will break down your muscle protein especially in your thigh muscle in your legs that's why you can't get your thigh muscles toned because you have too much of this darn destructive cortisol and not for that so we're trying to reverse this process so how do we do it number one intense exercise is very good but that would be interval training very important to keep growth rolling up and I'm talking like short little tiny workouts maybe 30 seconds resting for three minutes back and forth every other day versus the treadmill that will actually enhance growth hormone unless you're really really stressed and you're not sleeping you're gonna have to walk but eventually want to work up to interval training okay and then number two sleeping you need to sleep seven eight hours to keep this growth roaming really high and then the next thing is you need to get your liver healthy you need to do the liver enhancement you need to really protect your liver and prove it and so what are the foods that will improve the liver my favorite is you guessed it kale everything comes back to that kale doesn't it we've talked about that in every single video and kale is one of the super foods to heal and protect your liver because the liver loves the bitter vegetables and it's low sugar and it's is a lot of properties to restore liver function and when you have that Cal shake in the morning the the liver will improve and you'll get a lot of potassium and you'll get more growth hormone and you get less insulin and you'll crave less and you'll be able to maintain your age better and prevent the protein breakdown and I've had lots of people improve their blood sugars by taking kale so I hope this video helped you understand some of the basics of blood sugars and apply this information and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dr. Eric Berg DC

Views: 3,438,544

Rating: 4.8251581 out of 5

Keywords: diabetes, blood sugar, hypoglycemia, dr eric berg, drberg, Type 2, Cure, Type 1, Treatment, Sugar, Diet, Symptoms, Type 2 Diabetes, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 Diabetes, Diabetes Diet, Diabetes

Id: P7fHYSyvxU0

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2013