Metabolism
Insulin resistance stems from more than just carbohydrates. Iron levels, body fat, and environmental toxins all significantly impact your insulin sensitivity—a holistic view of metabolic health.
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Merry Christmas and a peaceful time with your loved ones! We also wish you a happy New Year!
Insulin resistance is something we know. The opposite of it is insulin action, or insulin sensitivity. Insulin is perhaps our most important hormone. It is—unlike what is often claimed—not a "storage hormone" that just makes us fat and sick. Quite the opposite. Insulin and what is called "insulin signaling" in cells normally works like balm for cells. It serves to build and maintain structures; insulin acts anti-inflammatory and function-preserving. That means:
Fair enough. There are basically two reasons why insulin no longer works well. One reason is why there is such a thing as low-carb diets: if you constantly overload cells with an insulin surplus, they shut down and no longer want too much insulin. Hence the idea: simply remove from your diet what normally triggers insulin release—namely carbohydrates.
The logical flaw in this approach is that a) regular carbohydrate consumption usually means that you process carbohydrates better over time and thus need much less insulin, and b) there are some of the healthiest indigenous populations in the world that have far lower insulin and far better metabolic health than we do, and eat mainly carbohydrates. Sure, you can argue about wheat flour and refined carbohydrates, but the fact is that good insulin action doesn't necessarily have anything to do with carbohydrate consumption. Quite the opposite.
What many people don't realize is that the defect in insulin action—that is, insulin resistance—can occur not just via "top-down," meaning through carbohydrate abuse, but also "bottom-up." In other words, the cell for whatever reason doesn't do what it should—for example, burn energy—and as a result shuts down and inhibits insulin action. This creates insulin resistance gradually and without our conscious doing. In this case, even the best low-carb diet won't help.
We've addressed this topic many times—in the blog, in our books, everywhere. And yet it continues to be misunderstood, for inexplicable reasons. Here are a few examples:
... and especially not when it comes to consuming organisms from the sea. Seafood are often true garbage dumps, packed with all those substances we dump into the ocean. Whoever regularly consumes fish will inevitably expose themselves to a large amount of pollutants. Already in 2011, an important paper showed that farmed salmon containing persistent organic pollutants causes insulin resistance and obesity in an animal model. Do you want to eat something like that?
Just a few years ago, a paper appeared showing that "the population of 38 percent of 175 analyzed countries was exposed between 2001 and 2011 to weekly methylmercury doses far exceeding the maximum safe level for fetal development." Why? Because heavy metals—in this example, the highly toxic organic methylmercury—have been massively increasing in the world's oceans for many decades. The same can be assumed for virtually all other environmental toxins.
In other words: good insulin action, a normally functioning energy metabolism, depends on many factors. In our Western world, however, it often depends on factors we don't even think about. We eat and live ourselves gradually into sickness—and then believe that simple carbohydrate restriction will make it better again. This tool can be a tool, and certainly wheat gluten consumption in this context is not particularly beneficial. The fact is, however, that these days you have to think a bit outside the box if you want to get your body back on track.
Simplest approach: just for a few weeks remove fish from your menu and see what happens. Plant-based and vegan diets are certainly successful and valuable partly because they remove from the menu exactly what often impairs insulin action. Red meat (= lots of iron), fish (see above), also eggs (often still very high dioxin levels!) and other things. You should also not forget that heavy metals and environmental toxins particularly like to accumulate in animal organisms and are often found there in a particularly bioavailable form.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't eat animal products. No, they are nutritionally extremely valuable and irreplaceable. But you should consider whether it's a good idea to eat low-carb and then consume a kilogram of salmon every week, five eggs daily, or 300 grams of beef. Something like that can very quickly become very detrimental to your insulin action. And then you wonder.
So the circle closes. For the new year, we're aiming to achieve good insulin action.
