Insulin Is Not Our Friend.
Insulin Is not our friend. Healthy habits are.
Summary: Learn more about the difference between quick fixes and long-term, sustainable changes.
People with type 2 all know about blood glucose. We talk about it, we check it, and when it’s too high, that’s a diagnosis. But if elevated blood glucose means a person has type 2, does normal blood glucose mean we’re healthy and don’t have unhealthy blood sugar? Not necessarily.
You have to take into account the many things that happen to the body before you ever arrive at the doctor’s office with high blood glucose.
Type 2 starts and progresses for many years before your body allows blood glucose levels to rise. When bombarded, your cells make less and less efficient use of insulin. As this happens, your body fights to keep blood glucose levels normal, and it does so by producing more and more insulin. We call this cycling progression insulin resistance, and the body’s increasing insulin production is called hyperinsulinemia.
Most people with type 2 spend years or decades with elevated insulin levels before blood glucose levels ever rise above normal. And insulin is not our friend. Insulin is an anabolic hormone, meaning it tends to build tissue, in this case, fatty tissue. That’s why it’s called the “fat storage hormone.”
Insulin also initiates the inflammatory response mechanism. Inflammation is the body’s reaction to a pathogen or infection. Without inflammation, wounds and infections would never heal, but left unchecked, it also leads to hay fever, atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer.
This is why it’s counterintuitive to treat insulin like a cure-all. It’s really just a fix to how our body has been conditioned.
So, should we be content with just achieving a normal glucose reading? No, not by a long shot. We must return blood insulin levels to normal to achieve any kind of lasting health. So, include a fasting blood insulin test the next time you get blood work done.
