about insulin

[Guest guest]

Caloric Restriction Research

There have been thousands of studies done since the 1950s on caloric

restriction of laboratory animals. If you restrict calories but maintain a

high level

of nutrition, called CRONs (Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition), or

adequate nutrition, CRANs (Caloric Restriction with Adequate Nutrition),

these

animals can live anywhere between 30 percent and 200 percent longer,

depending on the species.

Researchers have tested caloric restriction on several dozen species, and

the results are uniform throughout. They are doing it on primates now, and

it

seems to working with primates, though we won't know for sure for about

another 10 years.

Centenarian studies

There are three major centenarian studies going on around the world. They

are trying to find the variable that would confer longevity among this group

of

people who live to be 100 years old. Why do centenarians become

centenarians? Why are they so lucky? Is it because they have low

cholesterol, exercise

a lot and live a healthy, clean life?

Well, the oldest person ever recorded was Calumet of France who died

last year at 122 years of age. She smoked all of her life and drank.

What researchers are finding from these major centenarian studies is that

there is hardly anything in common among these people. They have high

cholesterol

and low cholesterol, some exercise and some don't, some smoke, some don't.

Some are nasty as can be, some nice and calm and some are ornery.

But, they all have relatively low sugar for their age, and they all have low

triglycerides for their age.

And, they all have relatively low insulin.

A Common Cause

Insulin is the common denominator in everything I've just talked about. They

way to treat cardiovascular disease and the way I treated my stepfather, the

way I treated the high risk cancer patient, and the osteoporosis and high

blood pressure. The way to treat virtually all of the so-called chronic

diseases

of aging is to treat insulin itself.

The other major avenue of research in aging has to do with genetic studies

of so-called lower organisms. We know the genetics involved. We've got the

entire

genes mapped out of several species of yeast and worms now. We think of life

span as being fixed, sort of.

Humans tend to have an average life span of 76 years, and the maximum

lifespan was this French lady at 122 years. In humans we feel this length of

time

is relatively fixed, but in lower forms of life it is very plastic. Lifespan

is strictly a variable depending on the environment. Other species can live

two weeks, two years or sometimes 20 years depending on what they want

themselves to do, which depends very much on the environment.

If there is a lot of food around they are going to reproduce quickly and die

quickly, if not they will just bide their time until conditions are better.

We know now that the variability in lifespan is regulated by insulin.

Often it is thought that insulin's role is strictly to lower blood sugar. I

once had a patient list off about eight drugs she was on and not even

mention

insulin. Insulin is not treated as a drug. In fact, in some places you don't

even need a prescription, you can just get it over the counter, it's treated

like candy.

Insulin is found in even single-celled organisms and has been around for

several billion years. Its purpose, in some organisms, is to regulate

lifespan.

The way genetics works is that genes are not replaced, they are built upon.

We have the same genes as everything that came before us--we just have more

of them.

We have added books to our genetic library, but our base is the same. What

we are finding is that we can use insulin to regulate lifespan too.

Aging is a Disease

If there is a single marker for lifespan, as they are finding in the

centenarian studies, it is insulin, specifically insulin sensitivity.

How sensitive are your cells to insulin? When they are not sensitive, the

insulin levels go up. Who has heard of the term insulin resistance?

Insulin resistance is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging,

because the disease itself is actually aging.

We know now that aging is a disease. The other case studies that I

mentioned, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, cancer,

all the so-called

chronic diseases of aging and auto-immune diseases, those are symptoms.

If you have a cold and you go to the doctor, you have a runny nose. I did

Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) for 10 years so I know what the common treatment

for

that is, a decongestant. I can't tell you how many patients I saw who had

been given Sudafed by their family doctors for a cold who then came to see

me

afterward because of a really bad sinus infection.

What happens when you treat the symptom of a runny nose from a cold and you

take a decongestant? Well, it certainly decongests you by shutting off the

mucus,

but why do you have the mucus? It's because your body is trying to clean and

wash out the membranes. What else is in mucus? Secretory IgA, a very strong

antibody to kill the virus. If there is no mucus, there is no secretory IgA.

Decongestants also constrict blood vessels, the little capillaries, or

arterioles, that go to those capillaries, and the cilia, the little

hair-like projections

that beat to push mucus along to create a stream. They get paralyzed because

they don't have blood flow, so there is no more ciliary movement.

What happens if you dam a stream and create a pond?

In days you've got larvae growing, but if the stream is moving, you are

fine. You need a constant stream of mucus to get rid of and prevent an

infection.

I am going into this in some detail because in almost all cases, if you

treat a symptom you are going to make the disease worse. The symptom is

there as

your body's attempt to heal itself.

Now, the medical profession is continually segregating more and more

symptoms into diseases--they call the symptoms diseases. Using ENT for

example, a patient

will walk out of the office with a diagnosis of Rhinitis, which is

inflammation of the nose. Is there a reason why that patient has

inflammation of the

nose? I think so. Wouldn't that underlying cause be the disease as opposed

to the descriptive term of Rhinitis or Pharyngitis?

Someone can have the same virus and have Rhinitis, Pharyngitis or Sinusitis.

They can have all sorts of " itis's, " which is a descriptive term for

inflammation.

That is what the code will be, and that is what the disease will be. So they

treat what they think is the disease, but which actually is just a symptom.

The same thing happens with cholesterol. If you have high cholesterol it is

called hypercholesterolemia. Hypercholesterolemia has become the code for

the

disease when it is only the symptom. So doctors treat that symptom, and what

are they doing to the heart? Messing it up.

What you have to do if you are going to treat any disease is get to the root

of the disease. If you keep pulling a dandelion out by its leaves, you are

not going to get very far. But the problem is that we don't know what the

root is.

The root is known in many other areas of science, but the problem is that

medicine really isn't a science; it is a business (but I don't want to get

into

that, we could talk for hours).

You really need to look at the root of what is causing the problem. We can

use that cold as a further example.

Why does that person have a cold?

If he saw the doctor, the doctor might tell him to take an antibiotic along

with the decongestant. You see this all the time because the doctor wants to

get rid of the patient. In almost all cases of an upper respiratory

infection, it is a virus, and the antibiotic is going to do worse than

nothing, because

it is going to kill the bacterial flora in the gut and impair the immune

system, making the immune system worse.

The patient might see someone else more knowledgeable who will say, " No, you

caught a virus, don't do anything, go home and sleep, let your body heal

itself. "

That's better. You might see someone else who would ask why you caught a

virus without being out there trying to hunt for viruses with a net. We are

breathing

viruses every day; right now we are breathing viruses, cold viruses and

rhinoviruses.

So why doesn't everybody catch a cold tomorrow?

The Chinese will tell you that it is because the milieu has to be right, if

the Chinese were to quote the French. Your body has to be receptive to that

virus--only if your immune system is depressed will it allow that virus to

take hold.

So maybe a depressed immune system is the disease. You can be given a bunch

of vitamin C because your immune system is depressed and it is likely that

the

person has a vitamin C deficiency. That's where most of us are at right now,

where we would recommend a bunch of vitamin C to try to pick up the immune

system.

But why is the vitamin C not working? Vitamin C is made in almost all living

mammals except humans and a couple of other species. Vitamin C is made

directly

from glucose and actually has a similar structure; they compete for one

another.

It has been known for many decades that sugar depresses the immune system.

It was only in the 70s that they found out that vitamin C was needed by

white

blood cells so that they could phagocytize bacteria and viruses. White blood

cells require a fifty times higher concentration, at least inside the cell

as outside, so they have to accumulate vitamin C.

There is something called a phagocytic index, which tells you how rapidly a

particular macrophage or lymphocyte can gobble up a virus, bacteria or

cancer

cell. In the 70s Linus ing knew that white blood cells needed a high

dose of vitamin C and that is when he came up with his theory that you need

high

doses of vitamin C to combat the common cold.

But if we know that vitamin C and glucose have similar chemical structure,

what happens when sugar levels go up? They compete for one another upon

entering

the cells. And the thing that mediates the entry of vitamin C into the cells

is the same thing that mediates the entry of glucose into the cells. If

there

is more glucose around then less vitamin C will be allowed into the cell,

and it doesn't take much glucose to have this effect. A blood sugar value of

120 reduces the phagocytic index 75 percent.

Here we are getting a little bit further down into the roots of disease. It

doesn't matter what disease you are talking about, whether you are talking

about

a common cold or cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis or cancer, the root is

always going to be at the molecular and cellular level, and I will tell you

that insulin is going to have its hand in it, if not totally control it.

What is the purpose of insulin?

As I mentioned earlier, in some organisms it is to control their lifespan.

What is the purpose of insulin in humans? Your doctor will say that it's to

lower

blood sugar, but I will tell you right now that that is a trivial side

effect. Insulin's evolutionary purpose as is known right now, we are looking

at

other possibilities, is to store excess nutrients.

We come from a time of feast and famine when if we couldn't store the excess

energy during times of feasting, we would not be here because all of our

ancestors

encountered famine. We are only here because our ancestors were able to

store nutrients, which they were able to do because they were able to

elevate their

insulin in response to any elevation in energy that the organism

encountered.

When your body notices that sugar is elevated, it is a sign that you've got

more than you need; you're not burning it so it is accumulating in your

blood.

So insulin will be released to take that sugar and store it. How does it

store it? Glycogen?

Your body stores very little glycogen at any one time. All the glycogen

stored in your liver and muscle wouldn't last you through one active day.

Once you

fill up your glycogen stores that sugar is stored as saturated fat, 98

percent of which is palmitic acid.

So the idea of the medical profession recommending a high

complex-carbohydrate, low-saturated-fat diet is an absolute oxymoron. A

high-complex-carbohydrate

diet is nothing but a high-glucose diet, or a high-sugar diet. Your body is

just going to store it as saturated fat, and the body makes it into

saturated

fat quite readily.

Insulin's Other Roles

Insulin doesn't just store carbohydrates, by the way. Somebody mentioned

that it is an anabolic hormone, and it absolutely is. Body builders are

injecting

themselves with insulin because it builds muscle and stores protein.

Magnesium

A less known fact is that insulin also stores magnesium. But if your cells

become resistant to insulin, you can't store magnesium so you lose it

through

urination.

The above information was copied from Doctor Mercola's web page.