 CocoChia Sea Greens 3D Bar ™
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New!Contents: 12 x 48g bars Net weight:480g Total calories: 220 per bar Calories from fat: 120 per bar |
 TheraSweet ™ 750g
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Net weight: 750g or 214 servings Serving Size: 1 teaspoon (3.5 g) Main ingredients: Xylitol, Tagatose, Glycine ... |
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The Importance of the Insulin Response
We all know that insulin is involved in regulating blood sugar levels. But insulin’s role in living creatures is much greater than that, even pivotal.
One of insulin’s primary roles is the storage of excess nutrients. Since the beginning of time, human beings have lived through dramatic periods of feast and famine. We would not exist as a species if we hadn’t been able to store the excess energy gathered in times of plenty. Our ancestors, like ourselves, could do just this because our bodies increase the amount of insulin in response to elevations in energy. The release of insulin—in other words, the signal that the body has more than enough sugar—triggers your body’s storage mechanism, which takes the sugar and stores it, mostly as the saturated fat palmitic acid, triglycerides, and cholesterol.
A diet high in complex carbohydrates—such as the standard American diet—is essentially a high-sugar diet because high-glycemic foods convert so quickly to sugar that the body does not know the difference. Our bodies naturally react to such a diet by storing much of it as saturated fat.
Another role of insulin is storing magnesium. But high levels of insulin cause the body’s cells to develop resistance to this magnesium. Thus, high insulin levels lead to an ironically lower level of bodily magnesium, which is excreted in urine when resistant cells cannot use it. This loss of magnesium causes blood vessels to constrict and blood pressure to increase. Even more importantly, energy is lost because magnesium is critical to all energy-producing reactions within cells.
This concept of increased insulin leading to increased insulin resistance is important. In fact, it is not going too far to say that insulin resistance and the associated state of hyperinsulinemia are largely responsible for what are considered the chronic diseases of aging. Any diet aimed at improving and prolonging our lives must thus address insulin regulation with the goal of decreasing insulin resistance or, to state it in a positive way, increase insulin sensitivity.