Telltale Signs Your INSULIN Is Too High!

Hello, health champions. Today we're going to talk about the warning signs that your insulin is getting too high. And we're going to talk a lot about why it's so critically important that we understand these things so that we can catch it early. But when we talk about these signs and symptoms of high insulin, we have to distinguish. We have to understand, are we talking about blood glucose or are we talking about insulin? Because most people who cover these topics of signs and symptoms, they're talking about blood sugar. And they're talking about a range that could be anywhere on the scale from 80 up to 200 or 300. And very often we hear things like that. You get a lot of thirst. You get excessive thirst. You lose water. You get dehydrated because you're losing glucose through the urine, which would be because there's a renal threshold for glucose at around 180. But these are late cases. This is when it has gotten completely out of hand. So most of this video is going to talk about the early signs and where glucose really should be. And what can we see? What can we expect when we start seeing subtle changes? So sign number one would be that blood glucose is starting to creep up. And we're talking about creeping. We're talking about very small changes. So normal blood glucose is normally considered, the range given on your blood test is typically 70 to 100. But optimal is a lot more narrow than that actually. So 82 to 88 is probably the sweet spot. And if you're a few points outside of that, don't worry. But realize that the optimal range is fairly narrow. And if we look at this graphically, then the normal so-called range would be anywhere from 70 to 100. And the optimal would be 82 to 88 is much smaller area. But then we have to understand when is it okay to be below that? So if you're doing a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet, or if you're in the middle of a fast that goes beyond 24 hours, now it's totally fine and totally healthy to be significantly below that. Your body could be perfectly normal doing exactly what it's supposed to do, even if you get all the way down to 60 or even below. I've done two, three day fasts where I end up in the 50s. But the reason is that when you go into a ketogenic diet or you go into fasting, which is okay to do at least once in a while, then your body is also going to rely on ketones as fuel for the brain. So if you have ketones as a supplemental fuel, then you want your glucose to be lower because you don't need it up in that range. However, if you're not making ketones, then it's not okay to be down in this range. Now that's called hypoglycemia. So if you normally have glucose after a meal of 120, 150, now and you get blood sugar swings, now it's not okay to be at the lower end of this, because now this is truly hypoglycemia and your brain is starving. And the reason we really need to understand this is that this is the number one health problem in the world. It's not number one for everybody, it's not the only health problem, but across the board, it is the most common health problem. So the prevalence, if we look at it, type 2 diabetes, which is when your A1c, when your hemoglobin A1c is above 6.5, that's their definition. That's about 10% of the world's population today. So that is more than 3/4 billion people. It's closing in on a billion people. And then if we look at the people in addition to that, who are pre-diabetic, who if they don't change, could get type 2 diabetes within 5 to 10 years, and their A1c is above 5.7, that's another 10 to 15%. So 20 to 25% of the world's population have metabolic disease and they're heading into health problems. So that's already 2 billion people in the world, and just imagine the costs if they're allowed to get into type 2 diabetes, and we see that kind of numbers everywhere in the world. Now what is your insulin supposed to be? When is it too high? Well, ideally, we're talking about a number between 2 and 5, and this is measured in microunits per milliliter. A moderately elevated range could be between 6 and 17, and anything over 17 would definitely be too high. And interestingly, for the longest time now, we have seen the normal range for insulin on blood tests before they flag it all the way up to 25. So recently, they've started to lower that number, their threshold to 17, but depending on where you live, you could see different numbers. So if we look at a mild to moderate number of insulin resistance, where insulin is more than 10, it's more than twice what it should be ideally. No one really knows because so few people measure these numbers, but there are indications that that could be 60 to 80% of the world's population. So now we're talking 5, 6, 7 billion people in the world who are metabolically unhealthy and who are moving in the wrong direction. And why does this matter so much? Because this is the single biggest contributor to things like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke, dementia, and even cancer. In other words, most of the things that kill people today. Sign number two is sugar cravings. So basically what happens is we eat something that becomes blood glucose. Now the body needs to respond to that glucose with insulin. And if we eat too much of things that raise blood sugar too much, now we're going to get excess insulin and over time, we're going to get dysregulation. So let's just take an example here. If we eat something and your blood sugar is supposed to be here and at the lower end of fasting, at the upper end after a whole food meal with protein and fat. Now if you eat processed foods, low fat, high starch, high sugar, now this blood sugar is going to be much, much higher. So this might be let's call this 80, let's call this 120 and let's call this 170. Now when the blood sugar is high, your body has to release a lot of insulin at one time because high blood sugar is very unhealthy. It's a stress on the body. Your body can go into a coma with extremely high or extremely low blood sugar. That's why it wants to keep it in this narrow range. So blood sugar goes down and now when it dips, we get hungry, we get cravings and we eat again and it goes up and it goes down and we call this a blood sugar roller coaster. And that would happen if you eat like this all the time or a lot of the time, your body gets used to a high blood sugar. That's where it feels good. That's when you're juiced up, that's when you're pumped. And anytime that your blood sugar is really low, like on the lower end here around 70 or 80, now you get cravings because your body is running out of energy. It wants that kick again. And the fastest way, of course, to fix that blood sugar is to eat something sugary or starchy, comfort foods that will bring that blood sugar up quick. Number three is hunger and that's kind of like a craving, but there is more to it now. So at the very most basic level, whenever we eat and we have some excess energy available after we eat, then the excess goes into storage. And that's really, really smart because then when there is less food, then we need energy, now we can retrieve that stuff that we have put in storage. And the best way to store this is as fat because it's by far the most effective way to store extra energy on the body. And this hormone called insulin promotes lipogenesis. So when we have an excess, when we have high blood sugar, when we have excess food and energy, we make extra insolence that we can put that extra stuff into storage. So lipogenesis means to turn something into fat. Lipo is lipid and genesis means to make something. And the other thing that insulin does is that it prevents lipolises. It prevents the breakdown of fat. And this is really critical to understand because we are supposed to store the excess. We're supposed to retrieve it when we need it. But if we have too high a level of insulin, now that's going to prevent the breakdown. And what that means is when we need that energy now, if insulin is high, we can't retrieve it. And if we need energy, but we can't get it from the stores, then of course, you're going to get more hungry. That's the only other way that your body can get energy is to eat something else. So now you basically have two choices. You can eat something or you can use will power. You can just suck it up even though you're hungry. You just don't eat anything. And how long can you keep that up? Well, not forever. And this is why when you have a low fat diet and a low calorie diet, when you're trying to use will power to burn fat, then it ultimately results in failure. 98% of the time, because most people don't have that sort of will power forever. And this is why I believe the low carb high fat diet is a solution for most people who have become insulin resistant and who are facing this situation. Their insulin is too high and that is why they're hungry. Now if you go low carb, now your insulin drops. So you're allowing your body to reset the hunger to create a new set point to start reversing this vicious cycle of high insulin, more hunger, more weight gain, more insulin and so forth. And by lowering insulin through fasting and low carb diets, that's where we can lower insulin and reset it. And number four is weight gain. So everything that we talked about on the previous slide should be perfectly clear. And anything that gives us more hunger, of course, is going to cause weight gain. If it's the long term hunger that we don't have control over, now we can't just use will power like we talked about. And not only will it cause weight gain, but it will cause stubborn weight, the weight that won't come off very easily. Sign number five is fatigue. And what happens here is that if you are carb dependent, if your body expects to meet its energy needs from glucose, because that's what you typically eat. If you follow the guidelines, you'll be eating 56, 70% of your calories from carbohydrate, 250, 300 grams. The day you train your body to use glucose to expect that as your main fuel source. But if you're also now insulin resistant, meaning that the food you eat becomes glucose to a large extent, you raise your blood sugar, then the sugar is high in the bloodstream, but the insulin resistance keeps it from getting into the cells. So in a way, the inside of the cell is still low on energy. It's low on fuel and you have an abundance in the bloodstream. And the second part of this fatigue is that you're using up a lot of energy in converting this glucose into fat. So basically, here is a blood vessel and you have all these little glucose molecules swimming around. And the body doesn't like high glucose and it's supposed to get into this cell right here, but now this cell is insulin resistance. So this glucose has to become something else. We can put a little bit of it in storage as glycogen, but that fills up pretty quickly, especially if you eat frequently and you eat high carb. So now the body has one more thing that it can do with this glucose is it can turn it into fat. It can turn it into triglycerides. And then these triglycerides get packaged into something called a VLDL, very low density like the protein. And this VLDL carries the triglycerides and the purpose is to after a meal to package it and to deliver this fat, these triglycerides to the cell. But if this cell is insulin resistant, now it is resisting glucose, but it also has a more general resistance to fuel and the two types of fuel are glucose and fat. So if it's resisting glucose, it's also resisting triglycerides, even though fat doesn't technically need insulin to get across. The cell is still resistant. So what's supposed to happen after a meal is you absorb this fat from the diet and the body packages up these triglycerides in VLDLs. And VLDLs circulate in the bloodstream to deliver triglycerides to this cell. And the problem now is that the cell is resistant. It's resistant to fuel specifically to glucose, but can of as a follow through it also becomes resistant to other types of fuel like fat. So we have glucose and fat as the main fuels. And even though triglycerides fat do not technically need insulin to get into the cell when the cell is resistant, then they still have a hard time getting in. So normally the VLDLs would be in the bloodstream and they'd be unloading their cargo in 30 minutes or so. But if the cell is resistant now those VLDLs just float around for hours and hours and hours and our triglyceride and our VLDL values go way up. And this is why you can get really tired after a meal if your insulin resistant and your body has to use up a lot of energy converting more and more of this glucose into triglycerides. Number six is brain fog. So interestingly, it was only in the last few decades that they realized that the brain can also become insulin resistant. Before that they thought that glucose was so important and the brain was so important that glucose had automatic access to the brain without insulin. And then eventually they learned that it does need insulin. And now we even know that insulin resistance is one of the primary causes of dementia. So much in fact that they've given it the nickname type three diabetes. And that doesn't mean that this is a separate form of diabetes. It's just a way of saying that dementia and diabetes are so closely linked through that mechanism of insulin resistance. Sign number seven is hypertension or high blood pressure. And the mechanism here is that when we have high insulin that insulin tends to increase the reabsorption of sodium in the kidney. The insulin makes the kidney act differently. And now because water follows wherever sodium goes if we retain more sodium we're going to retain more water. We're going to increase our fluid volume and our blood pressure is going to go up. Now typically the body is pretty smart and it's basically perfect but it can be tricked. It can be pushed to do abnormal things. So normally the kidney is self regulating. And the way that happens is if we retain more sodium and we retain more water and blood pressure goes up that extra blood pressure is going to push more water out of the kidney called pressure diuresis. And this is a normally a self balancing thing. However, if we have insulin resistance now we can change the kidney's set point. We're altering the way the normal behavior of the kidney to where it keeps too much sodium. It reabsorbs too much sodium and that's where we have that high blood pressure. Number eight is skin tags. And those are the little unsightly outcrop things if you will that people with insulin resistance can find on their neck and in their armpits and in any skin fall, any crease basically. And what we have to understand about insulin is that insulin is anabolic and that means it promotes growth and that makes sense because when we have an excess of food that's when we trigger insulin and that's what we want to do the growing because we have a lot of resources. And insulin is also what we call mytogenic which has to do with mitosis. It stimulates the cells to want to divide. It increases the likelihood. It speeds up the rate at which cells divide and replicate themselves. And one more thing we want to mention is insulin stimulates IGF which is not insulin stands for insulin-like growth factor one which also promotes growth. So these skin tags, the locations they appear is usually where we have a little extra friction, a little extra wear and tear or rubbing or contact with things. And when we wear on the skin, when we rub on it we get inflammation because that's part of the damage and then we have the damage, we create the inflammation so that we can perform the repair which is obviously a good thing but then with excess levels of insulin now we get excess growth and we accept it. exacerbates all these factors. So as a result, we get a little too much growth and we see the skin tags. And often in those same areas that friction and that excess healing can also create something called acanthosis nigricans, which is basically dark patches. And for the most part, they appear in areas related to those skin tags. Sign number nine of high insulin is neuropathy, meaning sick nerves. And what we have here is high glucose, even moderately elevated glucose, can create increased ages, which is advanced glycation and products, meaning that you have fats and protein in the bloodstream. And sugar is really sticky. So if we have a lot of sugar, then there's going to be more things connecting by that stickiness. And that's those ages that can create a lot of damage. Another thing is ROS, reactive oxygen species, or oxidative stress. And both of these are inflammatory, and they do a lot of damage. And as a result, they can also, of course, damage the nerves directly. The high blood glucose can also cause swelling of the tissue. So if the blood glucose is high inside the blood vessel, it's also going to be high in the tissues immediately surrounding it. And that's where we find a lot of these micro vessels and these fine nerve fibers. And this swelling interferes with the blood flow and the distribution of nutrients in that immediate area. So now we have more nerve damage because we don't have proper blood supply. And one more mechanism is that high insulin will affect nitric oxide. So with high insulin, we have low nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is a basso dilator, meaning it opens up blood vessels to allow more perfusion, more circulation and distribution of nutrients. So again, if we reduce that circulation, now we're going to reduce the blood flow and all the tissues, including the nerve suffer. And now I want you to really pay attention because this is so critical for us to understand. Most of the time, they associate diabetes and insulin resistance with high blood sugar, which is true. That's where it eventually gets. But where does it start? When does it become a problem? So we're going to look at insulin and blood glucose in a hypothetical example that is typical on average. And we're going to look at this hypothetically over a period of 20 years. It could happen much faster if you give kids a lot of fructose. They could develop this in five years. Or it could happen even slower in 30, 40 years for someone who just does a little bit of the wrong things over a long period of time. So let's say we start out at time zero and we have insulin sensitivity. And we have normal blood glucose at 85. And with that glucose, it's balanced in this person with an insulin level of four. So we have insulin on this side and we have blood glucose over on that side. And then this person goes on to do their thing. And five years later, their blood glucose has gone from 85 to 88. And we're still in a normal range, normal lab range. And we're even still in the optimal range for this person, even though the insulin has double. So what this means now is that glucose, the yellow, is a controlled variable. The body works very hard at keeping it at this level. But it has to use twice as much insulin to get it there. This is where insulin resistance starts. But if we only look at the glucose, we would never see it. And then we go another five years into the future and glucose has gone up to 90. So if we go with my optimal range of 82 to 88, now we're slightly outside, but the lab range is 70 to 100. So we're almost in the middle of that range. Still, we're looking really good. However, our insulin has jumped to 12. And this is where people are missing the big picture because a lot of the things that we talked about in this video about the signs and symptoms, a lot of those things are already happening. But if you look at glucose, then there's basically no indication. Go forward another five years. And now our blood glucose is 99, but our insulin has jumped to 19. And now we are right on the cusp. And in my book, we've already gone way, way, way too long. We could have fixed this 10 years ago. But again, if we look at glucose and we just get our standard lab report, now we're one point away from this getting flagged at one where 99 instead of 100. So at 100, it's going to get flagged. But do we really want to wait this long? This person is four or five times more insulin resistant already, but we can't see it on the glucose because it's a controlled variable. The body is working so hard at keeping the glucose down. And then another five years forward. And now our glucose is 180 and our insulin is 25. So what's happening now is if you look at the trend, this dotted line, we see that the blood glucose is going to remain almost perfectly flat until the system completely fails. And this is what we call type 2 diabetes. And this is where we make a big deal out of this. This is where people get their diagnosis. This is where they recognize a problem. But the problem was there 15 years earlier. And now when the body has lost control, now there's no telling what this glucose is going to be. While the body still have some power to control it, we're going to find it close to this flat line. But now the blood glucose could be 200, 300, 400. There's no telling because the body can't control it. And we want to do something way sooner than that. And if we instead look at the insulin, we see that the trend is almost linear. And I'm not claiming that it's going to be a perfectly straight line for everybody. But on average, the insulin is going to be mostly linear as opposed to the glucose, which is controlled. Now if we look at the 15 years where the body still had some sort of control, before it went haywire, we see that the blood glucose only changed 16%. And the insulin at the same time changed 375%. So that means if we want to understand this, and if we want to detect metabolic disease at an early stage, then basically insulin is 23 times more sensitive a variable for us to look at. And yet nobody tests insulin. It might be one out of 100 standard blood tests where they actually measure the variable that matters. And sign number 10 that you might be high in insulin is that you actually get a blood test and you start measuring the things that relate to it. So one thing could be the estimated glomerular filtration rate. EGFR, that's a measurement of how much fluid is filtered through the kidney each minute. And glucose is the number one thing that destroys the micro vessels, the microtubules of the kidney. And with diabetics, that's the number one cause of kidney failure. So if this number starts going down, then that is a strong indication of insulin resistance, or at least a very good reason to start looking at it. And of course, we're going to measure glucose, but glucose is not that great of a variable cause even if we're fasting, even if we're healthy, it could swing a few points just based on whatever day we're having. If there's a little more stress, there's a little more traffic on the way to the lab, then this could change quite a bit, which is why we usually rely on A1C, which is a three-month average, an estimated average of what your glucose was. And like we talked about, you now understand perfectly why triglycerides is such a good indicator for insulin resistance. And why the normal range going up to 150 is a little bit crazy. If you're insulin sensitive, you really want it probably in the 50 to 80 or maybe 50 to 90 range. Another thing we can look at is an elevated total cholesterol to HDL ratio, because as you become more insulin resistant, you increase the degree of low grade, chronic inflammation. And what that has a tendency to do, it has a tendency to reduce the number of HDL. It's not a specific thing, but it's a general good indicator, but we can get an idea. If our HDL is low, we probably have a little more inflammation, and that could be insulin resistance. And then of course, like I hope you understand by now, insulin is the first and the best indicator of developing insulin. in resistance. Now unfortunately most doctors are not going to understand blood work even though they order it. They'll understand to look for the flags when something's out of range but like we said that can be much too late to really start addressing the root causes at an early stage. So if you want to understand more about what your blood work really says to you about your health and your body and get a baseline to be able to make changes from, I created a blood work course where you can take your blood work and go through it line by line and not only understand what each marker is but to a large extent how they relate to each other. And I'll put a link down below if you want to check that out. If you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life saving video.