The body burns glucose.

 

Glucose is the fuel that powers each and every cell in our body.

 

Glucose is a “simple” sugar molecule made specifically for this purpose.

 

The system that runs and regulates the creation and delivery of glucose to the cells is constantly in a balancing act to make sure that enough glucose gets delivered to the cells, there is not too much glucose running around going no-where and there is not too much insulin chasing it.

 

In a healthy body, properly nourished and unchallenged by toxins or chronic disease, what happens is this:-

 

1) Food that is eaten is processed through the stomach and the digested components of the carbohydrates are delivered to the liver where they are converted into glucose.  This is only one of the livers many functions.

2) It then releases the glucose into the blood stream.  Some of it is relayed on to the pancreas where if is converted into insulin, which is also released to flow in the blood.

3) Insulin acts like a key that “turns on” the “glucose conveyor” in the cells.  Like a key fitting into a lock, when it encounters the right receptor molecule on the surface of a cell, it fits into it.  This in turn releases a cascade of chemical signals in the cell that tell the GLUT4 molecule that there is glucose out here.  This molecule moves up through the cell, into the cell wall and when it finds the glucose molecule, attaches to it and draws it into the cell

4) Mitochondria within the cell metabolise the glucose and convert it into power for the cell to use.

 

If this process breaks down at any one of those stages, a number of things go wrong.  Among them are:-

 

1) Not enough glucose reaches the cells, so they are underpowered.  This leads to feelings of weariness, fatigue and feeling heavy and dull

2) Too much glucose in blood damages blood vessels.

3) Too much glucose in the blood makes it possible for candida to survive in the bloodstream, allowing this yeast (which is normally confined to the large intestine) to survive in the whole of the body, causing systemic fungal infection.

4) The pancreas goes into overdrive in an attempt to produce enough insulin to keep the cells supplied with glucose.

5) Serum insulin levels rise, further damaging blood vessels.

6) Body starts converting glucose into fat and storing it to try and reduce serum levels.

7) The pancreas, as it races to produce enough insulin, can suffer exhaustion and cease to make insulin at all.

8) Damage to major blood vessels develops into atherosclerosis and heart disease, culminating in heart attack.

9) Other systems damaged by excess glucose and insulin in the blood develop problems too.  Thinning of the blood vessels crossing the retina, for example, eventually causes them to rupture, allowing bleeding and causing slowly encroaching blindness.  This is diabetic retinopathy.

 

Look beneath the calm assertions that diabetes is caused by being overweight and having a high blood pressure and ask “Why AM I overweight and suffering blood pressure problems”.

 

The evidence that I’ve seen so far seems to indicate a number of problems which act either singly or together to cause diabetes.  It is not as simple as modern medicine would have us believe.  And yet, at the same time it is so ridiculously simple that I have to ask myself why the medical profession haven’t got to grips with it yet.

 

Most pertinently, it’s a question nutrition and how the things that we eat affect our bodies.

 

In an ever more toxic world where food is becoming nutritionally poorer every year and more dubious chemicals are being added to the diet,    our bodies find themselves under increasing stress trying to function.  The onslaught of these chemicals further depletes our bodies of nutrients leaving them further stressed.

 

How does this cause diabetes?

 

Lets take a closer look at the Blood Sugar Regulatory System and see where it can break down.

 

Like any other system that relies on a number of factors all working together, if one of the elements fails it can do one of two things – either the system will carry on working in an increasingly less efficient manner until there is very little function left, or it will break down altogether straight away.

The main elements in the BSRS are:-

 

1) The liver
2) The Pancreas
3) The mechanism that draws glucose through the cell wall.

 

If any of these three links weakens or  breaks, so does the chain, and diabetes is the ultimate result if nothing is done to prevent it.

 

 

The liver is one of the bodies major chemical processing organs.  It is responsible for a number of functions including detoxifying everything that comes into the body, trapping and neutralising parasite eggs and developing stages as well as processing the digestion products of carbohydrates into glucose – which is the only kind of sugar that is easily metabolised by the mitochondria – the power plant of the cells.

 

To neutralise toxic chemicals that we eat or drink, the liver subjects them to a series of chemical reactions that break them down into safe substances that are either water soluble (these go out to the bladder via the kidneys) or fat soluble (these are returned to the small intestine and exit via the bowel). 

 

Next time you are shopping, look at the lists of ingredients on what you are buying.  Take note of how many different chemicals there are that you don’t recognise, as well as the obvious poisons like aspartame and splenda.

 

The welter of different toxins that bombard the liver on a daily basis is enormous but include chlorine (tap water), fluoride, artificial sweeteners, colours and flavours, MSG, coffee, alcohol – even prescription drugs.  The liver treats our medicines as toxic and sets about making them safe.  So much so, that the dose we are given is actually five times the strength of the dose that is needed so that we can be sure of getting enough to have the desired effect.

 

This works fine as long as the liver does not become exhausted from having to deal with so many poisons.  Once it becomes exhausted it becomes less efficient and succumbs to the very substances it was designed to break down.  It becomes toxic in its own right.

 

At this point, it becomes un-able to produce perfect copies of the glucose molecule.

 

Our bodies only work properly because of the sophisticated system of chemical signalling that it uses to communicate with all the different cells.  This system works by fitting the substances in the bloodstream with a molecule that acts like a key.  When it meets a place on a cell wall where there is another molecule that fits it perfectly, the two join up and start a cascade of signals down into the centre of the cell telling it what it needs to do.  This is how mitosis is triggered, this is how the muscle cells are told to contract to move the body, this is how specialist cells like those in the adrenal glands are told that the body needs more of whatever hormone they secrete.

 

The whole body relies on this signalling system, and the signalling system relies on the two molecules fitting perfectly together, or they do not recognise each other and nothing happens.

 

Now, when the glucose molecule is not perfect, the cell may not recognise it as glucose, and refuse to accept it at all.  This will mean that there is plenty of glucose in the bloodstream, plenty of insulin to signal the cells that the glucose is there, but the cell will still not recognise the glucose and not take it in.

 

 

Some of the glucose released from the liver will pass through the pancreas, where it is converted into insulin.  Insulin is needed for the metabolism of glucose because it is the insulin that actually gets the cells ready to accept the glucose.  The insulin molecule is the key that turns on the “glucose conveyor” in the cell.

 

What happens is that when the insulin molecule contacts the right receptor molecule in the cell wall, the two fit together like a key fitting into a lock.  When this happens, the cell knows that there is glucose available and sends the right transporter molecule to the surface of the cell where it penetrates the membrane, locks onto the glucose and draws it back down into the cell where the mitochondria are waiting.

There are two main reasons why the pancreas may cease to work.

 

a) Once blood sugar levels begin to rise, the BSRS assumes that it is because there is not enough insulin in the blood to clear the glucose.  It stimulates the pancreas to create more.  As the problem escalates, more and more insulin is demanded.  This condition is called hyper-insulinemia and is a precursor to diabetes, but is often not detected before the body enters a diabetic crisis.  The  endpoint of this process happens when the pancreas becomes exhausted and can no longer produce insulin – but diabetes has often been diagnosed before this point is reached.

 

b) Some poisons – heavy metals for instance – can not be neutralised in the liver.  They enter the body unchallenged.  Mercury is one of the worst.  It enters the body in a number of ways.  Vapours from amalgam fillings, environmental exposures at work or at home and in the food chain are the major routes.  Mercury is a well known cytotoxin.  This means that it kills cells.  Any kind of cell.  This is why it is used in vaccines – no bacteria can survive in a vaccine that uses a mercury based preservative.  It has certain cells for which it has a greater affinity, though, and they are nerve cells and the beta cells in the pancreas – the very cells that make insulin.  Not only can mercury kill the beta cells and either precipitate or contribute to diabetes, but it also kills normal intestinal flora and creates an anti-biotic resistant strain of Candida Albicans which can then run out of control and enter the bloodstream as previously described.

 

 

Our cells are like little bags of salty fluid full of interesting molecules that do a myriad of different things.

The “little bag” or cell wall is made of lipids.  This is just a fancy name for fat molecules that are put together in such a way that they form a barrier around the working parts of the cell.  If we are eating a healthy diet, these cell walls are created from a mixture of saturated fats and omega 3 fats.  The cell walls are permeable to the transporter molecules that rise up from the centre to transport molecules like glucose, growth factors and other chemical messengers to enter the cell.

 

Enter the villain.

 

Many modern fats are highly refined oils extracted from vegetable sources such as sunflower seeds, cottonseed, rapeseed and Soya.  These “poly-unsaturated” oils that we have been told so often are good for us are highly vulnerable to being damaged by the process that creates them.  The process creates transfats – even if the oil is NOT HYDROGENATED.  The concentration of those transfats increases every time the oil is used to fry with.

 

Hydrogenation is a process of forcing hydrogen into the oil.  It makes it solid, amongst other things, and is part of the process used to make margarine and shortening.

Today we are constantly being told that we should NOT be eating saturated fat – but we should be eating and cooking in this highly dangerous cocktail of transfats and omega 6’s.

Why is it dangerous?

 

Well:-

 

1) We should maintain a higher intake of omega 3’s than omega 6’s.

2) Without the correct amount of Omega 3’s and saturated fats the body has no choice but to build the cell walls out of what it can get from the poly-unsaturates that most of us use today.  This is all wrong because these oils do not behave the same way when used as a building block.  The cells that are built of fats derived from poly-unsaturated oils are sticky, making it far more difficult tor the transporter molecule to penetrate it from the inside.  Of course, if it cannot do that, then it cannot attach to the glucose molecule and pull it through into the cell.

 

Any one of these factors is capable of tipping the body into diabetes on its own, but the likelihood is that at least two of them operating at once are responsible for age onset diabetes.

 

Webby