Lifestyle Choices

In Type Z diabetes, there is at first no shortage of insulin. In fact, early in the disease, there is more than usual. Yet, despite the insulin making its presence known in the muscle tissue, the muscle remains deaf to insulin’s messages, no matter how many are sent, and does nothing to stimulate the uptake of glucose or the storage of glycogen.

Another hormone which comes from the pancreas, in cells which live very near to those which make insulin, is glucagon. Whereas insulin is the hormone of plenty, glucagon is the hormone of scarcity: so when glucose is taken into the blood from the intestine during digestion of starchy foods, insulin is secreted and glucagon secretion is inhibited. During the night, when there is nothing left in your gut to absorb, glucagon secretion increases and insulin secretion is inhibited. As we’ve just seen, if insulin levels are low, the liver switches into generating glucose mode once more, a process called gluconeogenesis. In healthy people, insulin and glucagon have a reciprocal relationship with one another, a bit like those wonderful Swiss weather houses, where as Mrs Sun comes out, Mr Rain disappears — and vice versa. In Type z diabetes, however, this relationship becomes altered so that glucagon levels are often high despite insulin secretion being high too.

So what’s the relationship between being fat and sedentary and Type z diabetes? The argument goes something like this: normally muscle uses a large amount of fat to sustain low-level activities. For instance, when we get up in the morning and have a shower and make breakfast, we are almost entirely fuelled by fat. That’s the reason why early-morning exercise, before breakfast, is best for fat burning.

In physically active people this fat mostly comes from stores within the muscle itself. However, in unfit people, fat gets stored in the wrong place in the muscle, so during early-morning exercise most of the fat has to be taken from the bloodstream instead, which although it sounds like it might be a good thing, isn’t. This wrongly stored fat is already a cause of problems, because in order to store it, glucose has had to be pushed out — a bit as if you’d flung out everything in a cupboard to make room for something new If glucose isn’t being used in the muscle it accumulates in the blood, raising blood sugars and prompting the release of insulin. We’ve seen that if you have Type z diabetes your muscles are no longer listening to the messages being sent by insulin. So when you have breakfast in the morning, the glucose released as your cornflakes are being digested causes a higher rise in blood glucose than in a normal person, because it is not being taken up into muscle.

So here you are: you’re unfit, so your muscles aren’t storing glucose properly; you have high blood levels of glucose; insulin is produced in greater and great quantity in order to get shot of that glucose, but your muscles are now deaf to insulin’s exhortations to take in glucose. Meanwhile, although your muscle has become insulin-resistant, for a while fat has no such problem — it retains its insulin sensitivity for some time and therefore helpfully takes up glucose at insulin’s insistence, maintaining glucose stores in fat. Meanwhile, the liver also succumbs to insulin resistance, just like the muscles and, when soon after a meal insulin would normally shut down its glucose-generating operation and go into glucose- storing mode, it continues to produce glucose at a supernormal level in those with Type z diabetes throughout the day. So it’s a vicious escalator in which being unfit and sedentary sends glucose levels up, tissues become insulin-resistant, and your body helpfully stuffs all that extra glucose away as fat.

It’s not all the fault of hormones, however. For Type z diabetes it seems that there is a strong genetic predisposition to the development of high insulin levels, insulin-resistance and other features of the so-called ‘metabolic syndrome’ such as the tendency to store excess fuel as fat, the development of osteoarthritis and high blood pressure. Some suggest that those who possessed such a gene in the past were at an advantage in times of food scarcity, for they put on weight quickly. Today they are at a disadvantage. The underlying message is clear, however: lack of exercise plus genetic predisposition plus too much food equals Type z diabetes.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Insulin and Diabetes, Obesity Hormones, from Muscle to Fat continue…

• Insulin and Diabetes, Obesity Hormones, from Muscle to Fat
• Diabetes and Eating disorders
• Overweight Hormones and Metabolism, complications of Obesity
• Specific Illnesses
• HRT or not?
• Great Skin for Life, Origins of Acne
• Diet and Depression
• Why are you Overweight?
• Treating the Physical Cause
• What if The Diet Isn’t Working?