Metabolic Syndrome
Metabolic syndrome is an early indicator of diabetes even among people of normal weight, and it’s important to take steps to prevent and treat it. During the early phase of metabolic syndrome, the body is compensating for insulin resistance by increasing insulin production to maintain near-normal blood glucose levels. However, when the pancreas and liver […]
Time-Restricted Feeding
Time-restricted feeding can reduce high insulin levels, which can reverse type 2 diabetes. It’s important to understand some facts about insulin and how it works. First, insulin is fat storage and a growth hormone. It reduces circulating glucose by converting it to glycogen storage first, which then overflows to fat storage. Eating carbohydrates causes insulin […]
Lack of nutritional information
The nutritional and informational value of food is often ignored by conventional medicine, and ignoring it can lead to severe and expensive chronic diseases. Unfortunately, most currently practicing physicians received less than 16 hours of education on nutrition during medical school. Often, dietary guidelines and recommendations were delegated to the dietitians. Unfortunately, the dietitians were […]
Demonizing Fat
Low-fat food doesn’t always mean healthy, and looking at fat negatively can actually lead to insulin resistance and weight gain. Demonizing fat because it has more calories per gram ignores the information transmitted in food to your body and encourages consumption of ultra-processed foods. If it says “low-fat” and you think it’s healthy, think again. […]
Fructose vs Glucose
Fructose and glucose are both sugars, but they are not the same. High-fructose corn syrup was invented in the 1970s and began to replace regular sugar around 1975. The obesity epidemic coincides with the use of HFCS, and vegetable oils and ultra-processed grain also increased in the mid-1970s. The per capita consumption of HFCS — […]
Anxiety and Depression
Can anxiety and depression unexpectedly improve when treating insulin resistance with metformin? I am an interventional pain physician in the urban core. More than 90% of my patients with chronic unrelenting pain also have metabolic syndrome with insulin resistance, and more than 90% also have significant anxiety and depression. I had always assumed that the […]
Satiety: The Key to a Healthy Life
Satiety, or the feeling of feeling full, is the key to maintaining a healthy weight and living a healthy life long-term. Instead of calories, people should focus on eating real food. It’s easier to track not eating sugars and artificial sugars than actually counting their calories. Tracking and reliving the calories of carbohydrates you didn’t […]
The Secret to Healthy Weight
Our weight depends on a variety of factors, but one secret to a healthy weight is found in awareness of the role the hormone insulin plays in fat storage. It is wrongly assumed that consuming excessive calories is the root cause of obesity. However, a calorie of food energy has different metabolic fates depending upon […]
Metformin Works in the Prediabetic Range.
Metformin, an anti-diabetic drug, can protect the heart in pre-diabetic patients. Even without a frank diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, normotensive or hypertensive patients with insulin resistance can develop left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and coronary artery disease (CAD). Insulin resistance (IR) is implicated in the development of LVH. Dysglycaemia is very common in patients with CAD […]
Food Labels Don’t Mean Much to the Individual Patient.
Individuals experience significantly different changes in blood glucose levels (as shown by using a continuous glucose monitor) after eating the same foods. Some patients with normal blood glucose levels experience after-meal glycemic spikes that are in the diabetic range. A person’s gut microbiome more accurately predicts the individual spike in blood glucose after eating than […]