Over the Counter Natural Cures (24 page)

Since the body is burning glucose for energy and storing fat, it screams for more sugar as glucose is converted into energy. Without sugar, the obese become edgy, depressed, weak, and tired. This is the body making a desperate call for more detrimental sugar.

Soda, juice, sugar-fortified coffee, cereal, beer, and candy manufacturers have built empires around such addictions. This is the metabolic nightmare our parents innately feared when they told us, “Don't eat too much sugar.” Sugar addicts are headed toward more treacherous health problems than just obesity. They're accelerating their own death.

WHEN OBESITY BECOMES LIFE THREATENING

If habitual sugar or the consumption of sugar mimics continues, the metabolic nightmare can turn into a living hell. Similar to those who consume excess alcohol and develop resistance to it, the excess insulin numbs the cells of our muscles. Once this occurs, they no longer vacuum glucose or other essential nutrients from the bloodstream. Unable to gain entry into muscle cells, glucose accumulates in the blood, and cells become old prematurely. Blood gets bad, as seen by sugar levels above 115 (normal is 85 to 95). Over time, high blood-sugar and insulin levels lead to type 2 diabetes, or more accurately called, insulin resistance.

Recognizing the rise in blood glucose, the pancreas attempts to curtail the danger with yet more insulin production. Or worse, physicians might prescribe insulin by injection or symptom-masking drugs like Januvia (sitagliptin) that further promote mass production of the dangerous hormone. Either way, the bloodstream becomes toxic with exorbitant amounts of sugar and insulin. Insulin resistance begins to take its toll on the body, and obesity becomes life threatening.

The blood sugar and insulin overload leads to the clinical diagnoses of depression, premature aging of the skin, hypertension, and eventually the pandemic killers—obesity, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease. In most cases, each of these is nothing more than a “sugar-eating” disease.

Insulin resistance is the health crisis of this century. Currently, 25 percent of the American population suffers from it, and the rate is climbing. One in three born in the year 2000 are predicted to succumb to it! According to a study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, that will equate to a loss, on average, of eleven to twenty years in life.
¹³²

This is the first reduction in life expectancy in more than 200 years. It's suicide in slow motion. And most people have no idea that they
suffer from it. The symptoms of the metabolic nightmare do not appear for at least seven to ten years. Over this time, the effects begin to build and become irreversible. But if caught early, the insidious outcome can be prevented. In addition to measuring belly fat, you can take a simple blood test to measure whether or not you have bad blood.

TOP BLOOD TESTS TO IDENTIFY THE SILENT KILLER

The best way to find out if you're a potential victim—before the nightmare turns into a living hell—is to get your blood tested. Three simple blood tests can tell with reasonable certainty whether or not you're at risk for type 2 diabetes.

First, test your fasting blood sugar. Wake up, go to a blood lab, and have them draw blood, or buy a self-test at a grocery store. Normal is 85 to 95 mg/dL. If yours is higher than that, you may have some bad blood. But then again, the reading is only a snapshot. Elevated blood sugar doesn't always mean you're at risk, nor does a normal reading mean you're in the clear.

Your body has the ability to hide the threat of high blood sugar. When blood sugar rises, your pancreas attempts to protect you from the poison by increasing its production of insulin. This helps to force-feed your muscle cells the excess blood sugar, keeping excess blood sugar invisible from tests. To avoid a false fasting blood-glucose test, get your insulin levels tested, too, so that you see if your insulin is compensating for high sugar levels. Any doctor can do this for you. If you have normal blood sugar and high insulin levels, you might have bad blood.

Both blood glucose and insulin tests are mere snapshots and don't give a good idea of what's happening over time. To achieve this, get an “A1C” test. If you have raised blood sugar for long periods, it will attach itself to hemoglobin. The process basically works like this: sugar
floats in the bloodstream for too long, gets lonely, and then grabs onto a nearby hemoglobin molecule. The attachment gives rise to “glycated hemoglobin.”

Since the same hemoglobin molecule lasts for about three months in your blood, an A1C test measures your blood sugar over that time. For instance, an A1C reading of 6 percent equals an average glucose of 135 mg/dL (7.5 mmol/L). If your reading corresponds to anything higher than 95 mg/dL, you could be in danger. Your health trajectory might be taking you toward depression, premature heart attack, stroke, cancer, and even Alzheimer's, usually in that order.

Plenty of other blood tests exist. Since high insulin can plummet testosterone levels, getting this hormone checked is also advisable. Watching your testosterone levels rise—and your blood sugar, insulin, and A1C drop over time—will help you know whether your healthy efforts are paying off.

There are also tests for inflammation like C-reactive protein. To show if you're aging prematurely, you can monitor your human growth hormone levels. Testing your vitamin D levels can be beneficial, too. But all this testing gets expensive fast. And since the tests are just snapshots, you don't really need them to know if your blood is bad. Ultimately, if you're carrying a body-fat percentage of 22 percent or higher, you can bet that you're not as healthy as you could be. Blood sugar is bringing you down fast. You can stop this insidious outcome by increasing your insulin sensitivity.

HOLY GRAIL FOR TOTAL HEALTH

My wife and I are about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Over the years, I've learned that being more sensitive to her needs keeps our marriage strong.

Being more sensitive is also the key to optimal health and longevity. But, I'm not talking about emotional sensitivity here; I'm talking about insulin sensitivity. Being more sensitive is the only way to make sure that your body controls its weight and blood sugar while strengthening your health.

Neither diet pills nor antidiabetic drugs were going to help me overcome my metabolic nightmare. Grocery-store fat traps had successfully put me into XL-sized shirts and the extra thirty-five pounds were taking their toll on my energy levels and heading me toward an early grave. Exercise proved futile, and dieting just made me binge later at night. Digging deeper into the cellular cause of obesity, I learned that my only escape was to increase my insulin sensitivity.

Your body is a round-bottomed flask. To biochemistry geeks, this means that internally, you are a mesh of chemicals, and your health depends on how they react with neighboring cells. There are billions of chemical reactions that make up human function. I'm only concerned with one. It's known as phosphorylation.

Forget memorizing that; it's not even on your computer's spell-check list. All you need to know is that it's the most important reaction for increasing your insulin sensitivity, which helps to control weight, blood sugar, insulin, and lifespan. Akin to a plant getting sunlight, cells are renewed by this biochemical reaction.

Here's why phosphorylation is so important: When insulin is released by the pancreas, it races—faster than the speed of light—to your muscle cells. When it reaches the exterior, our natural intelligence guides it to its corresponding receptor on the cell's outer membrane. Once bound and clinging to the cell, the insulin-sensitive receptor undergoes the phosphorylation reaction, which sequesters sugar and nutrient vacuums from the inner core. Once the vacuums reach the outer membrane, they pull sugar and other cellular nutrients from the blood into the cell. What
happens next is a testament to the power of your “hormonal intelligence” and shows why it was my only escape from obesity.

As blood sugar and insulin are controlled by phosphorylation, your energizing, fat loss, and antiaging hormones begin to flood the body in the proper amount, in the proper ratio, and at the right time of day. For instance, your testosterone-to-estrogen ratios are optimized to allow for increased muscle growth and fat metabolism, while protecting you from the cancer dangers associated with estrogen dominance.

During exercise, fat-melting hormones known as catecholamines are released by your adrenal glands. At night, your levels of human growth hormone surge to help your cells recover from daily stress and aging. When you eat, your body becomes more sensitive to the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which means that you don't overeat, while at the same time you burn off calories more readily via thermogenesis. The list goes on, as a myriad of hormones that reduce inflammation, pain, and your risk of heart disease and cancer are totally optimized, thanks to this hormone intelligence.

The better your phosphorylation, the younger and thinner you remain. Just as sun-deprived plants come to life when exposed to sunlight, malnourished and dying cells are renewed by this single reaction. If it is numb to insulin, the receptor does not elicit this essential reaction when bound by insulin. All of the subsequent hormonal intelligence ceases to exist, and you get bad blood along with belly fat. Sugar and vital nutrients remain out of reach for the aging, insulin-resistant cell and instead float in the bloodstream with nowhere to go.

Just as a relationship can't be healthy without sensitivity, bad blood and obesity can't be corrected without increasing sensitivity to insulin. That's the Holy Grail to health because it serves as one method for controlling weight, blood sugar, and insulin while maximizing longevity.

TOP ANTIDIABETIC DRUGS DEADLIER THAN DIABETES

When it comes to antidiabetic drugs, your doctor can choose from a host of options or prescribe multiple types of medications known collectively as hypoglycemics. Most popular are Avandia (rosiglitazone maleate), Actos (pioglitazone hydrochloride), Januvia, Glucophage (metformin hydrochloride), and Glucotrol (glipizide). While they might lower blood sugar levels by 15 percent to 20 percent, this effect doesn't translate into health for diabetics. Quite the opposite, this drop in blood sugar results in early death!

In a press release issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. government alerted the public about the hypoglycemic risk:

 

Intensively targeting blood sugar [with hypoglycemics] to near-normal levels in adults with Type II diabetes at especially high risk for heart attack and stroke does not significantly reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events, such as fatal or nonfatal heart attacks or stroke,
but increases risk of death, compared to
standard treatment.
¹³³

 

The disturbing news came from the ACCORD (
Action to Control
Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes Study Groups)
study. The results were
published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
and showed that those taking drugs like Avandia or Glucophage experienced the greatest drop in blood sugar and also longevity.

The official story in the media hid these facts from the public by implying that lowering blood sugar among diabetics might be dangerous. But anyone who isn't dizzy from Big Pharma's spin can tell you that if
lowering blood sugar was deadly, cinnamon would have wiped most of us out a long time ago.

The biggest fault in the study is that researchers failed to cite the laundry list of dangers associated with the hypoglycemic drugs that were the likely culprits for early death. The most prominent are obesity, heart attack, heart failure, and rigor mortis caused by the buildup of lactic acid. Avoid these deadly outcomes by making a quick trip to Wal-Mart.

NATURE'S BLOCKBUSTER DIABETES DRUG

Organic chemists are always on the hunt for the next blockbuster drug. More than 30 million molecules have been synthesized to date in this quest. Chemists use a deluge of drug discovery techniques in hopes of finding a winner.

The most popular methods used today are natural product screening (the large-scale study of naturally occurring proteins, peptides, and amino acids) and combinatorial chemistry. Most recently, the Nobel Prize–winning technique of metathesis has also been employed. This method changes the three-dimensional shape of molecules to allow for more diversity. These techniques all have one thing in common: they allow chemists to shuffle atoms or molecular formations to make new molecules that can eventually be tested for medicinal properties. The process is like shooting craps. There are a lot of variables, and only a few outcomes are winners.

To date, one method has proven most beneficial than all the others—natural product screening. The design of most prescription drugs is guided by knowledge obtained from plant-based predecessors, which are commonly sold as nutritional supplements. Drug companies obfuscate this. They like people to think drugs are the only option and that
they intuitively invent them out of thin air using expensive, hard-to-understand technology.

All of today's blockbusters have natural roots. Painkillers, blood pres-sure meds, anticancer drugs, and even the particularly nasty cholesterol-lowering drugs are nothing more than copycats of Mother Nature. And that's why chemists use natural product screening over all other methods. Nature provides the best medicine, and using it successfully to make a synthetic version could mean big bucks. The method rarely makes for great drugs, because when nature's molecules are altered, they usually become toxic. But it does make for great natural medicine discoveries, as recently proven in the fight against insulin resistance.

Using natural product screening, chemists have discovered the only blockbuster diabetes drug. It successfully lowers blood sugar, triglycerides, and A1C levels while increasing insulin sensitivity—and without a single negative side effect. Such a discovery is like striking medicinal gold. This drug is commonly known as cinnamon! Just as the simple act of supplementing vitamin C (from lemon juice) saved our ancestors from deadly scurvy, cinnamon is positioned to save modern society from the type 2 diabetes epidemic.