Type two diabetes reversal; Understanding insulin resistance.

After eating food, digestion breaks it down to simpler substances. The liver is a factory that turns substances into useful forms. There are only a few sources of food calories: carbohydrates, fat, protein, and alcohol. From your plate to your body, it goes like this:

1.Carbohydrates > potatoes, rice, bread, and all sugars: all broken down to glucose.
2.Fat > butter, oils, dairy produce, fat in meat: all broken down to simpler fats.
3.Protein > meat, lentils, nuts, dairy produce: all broken down to the basic building blocks (called amino acids) used for muscle and other tissues. But any surplus is turned into glucose.
4.Alcohol > broken down and stored as fat.

Looking at the list again, you will notice that all your food turns into glucose or fat. And those fuels are the source of all energy for your body. Carbohydrates are effectively sugar, and fat is fat. Glucose is stored as glycogen in the liver and muscles, and fat can be stored under the skin. Any excess protein ends up as glucose.

Understanding energy metabolism
-Only two fuels are burned for energy by your body – glucose and fat. Both can be stored and used when required.
-The body breaks down proteins into the building blocks our body needs for growth and maintenance.
-Alcohol? Alcohol is essentially liquid fat. The body breaks down alcohol then burns it just as though it had been fat.
-Metabolism is simply the coordinated handling of glucose and fat.

How overeating fat or carbohydrate leads to fat accumulating in the liver leading to type two diabetes
After eating a meal, blood glucose levels rise. The body goes to work removing absorbed glucose from the blood and storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscles. Overnight, the body can use these stores of glucose, and during day and night, the liver calmly delivers just the right amount of glucose into the blood to provide energy for the rest of the body – every minute – whether you eat or not.

Once glucose from a meal is tucked away, the fuel is redistributed to provide energy for the rest of the body. Glucose that cannot be stored as glycogen has to find another home. And the only way the body has of dealing with it is to transform it into fat. This process happens in the liver. The newly formed fat can then either provide energy for the liver if needed or be sent elsewhere in the body. However, if the energy is not needed in a 24-hour period, the levels stored there will gradually increase.

Overspill of glucose into fat
The body can cope fine if you overeat carbohydrates – in the short term. When the glycogen stores are full, the excess glucose has to be stored elsewhere. This is the key to understanding why surplus carbohydrates and fat share the same fate. Our bodies have only one way of handling this excess – transform it into fat.
That process of transforming glucose into fat – happens only in the liver. But if this newly formed fat is not needed to burn for energy, then levels of fat stored in the liver will gradually increase. This process is of central importance for the development of type 2 diabetes.

How Type Two Diabetes Develops.
Fat is stored mainly just under the skin. Under the skin, fat is safely stashed away in a form that causes no harm to the rest of the body. Suppose there is more fat than can be accommodated under the skin, in that case, the extra fat has to be stored elsewhere, such as within the stomach cavity. There, it is known as ‘visceral’ fat and is useful as a rough guide to how much excess fat the body has on board. The more visceral fat is present, the higher the risk of future heart attack – and diabetes.
Why? Well, because the presence of a lot of visceral fat, although not directly dangerous, indicates something else that most definitely is, namely, fat accumulating inside the main organs – the liver, pancreas, heart, and muscle tissue.
The amount of visceral fat can be estimated with a tape measure around the waist. However, the fat that builds up inside the main organs is hidden. When it comes to the liver and pancreas, it can cause serious problems – including the onset of insulin resistance and full blow type two diabetes.
The liver keeps the brain supplied with glucose between meals and overnight. The liver makes glucose every minute. Most of the glucose in the blood comes not directly from food but the liver. The brain is one organ that continues to demand the same amount of fuel throughout every 24-hour cycle. Your brain needs a steady and substantial amount of energy day and night. It uses only one fuel – glucose – and it uses the same amount whether consciously busy or not. This balancing act sounds quite simple – the liver puts the sugar into the blood for transport to the brain, and the brain uses it to stay alive. But the link between usage and replacement is critical and hidden. How does the liver know how much glucose to add to the blood?

The answer is in a hormone called insulin. Insulin is made in the beta cells within the pancreas gland. The pancreas is hidden deep in the stomach cavity and quietly going about its business, which ensures that the correct amount of insulin is released into the blood minute by minute. If blood glucose starts to creep up, more insulin is made. If blood glucose starts to drop, less insulin is made. As insulin lasts only a few minutes in the blood, it achieves a very tight regulation of blood glucose by increasing or decreasing production according to requirements – with an immediate and direct impact on the liver.

Your liver will respond to any increase in insulin levels by decreasing the amount of glucose released to the blood. But the sensitivity of the liver to insulin varies from individual to individual. In 100 people, most will be nicely insulin-sensitive, some will be very sensitive, and some won’t be sensitive at all. If a person’s response is poor, we will describe their liver as ‘insulin-resistant’

When the full effect of insulin is lacking, the liver makes more glucose than needed. As a result, blood glucose starts to creep up, which causes more insulin to be made. Eventually, the liver gets the message, and blood glucose returns to normal. In a healthy person, the pancreas will simply work harder to enable the body to achieve the main goalkeeping that glucose level normal in the blood. Every pancreas has its limits, and when an insulin-resistant person builds up too much fat inside the pancreas, it becomes unable to compensate fully, becoming a problem.

When you start to eat your meal, blood glucose levels rise. The moment that this happens, there is an enormous increase in the rate of insulin production. Blood levels of insulin increase 10-15 fold. So what happens to all the extra insulin? Most of it goes directly to the liver. And within 30 minutes, the production of glucose by the liver has almost completely stopped. Not just slowed, but almost stopped. The ongoing needs of your brain are supplied by glucose from food for a few hours.
The overall result is that blood glucose rises very little after a meal in someone of normal health and the level returns close to normal within 90 minutes.

If you have type 2 diabetes, your body will have had more food than it needed to burn over many years. Your fat stores will be full to the brim. Your blood glucose levels will be too high due to your pancreas trying as hard as possible to restore glucose levels to normal. Then, eventually, after many years, insulin levels gradually decline because the poor old beta cells become less and less able to do their job, type two diabetes develops.

The levels of ordinary fat in your blood will also be too high. This is because some of the excess glucose in your blood will be transformed into fat – fat that should be stashed away in the fat stores under the skin, except that they are already full to the brim. Type 2 diabetes develops if the beta cells in the pancreas are unable to respond normally to glucose.

If you have type 2 diabetes, your liver will be insulin-resistant. The lack of response to the controlling hormone, insulin, will make it unable to shut off the production of glucose. Consequently, glucose pours into the blood. This happens not only throughout the night but also during the day. It continues after you eat your breakfast. So instead of glucose production stopping to make room for the incoming flood of glucose from meal carbohydrates, your body has to deal with a double whammy. Food is causing the glucose level to rise, but your liver is cheerfully shoveling more into the blood at the same time.

This is the main reason why we advocate for weight loss or keeping your weight within a healthy acceptable range. Insulin resistance in muscle can be moderately improved by exercise. Over many years, this will have a considerable effect on health. Regular exercise is a great way to delay or prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes and deal with muscle insulin resistance.

An extra mouthful of food daily over a long period causes fat in the liver to build up. This makes the liver unable to respond properly to insulin. Blood glucose starts to creep up, which causes higher background levels of insulin. This insulin then oils the wheels for glucose to be turned into liver fat.

Having too much fat inside it, your liver very reasonably tries to shunt it off to safe storage in the layer under the skin, increasing the rate at which it exports fat into the blood. Some people have almost unlimited safe storage capacity for fat, and if so, diabetes may not happen for a long time. But in some people this depot under the skin is already full, and so the level of fat in their blood stays too high. The presence of fat in the pancreas gums up the works and prevents insulin from being made rapidly after meals; the gradual blunting of the normal insulin response to eating, leads to raised blood glucose levels for longer after meals.