Insulin: Myth vs Reality

The true story behind this anabolic hormone.


By Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN

 

We’ve all heard about insulin, but do you really know what it is and how it can impact your health? Insulin is an anabolic hormone that has extensive effects throughout the body, especially in regards to energy metabolism. It causes most of the body’s cells to take up glucose (sugar) from the blood (including liver, muscle and fat tissue cells), storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscle and stops the breakdown of fat to be used as an energy source. So what encourages insulin to be released? It’s the rise in blood sugar levels, which results from food consumption. Think of it this way: the more you eat, the more often insulin will be released. This is important to consider, especially if you want to lose weight.

Since insulin plays a pivotal role in obesity and diabetes, it is important to understand how to maintain normal insulin levels. With a whole foods diet low in sugar, you can greatly improve your health and prevent excess weight gain.

In other words, insulin is the primary signal that tells your body to store energy from your food as body fat and glycogen. When insulin levels are high, you are in storage mode, plain and simple. What’s more, when insulin is elevated, you are unable to release fat from your fat stores. Stated otherwise, when insulin is high, your fat isn’t going anywhere. When insulin is absent (or very low), glucose is not taken up by the body’s cells and can begin to accumulate in the blood, leading to blood sugar irregularities such as hypoglycemia and eventually diabetes.

Since this is an important hormone to understand, the following will help you dispel some of its common myths:

 

 

MYTH:

The release of insulin is not affected by the type of carbs you eat.
REALITY:
Insulin is affected by the type of carbohydrates you consume. Any refined carbohydrates (such as white bread, pasta, rice and sugars) that you eat will cause an immediate rise in blood sugar because they are easily metabolized. Due to this surge in blood sugar, a greater amount of insulin will be released to store excess blood sugar. Conversely, eating whole grains (including whole or sprouted wheat, quinoa or brown rice) that contain plenty of fibre and minerals (such as chromium which assists insulin) will lessen the blood sugar surge. This will impact the amount of insulin that is released from the pancreas.

MYTH:

Eating small frequent meals throughout the day is the best way to reduce your insulin levels.

REALITY:
While eating frequent small meals or meals with a low “glycemic index” (a measure of the meal’s effect on blood sugar) may help you control or even out your insulin levels, fasting for as little as 24 hours has been shown to drastically reduce your insulin levels. In research conducted on people who fasted for 72 hours, plasma insulin dropped dramatically, reaching a level that was less than half of the their initial levels. What’s even more impressive is that 70 percent of this reduction happened during the first 24 hours of fasting.
MYTH:

People with type II diabetes don’t produce enough insulin.
REALITY:

They produce adequate insulin, but their cells are less sensitive to the hormone due to high levels of sugar in the blood. If the body’s cells are constantly exposed to high insulin levels, they become “desensitized” and don’t respond to insulin correctly.
MYTH:
Adding healthy fats, fibre and/or protein to a carb-based meal does not affect insulin levels.
REALITY:

Actually they can weaken the release of insulin. These nutrients help lower the glycemic load, meaning that blood sugar and insulin levels will not rise as high as they would with a carb-only meal.