Diabetes Is Not A Disease Of Blood Sugar!
                                                    By Ron Rosedale, MD

As I have stated previously, and one concept that I would like to make well-known to save thousands and perhaps millions of lives as soon as possible, is that diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar, but a disease of insulin and perhaps more importantly leptin signaling, and until that concept becomes well-known in the medical community, articles like the one published in this issue will fortunately continue to be published revealing the inadequacy of current conventional medical treatment for chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, and the falsity of their advice about nutrition.

Typically treatment concentrates on fixing a symptom, in this case elevated blood sugar, rather than the underlying disease. Symptoms are generally the way that nature has taught our bodies to deal with a disease. For instance, a runny nose is a symptom designed to cleanse the nose and sinuses of viruses and bacteria when one has a "cold." Taking a decongestant just inhibits our own body's mechanism for dealing with that infection and will therefore prolong it.

Similarly, treatments which concentrate merely on lowering blood sugar for diabetes while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication. It just trades one evil for another.

Elevated insulin levels are highly associated and even causative of:

• heart disease,

• peripheral vascular disease,

• stroke,

• high blood pressure,

• cancer,

• obesity and

• many other so-called diseases.

Since most treatments for (type 2, insulin resistant) diabetes utilize drugs which raise insulin or actual insulin injections itself, the tragic result is that the typical, conventional medical treatment for diabetes contributes to the manifest side effects and the shortened lifespan that diabetics experience.

To Be Victorious, One Must "Know Thy Enemy.

Traditional medicine appears certainly not to, especially with diabetes. For two millennia diabetes has been considered to be a disease of sugar. Despite centuries of scientific progress including the discovery of insulin and more recently leptin, that has not changed. It appears that medicine has made little to no progress with that myth. Furthermore, the actual purpose of insulin is widely, if not uniformly, mistaken even among the medical community.

The Main Purpose Of Insulin Is Not To Lower Blood Sugar.

It July surprise you, as well as your doctor, that insulin's main role is not to control blood sugar. The control of blood sugar is mostly in an upward direction, not a downward direction. A few types of tissues and cells in our body such as red blood cells require glucose for energy (the rest can and even desires to burn fat or byproducts of fat metabolism called ketones). Thus it is important to always have a little bit of glucose dissolved in our blood.

The trick throughout most of our ancestral history was to keep sugar in our blood from falling too low since there was not that much sugar to be had. Most starches and grains that would turn into sugar are mostly indigestible unless cooked. You might even strain your jaw trying to eat an uncooked potato.

The major source of sugar was fruit, and that was mostly available only seasonally, and even then we had to work and exercise to obtain it, burning the sugar and preventing it from spiking very high. The hormones cortisone, epinephrine, norepinephrine, glucagon, and growth hormone make sure that we always have some glucose available to the tissues that need it.

High Blood Sugar Was A Rarity.

However when our blood sugar did become elevated it was a sign that we had more energy available than we could currently burn and thus it would be a good idea to store the extra. "Waste not, want not." Food was not always available; feast or famine was the rule. When blood sugar becomes elevated it is a signal for insulin to be released to direct the extra energy into storage.

A small amount is stored as a starch called glycogen in our body, but the majority is stored as our main energy supply -- fat. Thus, in this regard insulin's major role is not to lower sugar, but to take the extra energy when available and store it for future times of need. Insulin lowers glucose as a side effect of directing the extra into storage.

Insulin's purpose July go far beyond even that. Insulin is being researched very heavily by scientists who study the biology of aging. It has been found that when insulin is kept low either through diet or via genetic manipulation animals live much longer and the rate of aging is significantly reduced. This appears true in many different species of animals from single cell yeast, to worms, to flies, and appears likely to be true also in primates.

Apparently, low insulin is a signal that energy is scarce and animals need to focus their energy needs on maintaining and repairing themselves so that they can outlive the famine to be able to reproduce at a future, more opportune time. Insulin's purpose has gone from controlling blood sugar, to directing energy stores, and now to actually regulating the rate of aging including the major symptoms of aging -- diabetes, heart disease, obesity, osteoporosis, dementia, and even cancer.