Last week’s blog post was all about your heart. If you think of the heart as having electricity, carpentry and plumbing, then heart attacks are a plumbing problem, i.e., a blockage in the pipes. The pipes, of course, are the blood vessels of the heart, and the blockage is called a clot. If blood can’t pass through a vessel, then all the cells past the blockage quickly become starved for oxygen, and then they die. That’s a heart attack.
What does this have to do with diabetes and obesity? Everything. High blood sugars cause stiffening of the blood vessel walls. The higher your blood sugars, the faster the blood vessels harden. The longer your blood sugars remain high, the faster the hardening occurs. So the worse your diabetes, and the longer you have it, the harder your arteries become and the worse your circulation gets.
We’`re not just talking here about the arteries in your heart. Once your arteries start to harden, it’s a problem everywhere. Each of these complications has its own name. Blockages in the
heart cause heart attacks. Blockages in the brain cause strokes.
Blockages in the legs cause peripheral vascular disease, and then
amputations. Blockages in the kidney cause renal insufficiency, and
then “end stage renal disease.“ Blockages in the back of the eye, or
retina, cause diabetic retinopathy. And so on.
These aren’t all separate diseases. The fact of the matter is that they
are all caused by the same underlying problem. If you’ve been reading
this blog for a while, along the way you`ve learned that this problem is
caused by high insulin levels, or “hyperinsulinemia.”
Hyperinsulinemia
is also known as metabolic syndrome. It`s a pre-diabetic state, and it
is the underlying cause not just of diabetes, but also of high blood
pressure, high triglycerides and low HDL, polycystic ovarian syndrome
(PCOS, a cause of infertility in young women), and obesity. High
insulin levels stiffen blood vessels, too.
Long before people are diagnosed with diabetes, their bodies try to
cope with the occasional (at first) and then frequent (later) high blood
sugars by releasing loads of extra insulin to catch all the extra blood
sugar. But the high blood sugar itself causes resistance to the
insulin, and so bodies respond by releasing even more insulin.
Unfortunately, it’s never enough; the amount of circulating insulin
continues to rise. When the day finally arrives on which the person can no longer make enough insulin to manage their ever-rising high blood sugars, those blood sugars begin to rise even higher and faster.
Diabetes increases the likelihood of having a stroke (brain arteries), an amputation (leg arteries), kidney disease and dialysis (renal arteries), blindness (retinal arteries), dementia (due to “small vessel ischemic disease“, which means “hardening of the small blood vessels“), and difficulty having an erection (penile arteries). In case you’ve ever wondered, yes, hardening of the arteries causes erectile dysfunction, too. That’s why we call erectile dysfunction a “proxy” for heart disease. Hardening of the arteries anywhere increases the risk of hardening of the arteries everywhere.
Remember that blood sugar problems start years, even decades, before people are diagnosed with diabetes. For a long time, their blood sugars have been spiking after they eat, and then taking too long to return to normal. For all that time, damage has been slowly accruing. That’s why people who are diagnosed with diabetes already have 10 years worth of damage to their blood vessels at the time of their actual diagnosis. What does that tell you? It tells me that we diagnose diabetes 10 years after it really starts. I’d like to change the paradigm so that doctors recognize diabetes before the damage begins. Even better, I`d like to identify those people who are entering that 10-year period and stop it before it even begins. We need to start diagnosing people at the beginning of that 10-year period instead of at the end. It would save patients 10 years of damage to their blood vessels.
All the while, as the years go by, arteries continue to harden throughout the body. So if you are ready to decrease your chances of developing hardening of the arteries, I`d like to suggest that you start today by decreasing your consumption of refined carbohydrates, and shifting your diet in the direction of foods that you absorb slowly: Eat more fruits and vegetables, more healthy oils, more high-quality protein, and less white flour and sugar.
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