The role of insulin in the body
The main job of insulin is to keep the amount of sugar in the bloodstream within a normal range. Here's what happens during digestion:
- After eating a snack or a meal, sugar and other nutrients enter the bloodstream as the body digests food.
- Carbohydrates, protein and fats are three types of nutrients found in food. Although all three affect the amount of sugar in the bloodstream, carbohydrates affect it the most.
- Protein is essential for building and maintaining your muscles, bones, organs and other tissues and to keep your body functioning.
- Fat is important for vital body functions such as making hormones, building cell walls and storing energy.
- Carbohydrates provide the quickest form of energy--they are converted into glucose, or blood sugar, when they reach your bloodstream.
- During digestion, carbohydrates break down into sugar and enter the bloodstream in the form of glucose, a simple sugar.
- The pancreas responds to this rise in the amount of sugar in the bloodstream by producing insulin.
- Insulin must be present in the bloodstream to allow sugar — the body's main energy supply — into the body's tissues.
Insulin also influences the liver, which plays a key role in maintaining normal blood sugar levels. After eating, when insulin levels are high, the liver accepts and stores extra sugar in the form of glycogen. Between meals, when insulin levels are low, the liver releases glycogen into the bloodstream in the form of sugar, keeping blood sugar levels within a narrow and normal range.
When your body notices that the sugar level is elevated, it is a sign that you have more sugar than you need right now, your body is not burning it and therefore it is accumulating in your blood. So insulin is released to take that sugar and store it. How does it store it? Glycogen? Your body stores very little glycogen at any one time. All the glycogen stored in your liver and muscles would not last you through 1 active day. Once you have filled up your glycogen stores, that sugar is stored as saturated fat.
So the idea of medical professionals recommending a high complex-carbohydrate, low-saturated-fat diet is absolutely a mistake. A high complex-carbohydrate diet is nothing more than a high-glucose diet, or a high-sugar diet. Your body is just going to store it as saturated fat, and the body makes it into saturated fat quite readily. Insulin normally allows body tissues, such as the muscles, to take up the blood sugar glucose, the body's prime energy source. In those with diabetes due to a lack of normal insulin or insulin resistance, blood sugar rises, a condition that can lead to tissue damage.
Your body's principal way of getting rid of sugar, because it is toxic, is to burn it. The sugar which your body can't burn will be rid of by storing it as glycogen, and when those glycogen reserves are full, sugar gets stored as fat. If you eat sugar your body will burn it and you stop burning fat. Another major effect of insulin on fat is it prevents you from burning it. What happens when you are insulin resistant and you have all this insulin floating around all the time? You wake up in the morning with an insulin level of 90.
Treatment at this stage is to improve your diet to include more fresh fruits and veggies, more whole grains and lean proteins & less sugary foods and highly processed carbohydrates. Exercise daily will help keep your body and muscles active.