Diabetes and obesity in the United States are known to have reached epidemic proportions, but it is less well known that many, if not most, cases of diabetes are preventable.  How?  The best strategy for preventing diabetes and obesity is to learn how to protect your body’s insulin supply. 

Think of your insulin as a friendly escort service.  It catches the glucose (sugar) arriving from your gut, and then escorts it to the cells, opening doors to transfer that sugar into your cells.  The more rapidly food is absorbed into your bloodstream, the more insulin you need to catch it.  If and when that happens, a healthy pancreas says “that’s OK, I’ll make more!” 

Simply releasing more insulin is not as reasonable a compromise as you might think.  Even though you can’t live without it, elevated insulin levels create their own set of problems.  Insulin is, for example, the fat-storage hormone.  The more insulin you release, the more fat you store, especially in your abdomen.  To make matters worse, the more fat you store in your abdomen, the less efficiently your insulin works.  Then it takes more insulin to get the same job done.  This vicious cycle is called “insulin resistance.”

High levels of insulin cause other serious problems.  Having high insulin levels makes you hungry because insulin coats the receptors in the satiety centers in your brain.  That makes it hard to tell if you are full.  So if you’ve had the experience of cruising the cabinets after dinner, looking for something else to eat, that may be why.  Sustained, elevated insulin levels cause numerous other significant problems, like high blood pressure and polycystic ovarian syndrome, which decreases the fertility of many young women.  So it makes very good sense to conserve your insulin.

When you eat a food that is broken down quickly and absorbed rapidly, your pancreas releases a large bolus of insulin to catch it.  But if you eat a meal that is more slowly absorbed, the insulin is released one drop at a time, so very little gets wasted.  It takes only a thimbleful of insulin to catch sugar that is arriving bit by bit.  How does that work?   Like a valet service. 

Imagine that your insulin is a valet service, and the sugar (absorbed from the food you eat) is the cars.  If 1000 cars all arrive at a huge party at 7 p.m., the boss is going to need to hire a lot of staff to park all those cars.  But if, instead, the arrival times of those same 1000 cars are spread out over the course of a few hours, fewer valet staff will be sufficient to get the job done.  In both cases, at the end of the day 1000 cars will be parked.  But if they arrive slowly, it won’t take nearly as many valet staff to do the job.  It’s the same with your insulin and sugar:  if you choose foods that are broken down  and absorbed slowly, it will take a lot less insulin to move the resulting sugar into the cells.

Another thing about insulin is that it works worst when you wake up in the morning.  So if you use a ton of extra insulin because you chose a breakfast loaded with simple carbohydrate, it will take even more insulin than if you eat that same meal later in the day.  So if you eat toast and jelly, or cereal, for breakfast, your pancreas will have to release a massive amount of insulin to catch all that incoming sugar.  Eat two eggs scrambled in butter, and it won’t.

Now if your pancreas continues to be called upon to meet an excessive demand for insulin, year in and year out, the day may come when your pancreas has difficulty keeping up.  If this happens to you, then your blood sugar levels, which rise normally (and temporarily) after eating, will slowly begin to rise higher, and then take longer to return to normal.  Why?  Because if there isn’t enough insulin available to escort incoming sugar to hungry cells, then the sugar will float around in the blood waiting until more insulin shows up. 

To add insult to injury, high blood sugars themselves negatively affect your pancreas and decrease its ability to make insulin.  So once your pancreas begins to struggle to keep up with demand, you enter a negative feedback loop of worsening blood sugar control from which there is no exit unless you start conserving insulin, whether with diet, exercise, or medication.  Or you can just start now.

Remember that you’re not alone -- this problem belongs to all of us, and it’s been getting worse for decades.  In fact, the typical American diet requires so much insulin that it overwhelms the insulin-producing capacity of millions of people.  Who are they?  All the people with pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes, including those who do not yet know they have it.   

What can you do about it?  You can be kind to your pancreas and your insulin supply by learning which kinds of foods are absorbed rapidly and which are not.  You can learn four simple changes that will automatically decrease the amount of quickly-absorbed food you eat without having to consider every bite you eat. Click on “Four Healthy Recommendations” in the upper right hand corner on the Home page to find them.  Hearty appetite!