PART 2 Blood Sugar.

So off we go again. Once again, I am not telling you what to do. If you are happy with your health that's fine with me, BUT and this is a big but, if you ask please allow me to tell you what I think. If you think what I say is crap that is very OK. All I know is what is working for me and I really hope that somewhere in this ramble you will find something that helps to improve you life. We all have the right to be 100%+ healthy. After all, someone has to help me keep this world running!!!!

As I said last time, the first thing I did was panic. Luckily we live in an age when we can get information quickly and aplenty and delivered directly into our living rooms via the internet. Unluckily a lot of this information is contradictory and confusing, none more so than what constitutes normal blood sugar levels. What's more, is seems that the goal posts keep moving. One would hope that this is because, as knowledge increases and improves we have a more accurate idea of what normal is, but this appears not to be the case. Politics and profits feature large here!

The trouble with high B/S seemed to me to be twofold. Firstly, the end result is that all systems in the body suffer; potential blindness, amputations, kidney and heart failure are but a few and very real. Secondly, the concentrations of sugar in the blood stream make the pancreas over work as it tries to compensate until, at last, it says bugger this and either closes down or collapses altogether. When you are unable to produce insulin because the beta cells have gone out for lunch, the only course open to you is to inject insulin, this is artificial insulin in most cases. But you know all this!

So, what I decided to do was to keep testing how my body was handling the sugar it was getting and to reduce the amount of sugar I put into it in the first place. To my way of thinking less sugar meant less insulin needed. I would keep on testing to see if I could reduce my numbers until they got into a more reasonable range. I knew I did not want to do drugs unless I really had to. The reason for this is that drug intervention affects only a small aspect of the wonderful balancing circle our bodies perform every micro second of every day. Affecting just one small part can put disproportionate strain on another area causing yet another area to malfunction and setting into motion a cycle of ill health. I looked at the people I knew who were on diabetic drugs and saw a great deal of side-effects and suffering.

So, I tested my blood over and over again and logged it along side the food I was eating. What I found was that my blood was quite high in the morning, then when I ate my "heathy breakfast" of whole meal bread and fruit, it would shoot up into the range where I had read permanent damage was happening. It would come down, then after a little more time, down it would come again. So my reasoning was; (1) I was still producing insulin, but not enough or (2) maybe my body was becoming resistant to that insulin. If so there was probably too much in my system which was  unable to work. High insulin levels are not good! As insulin is known as the "fat storage hormone" it was more than likely that this was contributing to my "personal inflation".

It was at that stage I rediscovered Tom Smith and his "take" on insulin resistance and fats. I will not go into the details of this... go get it from the organ grinder not his monkey!  Visit his web site and  buy his book but roughly what he said was this.

The cell membranes of the body are made up of lipids (fat)! The "right" fat is needed to make a healthy cell membrane. When healthy,  fuel  (ie, sugar/glucose) can be transported optimally into those cells. The fats needed to optimise the transit of fuel into the cells are the omega 3 fatty acids. These essential building blocks cannot be synthesised within the body from other things and so must be taken in on a regular basis for repair and renewal of the cells. Unfortunately omega3 oils are fragile and difficult to store so there has been a huge swing to more stable, cheaper oils with long shelf lives - the omega 6 and 9 oils. More on this later. The poor old body can't get the building blocks it needs so it grabs what it can and uses those instead.

Then, as the percentage swings in favour of the "bad stuff", the cell membranes become more sticky, less flexible and, therefore more difficult to cross. Add to this the greater and greater amounts of sugar being pumped into the blood stream and very soon those poor old beta cells are going hell for leather, 24/7, with no time off for good behaviour!

So the first part of my plan relied heavenly on Tom's protocol. Cut out all fats and oils (fats and oils are the same stuff, only oil is fat that melts at room temperature) except for the omega 3 in the form of flax seed oil. What this seems to do is allow the cells to rebuild themselves using the right stuff thus restoring their ability to work as they should. When this is sorted "good fats and oils" are re-introduced with Omega  3, 6 and 9s  kept in the right ratio.

Anyone who is interested in the technical details surrounding good/bad fats might like a read of Tom Smith's website - www.healingmatters.com - and Udo Erasmus's work - www.udoerasmus.com

Now a quick note on flax seed oil. This is linseed oil but not the stuff that has been boiled, buggered and bewitched! Not what you oil your old cricket bat with! To retain all the good stuff oils have to be treated with respect and care. In the first case it must be cold pressed. Heating oils to extract maximum yield changes the molecular structure of the oil and in most cases makes it toxic.
If you heat it enough it will not go rancid and will last for ever. Check out that old bottle of sunflower oil hidden in the back of the cupboard; still good as the day it was bought and still as toxic! Cold pressed flax seed goes rancid very quickly, so it must be kept in a fridge once opened. Because it is so fragile it must be bottled in glass darkly! It should also have a short "sell by" date. See the problem for the supermarkets!!

So I started by taking 2 to 3 tablespoons a day. I have no trouble just taking it on a spoon but I know a lot of folk can't hack this so mix it with your yogurt or what ever. But take it every day.
Over 2 years later I still take 1 to 2 tablespoons a day along with other good oils and fats.

Next I had a look at what was putting sugar into my blood stream and this is where I am going to upset some folk. In fact it upset me.

As I said earlier, carbs = sugar. So all those "health foods" we have been told to eat pushed up my blood sugar like hell! The porridge and muesli I ate for breakfast and that whole meal bread,  the pasta (whole wheat, of course) shoved up the number and all this stuff about "slow release carbs just kept it up there. If you don't believe me just test it for yourself.

That was the first thing then there was the amount of sugar in just about everything from ham and bacon, to sauces and pickles and every other thing in between! Those two objects on either side of, and just above, my nose earned their keep. I read every label. So boring but such an insight.

To reduce the stress on my pancreas I removed as many carbs as I could. So no bread, no pasta, no grains of any sort and that included rice. Obviously no sweets, biscuits or fizzy drinks, just plenty of fresh veggies, cooked and uncooked protein, seeds and nuts. I still had dairy in the form of milk, cheese and natural yogurt and fresh free range eggs.

Everything I ate I tried to get as fresh as possible. Breakfast would consist of a pile of seeds, ground so I would be able to digest them, mixed with a yogurt and my flax seed oil. I drank a coffee or two and low and behold after a bit, I found I could go through to lunchtime without feeling hungry. Previously, on my muesli  and fruit I was in need of a bun at about 11am and ready to kill if lunch was delayed for an hour! I kid you not!! It's all to do with the spikes that sugar creates. In goes the sugar,  whoosh, send in the insulin  De Da! Big pinch up and sugar is stripped out of the system. More sugar needed, bring on the croissants! Up and down, cause and effect, seesaw, roller coaster and a grumpy Roger!!
So by reducing the carbs/sugar I reduced the need for so much insulin. Because of this the peaks and troughs evened out and I was truly, and I will write this in big letters to make a point, NOT HUNGRY. There was a side effect because there was not as much insulin and sugar charging around - I started to stink... sorry, that was a typo... that should read shrink, slow and regular. Now as the fat went away other forces came into play... But more of that next time.

Recommendations.

Keep testing, but now cut down dramatically on carbs/ sugar.

Check out the glycemic Loading for foods (not the glycemic index) so you can really know how many grams of carbs you are eating.

Buy a set of scales and be anal about the amounts of food you eat. 10 grams of nuts is 10grams but a "little bit more" is 20 or 30 grams. It's all in a shake of the packet!

Read all the labels. Anything ending "ose" is sugar,  so lactose, glucose, fructose, dextrose,  etc,. etc. It all adds up. Cut them down or better still, cut them out. I know milk in my coffee has lactose in it but we will come to that late.

Keep up with the Omega 3 Oils.

Keep checking your blood and,  this is important, log the results because you need to know what food pushes the glucose.

Here is a BIG thinks from me which I would like you to play around with. There are two aspects to regaining your health. One is "what you do", the other is "what you stop doing". The ratio is something like  80/20. That is 80 to stop doing, 20 to do.

More as I have time and I will start to be more specific.

Just out of interest,  1and a half hours after a fairly large chicken meal with veggies and nuts and cheese yesterday evening! and with only a 10 minute walk with the dog - a reading of 79 mg/dl...!Yippee! Still getting better!

Last thought for today: If you have a high performance racing car and you put bog standard fuel in it or you have a little old car like mine and you fill it up with super high octane race fuel, will you get optimum results with longevity? Just a thought. I know what I think.