American health care looks at how obesity promotes insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome differently. Metabolic syndrome in America is understood as a set of conditions that occur together that increase your risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes – like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels.
So, the World Health Organization recognizes the role of insulin resistance in metabolic syndrome, where it isn’t really acknowledged much of the time in America. This is important because one in three adults in the United States has metabolic syndrome. Also, almost 90% of all adults have at least one component of it.
We will refer once again to Dr. Ben Bikman, who is an expert on insulin resistance. He states that obesity (or excess fat on the body) is the metabolic consequence of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. That is a more complicated way to say our excessive weight gain results from insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia.
Hyperinsulinemia is a result of insulin resistance. If your cells cannot use insulin effectively, then your blood sugar goes up. Your body then sends out signals to your pancreas to make even more insulin to deal with that extra sugar, because it is dangerous. This is an overproduction of insulin because of ongoing high blood sugar.
And what is the connection to weight gain? Because insulin actively promotes the growth of fat cells, weight gain is a side effect. Not only does insulin promote fat cell growth, it also blocks fat cells from sharing their fat to be used by the body. You simply can’t burn the fat for fuel, making weight loss difficult.
Insulin resistance does not improve just because someone loses weight by eating a too low-calorie diet and starving themselves. You have to target a lifestyle diet that will not increase blood sugar and insulin production, if you want to improve insulin resistance and lose weight, because all calories are not created equal.
However, hormones are behind much of the debate, whether it is the hormone insulin or a low-functioning thyroid, etc. Bottom line, hormones determine how your body uses the food you eat for many functions; however, no single hormone promotes fat cell growth as much as insulin.
When it comes to fat accumulation, you have to look at the size of your fat cells. As fat cells increase, they become very full, so that excess fat spills over into the blood, and can end up getting stored in other tissues.
Insulin then sends a very strong signal to store that fat, whether it means pulling that fat directly from the bloodstream or making new fat from glucose.
At the same time, insulin also prevents or blocks fat from leaving the fat cell. Our fat cells can then grow in two ways. We can either increase the number of them, which leaves the individual fat cells smaller; or the number of fat cells can remain the same and just grow bigger.
These larger fat cells have fewer insulin receptors than small ones, so they do not have the same amount of influence from insulin to store the fat. So, Larger fat cells allow greater fat breakdown or fat loss.
When a fat cell reaches its maximum size, it tries to limit its growth by becoming resistant to insulins demands to store more fat. However, if your fat cells remain small and just increase in number, they never get to that limit and stay insulin sensitive, allowing us to add on more weight.
Leptin is the hormone that tells your body to burn fat. Leptin is supposed to prevent insulin secretion and keep us thin. Most obese people have a lot of leptin, because it is produced in fat cells. So, excess fat should mean lots of fat burning leptin.
However, leptin is no longer effective in obesity at regulating appetite. Because just like insulin, too much leptin for too long and your body becomes resistant. Now insulin is free to store fat without anything getting in its way.
It’s a vicious cycle, because the thing that increases leptin in the first place is insulin! Insulin is what stimulates leptin production in your fat tissues to start with. So, too much insulin (hyperinsulinemia) means too much leptin. Now you have insulin and leptin resistance, therefore, weight gain and a greater risk of metabolic diseases.
By making informed dietary choices and embracing lifestyle changes, individuals can work toward reversing how obesity promotes insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.
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