INSULIN RESISTANCE & HEART DISEASE – PART 2

We will begin by taking a close look at high blood pressure. There’s a lot of research that shows us that insulin resistance and high blood pressure are not just related; but rather high insulin levels directly cause high blood pressure. The good news with that connection is that when you work to reduce your insulin resistance, it will also positively affect your high blood pressure.

This is what sets Genesis apart from low-calorie dieting. We emphasize an anti-inflammatory, low-glycemic (meaning low blood sugar and insulin spiking) lifestyle of eating.

We will look into several ways that insulin resistance actually makes your blood pressure go up. One way is caused by a hormone released by your adrenal glands. We may have heard of cortisol (our stress hormone) which is produced by the adrenal glands, but they also produce another hormone called aldosterone.

Aldosterone’s job is to regulate the balance of salt and water in your body. Salt is made up of sodium and chloride – two very important electrolytes responsible for proper cell function. Aldosterone tells the kidneys to hang on the sodium so that we don’t urinate it all out, because it is so important for bodily function.

However, if your adrenal glands are releasing too much aldosterone, you are going to retain sodium, which will cause you to retain water. When you retain too much water, your blood volume goes up, which increases your blood pressure. This is why many of you have heard of, or have been told to decrease your salt in your diet.

Remember last week, we told you how insulin effects almost every cell in the body. In this case, insulin naturally increases aldosterone, which we just indicated makes us to hold onto salt, but in a good way, when things are in balance.

However, if you are eating inflammatory foods and carbohydrates that increase your blood sugar, and therefore your insulin, that ultimately promotes insulin resistance. In this situation, you are naturally going to retain more sodium and water, leading to high blood pressure.

Too much insulin production will cause too much salt and water retention. Salt is not the bad guy! It’s very important when put in proper perspective.

There are some people who cannot handle excess salt, while others can eat a lot and have no problem. They are known as salt sensitive and can develop hypertension because of it. That is not the norm, though.

Our innate/inborn/God-given bodies are smart. When healthy people eat salt, it is detected by the body and allows the kidneys to get rid of the excess salt and water. This intelligence of the body – this active body chemistry – keeps blood pressure normal and in balance.

However, with insulin resistance, salt sensitive people are already retaining sodium and water, and they continue to retain even more when they ingest it. Over time it increases blood volume and raises blood pressure.

Another way insulin resistance can create high blood pressure is by thickening our blood vessel walls. Insulin stimulates growth, so, in this situation, it causes cells in the lining of the blood vessels to grow bigger. Excess insulin, therefore, makes the blood vessels narrower as the lining gets bigger. The narrower the vessel, the higher the pressure.

The problem is that when we have developed insulin resistance, insulin is now less effective in helping produce nitric oxide in the vessel cell lining. Now the cells are less responsive to insulin, and they do not dilate efficiently, causing blood pressure to stay elevated.

And the last reason we will mention this week is that insulin resistance changes our body fats, better known as lipids. You know them as triglycerides, and LDL and HDL cholesterol. These fats are important, because our body is able to break them down into fatty acids and use them for energy.

Without getting into the whole cholesterol topic, we can just assert that insulin resistance causes us to produce more of the damaging, dense LDL’s. Almost all cholesterol is made in the liver, and when we have insulin resistance, the liver shifts that cholesterol production to the damaging, dense LDL’s.

Still, these LDL’s alone are not the problem. All cells, even cells that line your blood vessels, need cholesterol to maintain healthy function. It’s when these fats and cholesterol get oxidized that an inflammatory response is created, which is the beginning process of developing plaque in the arteries.

The biggest culprit to oxidation is processed seed oils like soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, cotton seed oil, etc. They are highly inflammatory.

The great news is that even if you do have insulin resistance currently, you can make choices that will help to reverse it, because so many of your body’s systems are affected by it. So many Genesis clients have been able to do this, and they are now living healthy lives without diabetes or high blood pressure.