Scientists discovered that when the level of insulin circulating in the blood climbs too high, over time cells all over the body become more and more insensitive to insulin’s usual effects. 

Under normal circumstances insulin performs a role as a gateway hormone. Insulin allows the sugar in your blood to enter into your muscle cells where it’s consumed as fuel to produce energy.

But when the muscle cells become insensitive to insulin, less and less sugar is able to flow from your bloodstream into your muscle cells. You experience fatigue because your muscle cells can no longer get the fuel they need.

Worse yet as the sugar backs up in your bloodstream, your blood sugar levels rises excessively which is very dangerous. Ask any doctor (or any diabetic for that matter) and they’ll tell you how terribly damaging a high blood sugar level can be.

Eventually after three or four decades, your muscle cells become so insensitive to insulin that it can no longer fulfill its normal role. Your blood sugar climbs so high your doctor gives you an official diagnosis of type II diabetes. (A fasting blood sugar level of over 125 is how doctors diagnose type II diabetes.)

Remember, it’s the slowly accumulating insulin insensitivity of your muscle cells that’s the root cause of type II diabetes. And the root cause of this insensitivity is the overproduction of insulin which is the result of the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates.
 

You May Be At Risk…

Most Americans have too much insulin in their blood. This is a stealthy problem as you can have an abnormally high level of insulin in your blood and as a result be at a dramatically increased risk of suffering from a long list of life threatening diseases – and yet have no symptoms at all!

Tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide will suffer and die from the diseases excessive insulin causes including Alzheimer’s without having any warning signs whatever.

Not only does excessive insulin damage your brain and dramatically increase your Alzheimer’s risk, it also accelerates the rate at which you age. Simply stated - the higher your insulin level the faster you’ll age.

I recently attended a high school class reunion. Perhaps you’ve had this same experience. What astounded me was how little some of my old friends had aged. A few looked just as they did way back when.

But then there were others who looked much, much older. Some looked twenty years or more older than their chronological age. Their 50 year-old faces were etched with the lines and wrinkles you’d expect to see on the face of an 80 year old!

According to the scientists, even a slightly increased insulin level can substantially increase your risk of disease and at the same time dramatically accelerate the rate at which your body ages. 

Unfortunately few doctors are aware of how damaging excessive insulin can be. They routinely shrug off elevated insulin levels as “high normal”. Exhibiting a casual attitude toward something as dangerous as excessive insulin does their patients a great disservice. 
 

Mother Knows Best

The Aborigines are the native people of Australia. One young aboriginal man raised on their reservation decided to abandon his tribe’s traditional ways, leave home, go to college, become an accountant, move to a big city and live a modern lifestyle. 

After he graduated from college he landed a good accounting job in the offices of a major Australian manufacturing firm in Canberra, the capital city of Australia. But after two decades of life in the big city, he received a terrible shock when his physician diagnosed him with type II diabetes.

When he told his mother of the diagnosis she insisted that he return to the reservation and go back to eating a traditional Aboriginal diet. He followed her wise advice. In two years his diabetes had completely vanished and his health was fully restored.

The diseases of civilization that are so common in the U.S. and Europe are extremely rare among the aborigines – but that advantage only applies to the individuals who reside on the reservation and live a traditional lifestyle. Unfortunately, those aborigines who leave to live in the big cities suffer from these modern diseases at roughly the same rate as Americans. 

The New Delhi Blues

Studies done in India have cast more light on this effect. There researchers have found that the diseases of civilization are much more common among the people who live in the larger more modern Indian cities where they consume what most people would call a modern western type diet.

While in contrast their cousins who live in the rural areas where they continue to consume a traditional more natural diet tend to remain healthy and are largely escaping these modern epidemics.

When researchers examined the health histories of Indians who left India to live in the U.S., they found that within a few short years of arrival their disease risk quickly rose to the much higher American level.

On the other side of the coin, those rare Americans who take up residence in the rural areas of India see their disease risk quickly tumble to the much lower rural Indian rate.

And then there’s the Japanese example. Many of these diseases of civilization are relatively rare among the citizens of Japan. But when the Japanese immigrate to Hawaii, where they begin consuming processed foods, their disease risk quickly rises 50% or more.

Among those Japanese who go on to move to the mainland U.S., the risk rises even further within a few short years. 

Burger Hell

 Back in the 1970s the people of a small backward island in the Philippines were eager to live a more modern life. They filed a formal request with their government asking for assistance in obtaining a fast food style restaurant. It took their government several years but eventually the people got what they desired – a modern hamburger outlet.

When the restaurant opened everyone was delighted. No longer did the locals have to spend long hours at sea fishing or break their backs tilling the soil in order to obtain their daily food.

Now they could just line up three times a day and have their food handed to them on a bright red plastic tray.

But after a few years on this new diet the health of the islanders, a group who had always been extremely healthy, went into an alarming decline. 

High blood pressure which had been all but unknown on the island suddenly appeared. After five years fully a third of the islanders were on various kinds of high blood pressure medications. 

A few years after that, the first few cases of type II diabetes were diagnosed. It wasn’t long before the number of diabetics on the island exploded. And after several decades of modern food, the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease were diagnosed. Eat like an American and you die like an American. ■