“Everyone Knows Someone Who Needs This Information!” (TM)
The radiation crisis in Japan shows that diabetics, who are often even more deficient in certain minerals than the massively-deficient Western populations, are the canaries in the mine. With less latitude, I’m sounding the clarion call for diabetics to get their biochemical house in order! Let’s learn what to start with.
CHROMIUM:
According to the staff at Life Extension Foundation, scientists conclusively established that low levels of chromium directly contribute to high blood sugar and even to pre-diabetic complications. That knowledge was found and published officially more than 50 years ago, and yet, today, how many of your doctors advise you to take chromium – usually in the trivalent form with GTC (glucose tolerance factor)?
And, amazingly (but as a reflection of rising over-all rates of obesity and diabetes), now anywhere between 25-50% of the American population suffers from chromium deficiency.
This began about 50 years ago, too, because of “modern commercial farming methods” which depleted the soil of valuable chromium, in the interim.
Then, “industrial food processing” depleted whatever natural chromium was in the whole foods. So, you got a double-whammy and that’s why so many people are deficient now.
It’s another reason why organically-grown, naturally-composted and amended soil, with little or no industrial processing — so-called “whole foods” are much more nutritious.
Compounding the danger of chromium deficiency is the reality that your body’s capacity to absorb chromium also declines with age. That’s possible one of the reasons that Type 2 diabetes used to be “adult onset” when people still ate decently. Now, even children have poor diets and can become Type 2 insulin-resistant (adult-onset) diabetics in their teens!
Rampant nutritional insufficiencies may also be undermining even the best efforts to optimize blood glucose levels using other protocols. For even if you eat well, if your diet is chromium deficient, you will not have enough to “partner” for your insulin needs.
Excess glucose ingestion (too many quick carbs) and high blood-stream levels not only increase degenerative disease risk, but also adversely impacts our longevity genes.
In published scientific studies, chromium deficiency induces early-stage diabetic complications, too, and hastens full-blown diabetes.
Chromium is the Master Blood Sugar Regulator.
Supplementation with chromium has consistently demonstrated improvement in:
___ blood sugar levels
___ insulin sensitivity
___ helpful lipid profiles.
The mechanism appears to be that chromium favorably modulates your cells’ internal communication centers (intracellular signaling systems). It helps your cells’ components communicate.
How does that work? In order to establish and maintain optimal blood glucose absorption and metabolism, the intracellular signaling is especially critical so each of your cells can detect and respond to elevated glucose levels in your blood.
When cells detect these elevations, a large-array of biomolecular processes are set in motion. Chromium is now recognized to be singularly vital to this process, enabling the cellular uptake and breakdown of blood sugar — and thereby effectively lowering glucose levels in the blood and increasing your insulin sensitivity.
Chromium also lowers blood sugar levels via GLUT4.
Chromium, like most metals in our bodies, binds to a specific protein “carrier” molecule (which is why Dr. Vickery’s protocols are so effective — see the Title Archive for those articles).
Just as the hemoglobin molecule in red blood cells binds to iron, the chromodulin molecule binds bio-electrically to chromium ions.
In the presence of insulin, the chromodulin molecule even changes its shape and additionally changes its location in the cell. This process then triggers a further cascade — the activation of a vital glucose transporter molecule called GLUT4.
GLUT4 is found most abundantly in skeletal muscle and in fatty tissue, and this IS where most glucose metabolism takes place in your body! Of all your tissues, muscle is the most metabolically active, so that is why exercise to build and maintain muscle is SO important.
Once activated by chromium, GLUT4 actually migrates from deep within each cell’s internal matrix to a position on the edge, at the cell membrane.
GLUT4 then allows glucose to flow from high concentrations in your bloodstream to lower concentrations in the cell, acting as a gate-keeper. This allows the cell to safely metabolize sugar while lowering sugar levels in the blood, at a reasonable rate, concurrently.
One of the earliest events in the onset of type 2 diabetes is now known to be inhibition of glucose transport by the GLUT4 complex. Scientists and physicians are understanding the need to reactivate GLUT4′s ability to transport glucose effectively.
Chromium also directly increases the production of GLUT4 transporter molecules as a second, separate, important, active mechanism independent of its effects on insulin.This is even more essential for those who are already “insulin resistant”.
Exciting recent studies show chromium also activates an entirely different signaling system called p38 MAPK and, again, that contributes to increased glucose uptake independent of the GLUT4 system.
Our body usually has back-up and alternate pathways. We are marvelously designed and it takes a lot to make us ill and overwhelm our ability to Heal. So, respecting that, we must give our body what it needs to help it do the Healing it knows how to do. Doctors seldom do more than help a little, mostly we need to give our body what it NEEDS.
Recent studies show that supplementing with chromium and biotin (an expensive B vitamin seldom in proper quantities in vitamin formulas) can improve glycemic control in overweight and obese diabetic patients when taken along with their regular medication. Or, as I have done, take these together,anyway, if you are not on medication.
LEF says: “Chromium also exerts its positive effects on blood sugar selectively — which means it does not induce dangerously low blood sugar levels like some drugs, but rather kicks into gear only when blood sugar levels become too high.” Nature always has a safe, life-affirming mechanism, if it has the supplies it needs.
Scientists recognize that control of blood sugar in the immediate period following a meal (the postprandial period) is perhaps more important than at any other time. Chromium helps control this interval when blood sugar can dangerously spike in the body thereby prevents or ameliorates the cumulative damage.
Chromium also helps prevent the formation of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. You should see the difference in readings on your A1c tests.
The combination of chromium and biotin has favorably affected a biomarker called the atherogenic index: this is the ratio of triglycerides to HDL. Chromium and biotin here reduce your cardiac risk factors.
Inflammation is the true cause of many of the same, connected dis-eases, and the improvement in insulin signaling by chromium is also associated with decreased production of specific pro-inflammatory cytokines, which will help tissue health all over your body, especially cardiac and arterial health.
WHAT FOODS HELP?
___ Indian Goosebery and Shilajit
The organic compounds amla (Indian gooseberry) and shilajit work synergistically to enhance chromium’s glucose-lowering effects. The high anti-oxidant amla fruit shields cells from damage inflicted by high blood sugar, while shilajit boosts efficient cellular glucose metabolism (be sure to get a quality preparation).
Shilajit is an unusual, complex mixture of organic and inorganic compounds rich in fulvic acid. Studies show that shilajit has remarkable effects on how our mitochondria utilize energy from dietary sugars and fats. As I’ve tried to emphasize, diabetics already have their mitochondria more at-risk, so this “support” is vital.
Fulvic acid acts as a molecular “chaperone,” shuttling electrons efficiently along pathways within our cellular mitochondria furnaces, which are actually genetically-independent life-forms within your cells, in a symbiotic relationship as old as Life itself.
Taking a compound of chromium plus amla and shilajit acts to optimize the way your body takes up and distributes glucose between and within cells, thereby assuring rapid removal of glucose from the bloodstream and encouraging efficient utilization of glucose within your cells’ mitochondria.
___ Brown Seaweeds
You can block carbohydrate breakdown using seaweeds which limits the amount of glucose that your body has to process.
This approach blunts the conversion of starches into their component sugars in your gastrointestinal tract by introducing natural enzyme inhibitors.
The usual targets are the sugar-producing alpha-amylase and alpha-glucosidase enzymes. Potent, anti-oxidant seaweed extracts have inhibitory effects on these enzymes.
These seaweed extracts also stimulate differentiation of fat cells, preventing them from replicating and reducing the release of harmful fat-related, inflammatory cytokines. Eating seaweeds also accomplishes these goals as long as ingestion is daily.
Seaweed compounds achieve this anti-inflammatory effect by their upregulation of the important PPAR metabolic sensing system and also through increased expression of the GLUT4 glucose transporter.
The seaweed compounds will also be protective of your thyroid to prevent it uptaking the radio-active Iodine isotope 131 while the radiation crisis is happening in Japan.
It will also help insure that you have enough Iodine for your thyroid to run your metabolism properly. Seaweed is a basic, foundational human food. Don’t leave home without eating some, every day.
Kelp, dulse and other sea vegetables are the best source of chromium, as well as being a mineral source for all needed minerals available on the planet. If you take seaweed, it will be hard to be deficient in anything. The sea veggies are all pH alkaline, which really is anti-inflammatory.
___ Beets, Olives, Fresh Garlic, Onions, Spirulina, Wheatgrass
These are other chromium sources. Do not overdose on wheatgrass juices as it is a powerful detoxifier.
Make sure you get adequate chromium daily. Next time I’ll write about other helpful foods and protocols. To heal diabetes, and that is often possible, and certainly to improve your condition, you need to act and give your body the raw materials it needs. Medications do not seem to be doing that.
Best to all – Em
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(c)2011 Em at http://diabetesdietdialogue.wordpress.com
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