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Myths & Fallacies: "Carbs Spike Insulin"
76 Plays1 year ago
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Transcript
The Role of Carbohydrates in Insulin Regulation
00:00:00
chrisyzen
In this segment of myths and fallacies on the how to actually live longer podcast with Christian Jordan, one of your hosts, AKA myself, let's talk about the carbs spike insulin though argument. Right. And if someone tells you that carbs spike insulin, tell them, yeah.
00:00:22
chrisyzen
So what and allow them to to explain why that's bad. Why is ah an incident spike bad? I think most people we've we've ah been so we just parrot what we read in um what our favorite favorite influencer um says on their podcast or or whatever YouTube channel or or whatever we read in the mainstream literature literature rags.
00:00:50
chrisyzen
all those health sites not worth the internet paper they're written on but here's the thing so yes carbs will increase insulin but that's supposed to happen because the insulin increases to help you partition that glucose the you know the the nutrition in the food right so that is That is a good thing because when your insulin increases, your your cortisol goes down. So you have two choices. Don't eat carbs. Guess what's going to go up? Your insulin will be lower. yeah What's going to go up? Your cortisol. Do you want to have a chronically elevated cortisol because you don't want to spike insulin? You don't want to increase insulin?
00:01:40
chrisyzen
I don't think you do because cortisol ages you prematurely and it degenerates your body. It breaks down all your lean tissue and your your your joints, your bones, your your muscles, you you know your skin, your organs. So that's what a chronically elevated cortisol level will do.
00:01:59
chrisyzen
so Do you want that? Probably not. Now, do you want a chronically high insulin level? No, absolutely you don't. Like that, that we can agree on.
Misconceptions About Insulin and Carbohydrates
00:02:10
chrisyzen
However, the carbohydrates, the chronic carbohydrate consumption is not what caused your or a person's insulin to be elevated on a chronic basis.
00:02:26
chrisyzen
but that is That is the myth because be a this is ah why it's a myth, why it's a fallacy is because carbohydrates can increase insulin. Therefore, my insulin is high because of my carbohydrates. However, you can have people on keto, you can actually have their blood sugar be higher than when they're doing carbs. Like when I was doing keto,
00:02:55
chrisyzen
and low carb I would measure my blood sugar in the morning it would be around 105 that kind of way and when I stop doing it it would be like a a much lower it'd be like 80 or whatever right so why would my blood sugar be higher on keto
00:03:13
chrisyzen
Um, then when, when I was eating like a normal, normal diet, because cortisol raises the blood sugar cortisol does it by degenerating your body by breaking down your tissue, your lean tissue. So the point is there's There's reasons why certain things are elevated and out of range and it's not always the the direct mechanism of why
Factors Influencing Insulin Resistance
00:03:37
chrisyzen
that can happen, right? So example, if you have, let's say an overweight person, they have a lot of fat in their body and a lot of fat is getting broken down and sent into the bloodstream on a chronic basis or elevated like policies.
00:03:50
chrisyzen
That fat buildup in the bloodstream will actually cause, ah will inhibit glucose from being up taken into the cells and oxidized for energy. That is one mechanism of becoming insulin resistant just by being overweight, right?
00:04:08
chrisyzen
or eating a high fat diet or being chronically stressed that can actually increase insulin resistance because ah the stress cascade causes peripheral insulin resistance to spare the glucose for your central nervous system, right? um Otherwise, you could very quickly die if if your your muscles didn't become insulin resistant in that scenario. It's a survival scenario, right?
00:04:32
chrisyzen
so you can have a very high insulin fasting insulin because you're metabolically not very healthy but going on the keto diet at that point on a low carb diet that just stops the carbohydrates coming from the diet but you're still creating glucose because if you're metabolically unhealthy you're probably your cortisol is elevated on a chronic basis you're probably creating a lot of ah glucose through gluconeogenesis in the liver
00:05:03
chrisyzen
So that's not really, it's a symptom masking tactic to lower the blood sugar in the near term. And people think, oh, it cured my diabetes. It's really not a long-term solution. It's not actually um resolving the metabolic issues in the cell.
Personalized Health Metrics and Carbohydrate Impact
00:05:18
chrisyzen
Why is the cell not metabolizing metabolizing the glucose? Very often the case is because there's a lot of fat in the bloodstream. So surprisingly,
00:05:30
chrisyzen
Surprisingly, it's fat that can cause insulin resistance, right?
00:05:39
chrisyzen
So in this, in such an instance, the journey back to health requires a slightly more sophisticated approach. But if you are metabolically healthy, like if you do like, for example, um one of my clients was asking me this and we did the fasting insulin test on her and her fasting insulin was like stellar. It was like three something, you know, and my wife's ah who's like a former professional ballerina,
00:06:06
chrisyzen
or her um ah fasting insulin is like three. So that is incredible. So I told that client, ah you have zero, absolutely zero to worry about that a meal with a higher carbohydrate content is going to spike your um insulin because you are extremely, well, I don't want to say extremely, but you're very metabolically healthy, right? From this perspective at least, right? So you eat your carbs, your insulin spikes, and then that ah glucose is cleared out of the bloodstream, partitioned to where it should be partitioned.
00:06:49
chrisyzen
Now, if you have a more metabolically, quote unquote, deranged person, and they have that same meal, let's say, I don't know, 80, 100 grams of carbohydrate, clean carbohydrates, we only eat clean carbohydrates, that person's blood sugar will stay elev elevated for longer.
00:07:11
chrisyzen
and their insulin will stay higher for longer, right? But that person's insulin level was already high
Limitations of Carb Restriction in Metabolic Health
00:07:17
chrisyzen
to begin with. Like I have clients that their insulin, rather than being like three, four, that kind of good range would be 17, 18, that kind of range where it's already elevated before the they like before they even wake up, before they even have the meal. So then at that point, it might go even higher, right? And it will stay high for longer and the the glucose won't be getting cleared out of the bloodstream. So the the glucose will be higher as well, right? So you go to the doctor like that and the doctor, they will only look at the glucose
00:07:52
chrisyzen
They might do a glucose challenge and they'll definitely label you as pre-diabetic or diabetic depending on how high the actual glucose levels are. But the thing is, all of that, all of that, it wasn't necessarily It wasn't necessarily the carbohydrates or the the insulin spike ah that that did it. That person was already in sort of poor metabolic health, right? So if again, if you are metabolically healthy, if your insulin level is low, and ah all the other stuff looks in decent range. Like, you know, your cortisol is mega high and your blood sugar is a mega high for whatever reason. In that in in that instance,
00:08:33
chrisyzen
you have zero zero to worry about about ah insulin spikes you know what I mean like absolutely nothing to worry about now if you're on like on the other side of the the spectrum if you're fasting insulin is high and you're not clearing the glucose out efficiently from the blood, then you have you have deeper problems here that restricting carbohydrates won't fix. It will reduce the blood sugar, which is what all doctors care about. They just care about reducing the blood sugar, but the metabolic derangement at the cellular level has not been fixed
00:09:09
chrisyzen
And it very likely they won't be fixed unless you lose a lot of weight.
Challenges of Keto Diets and Addressing Metabolism
00:09:12
chrisyzen
The problem is when you lose a lot of weight quickly on these keto diets, it's because of ah a lot of stress is put on the body and as a boy and as a byproduct of that, you lose a lot of weight because of the the tremendous stress which is shortening your life, right?
00:09:25
chrisyzen
So, in that case, you need a much more sophisticated sophisticated approach to resolve those metabolic derangements. Simply taking the carbs out of the diet is an extremely short-sighted tactic that is only ah treating a symptom, the symptom being the high blood sugar. It's not resolving the issue at the root level or the cellular level, right? So carbs spike insulin, that's fine. If you're metabolically healthy, that will be partitioned, the carbs will be partitioned efficiently. No problem. If you have a metabolic derangement where the insulin stays elevated and the blood sugar stays elevated for a long time after the meal,
00:10:06
chrisyzen
you have you have to figure out what what's that, fix that rather than simply taking away the glucose from the diet, right? Because that is not a long-term solution. Okay, so hope that was informative. Trying to keep this under 10 minutes, ideally five minutes, so you know I like to ramble. So stop there and hope you hope you got value out of this.