June 2025

Metabolic Health

• Metabolism & Your Health
• Understanding Metabolic Conditions
• Body Fat – The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
• What To Know About High Fructose Corn Syrup

About 10 years ago, I sat in my doctor’s office when he told me my lab test suggested prediabetes. He went on to suggest chromium and dismissed me. The entire visit lasted approximately 10 minutes. At the time, I had no clue. Now that I do, I want to share it because metabolic conditions are detrimental to life expectancy and quality.  

Understanding Metabolic Conditions

To understand them, you need to understand the role of insulin in the metabolism process.

The role of insulin

Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas in response to an increase in blood glucose levels. The role of insulin is to maintain blood glucose levels within a fairly narrow range by facilitating glucose uptake into cells or inhibiting glucose release from storage.

Cells produce energy in the mitochondria. Last week, I explained how glucose plays the role of the “wood” that fuels the metabolic fire in a healthy metabolic process. For that to happen, glucose needs to reach the mitochondria. This is where insulin becomes handy.

Insulin acts as a key that unlocks the cells’ doors, allowing glucose to enter and facilitating energy production within the cells.

What could go wrong or insulin resistance?

If we use the steam engine analogy again to describe cell energy production. What would happen to the steam engine burner if we fed it too many logs?

An energy crisis

The temperature in the burner will rise until the walls of the burner can no longer bear the heat, and they either melt or explode.

That is exactly what happens in cells if they don’t control the amount of glucose that enters the cell. To prevent metabolic rates from going out of hand, cells protect themselves by rationing the amount of glucose they allow into them.

When blood glucose is consistently high, cells will reduce their sensitivity to insulin, meaning that even if insulin knocks on their doors, they don’t open.

In insulin resistance, the body has too much glucose circulating in the blood, and cells that are hungry for glucose are not responding to insulin. Insulin resistance is an energy crisis in the cells of the body.

When your cells are starving, they start to malfunction. Insulin resistance affects every cell in your body; therefore, symptoms can occur throughout the body.

A storage crisis

One factor contributing to your chances of developing insulin resistance is how efficiently your fat cells store the excess fuel. People who consistently consume excess calories will produce more fat cells to store their calories.

Fat cells might increase their size up to four times their normal size. However, these fat cells become inefficient at some point, leading to toxic fats floating in the blood and blocking insulin signaling.

When excess energy can’t be effectively stored in fat cells, it will be diverted to storage in organs and tissues that are not designed to store energy, such as the liver.

Some people are born with insufficient storage capacity; they are at risk of developing insulin resistance independently of their caloric intake, so they might be thin but still have insulin resistance.

Inflammation is another factor that can cause insulin resistance independently of obesity. People with chronic sustained inflammation are at high risk of developing insulin resistance.

Finally, where you store fats in your body is an important factor to consider. People with excess fat around their waist are at greater risk of insulin resistance. More about the different types of fat placement and their health outcome next week.

Insulin resistance is a storage crisis.

What is metabolic syndrome?

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

The diagnostic criteria for metabolic syndrome are:

• Abdominal obesity – waist circumference higher than 40 inches in men or 35 inches in women.
• High triglycerides – Triglycerides higher than 150 mg/dL
• HDL cholesterol lower than 40 mg/dLin men or lower than 50 mg/dL in women
• Blood pressure higher than 130/85 mmHg
• Fasting blood glucose higher than 100 mg/dL
• A1C levels between 5.7% and 6.4%

Untreated metabolic syndrome may turn into diabetes.

What is diabetes?

Diabetes isn’t a single condition but instead a cluster of conditions that include high blood sugar as a result of either low insulin production in the pancreas or insulin resistance.

Diagnosing Diabetes

Non fasting blood glucose >= 200

Fasting blood glucose >= 126

A1C >= 6.4

Glucose is a sticky compound that tends to stick to your red blood cells. Red blood cells’ lifespan is about 90 days. By measuring the amount of glucose stuck to your blood cells, you can get an average of blood glucose in the last three months.

A1C can be artificially lowered by anemia or artificially high by dehydration; therefore, the A1C test is not used as a standalone test.

The classic symptoms are:

• Increase urination
• Increased thirst
• Increased hunger

In ancient times, diabetes was diagnosed by the presence of sweet urine. The health practitioner would taste the urine or observe if it attracts ants. Modern science has found that the blood of a person with diabetes is thicker than normal blood, much like syrup.

A couple of reasons contribute to the syrupy consistency of the blood in diabetes:

• Excess blood sugar leads to frequent urination and dehydration, reducing the plasma-to-blood proteins ratio.
• Glucose sticks to blood proteins, making them heavy and slowing their movement in blood vessels.

There are two types of diabetes:

Type 1 diabetes happens when the body is unable to produce enough insulin. This type of diabetes was called juvenile diabetes because it was commonly diagnosed in childhood, but nowadays, some people are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in adulthood. The common cause of type 1 diabetes in adults is an autoimmune disease that damages the pancreas.

Type 2 diabetes is a condition characterized by insulin resistance. As the condition progresses, it might lead to damage to the pancreas.

Metabolic conditions = Social conditions

About 1 in two Americans are at risk of either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, making it an epidemic. During the COVID epidemic, the people who were at risk for the worst outcome were those with metabolic conditions. Yet, health institutions were pushing for vaccination, social isolation, and masks and neglected to educate people about the health risks of metabolic conditions.

Metabolic conditions are partly a social problem. People in low-income neighborhoods and towns have less access to healthy foods. They struggle with high stress levels and less access to health care. Research found that exposure to poverty in childhood increases your risk of developing metabolic conditions.

The metabolic conditions epidemic is driven by excess caloric consumption, leading to overweight and obesity. In next week’s post, I will explain the differences between the three types of fats and how they affect your health outcome.

Metabolic conditions can reduce your life quality, but even worse, they can reduce your life expectancy by decades. You don’t want to neglect metabolic conditions.

If you are struggling with metabolic syndrome or diabetes, you want to find a holistic health practitioner who can tailor a unique care plan for your body and lifestyle. You can make significant improvements to your metabolic health through lifestyle modifications, herbs, and supplements. More about that at the end of the month.