PART FOUR Disease Prevention

24 The Perilous Path to Diabetes

From the standpoint of saving lives, this chapter should prove to be the most significant one I have ever written. Here's why: For the past two decades, two illnesses have escalated so rapidly that they are considered twin epidemics-obesity and Type ii diabetes. I might go so far as to say they are Siamese twins.

Obesity and Type Ⅱ diabetes are actually two aspects of a single illness, characterized by insulin resistance (insulin not doing its job in your body) and hyperinsulinism (excess production of insulin). The overlap between the two is impressive. Over eighty percent of Type Ⅱ diabetics are obese,i And in my experience, the vast majority of obese people have the identical problems that lead to diabetes. The most convincing connection of all is that these twin epidemics escalated at exactly the same time coinciding perfectly with dramatic changes in the American diet. During the generation in which these conditions reached unprecedented heights, the intake of dietary fat fell from forty to thirty-three percent of total calories consumed. But, predictably, the intake of refined carbohydrates, including both sugar and flour, went up by an even greater amount.

Type Ⅱ diabetes is caused by a genetic predisposition to the disease md/or a diet filled with refined carbohydrates combined with an overall decrease in physical activity. Let me call your attention to one of the most important books ever written, Saccharine Disease: The Master Disease of Our Time. By British Surgeon Captain T. L Cleave, MI), the book examined nearly a dozen cultures in which diabetes (and .coronary heart disease as well) simply never occurred until twenty years after the people in that culture began to consume significant amounts of refined carbohydrates (a further discussion of Cleave's findings appears in Chapter 27).

Cleave's logic has been confirmed with a worldwide epidemic of diabetes. United Nations researchers have stated that by the year 2025, our planet is likely to have three hundred million diabetic residents, the greatest number of which will be from nations that had very few cases of diabetes until they supplemented their indigenous diets with excessive amounts of refined foods.

I am not alone in my concern that diabetes is a looming national health crisis. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) has redefined its standard for diagnosing the illness, enabling physidans to identify it at an early stage., when treaunent can he more effective. In 1997 the Centers for Disease Control estimated that almost sixteen million adults in the United States had diahetes. Almost eight hundred thousand new cases are diagnosed yearly. Direct and indirect of the illness were figured at ninety-eight billion dollars annually in 1997!

Even children nrc now at risk for Type H dinhetes—although it has generally been referred to as adult onset diabetes. A Cincinnati study was typical of many that are currently being publishedˉresarchers found that the incidenee of children nmi adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 diagnosed with Type H diabetes had increased tenfold from 1982 to 1994.$ All evidence indicates that this disturbina trend is continuing. Further, African-Americans,Latinos and Native Americans are at a siguificantly higher risk for diabetes than non-Hispanic whites, a statistic that presumably has a close relationship to their higher rates of obesity, although there may be a genetic component as well.

The Answer

We know that the first key to unlocking the solution to this epidemic is the acknowledgment of a well-established scientific fact; the second key is the implementation of treatment based on understanding this fact. For my money, there are still far too many health professionals who acknowledge the fact but don't put the solution into practice. The simple fact is that the earliest diagnosable state of Type H diabetes is associated with the production of excessive amounts of insulin.

In such a condition, the body does not allow insulin to do its job (hence, the term insulin resistance); therefore, the glucose level in the blood remains elevated. High insulin levels cause additional health problems, including obesity, high blood pressure and two major cardiac risk factors: high triglycerides and low levels of HDL (good cholesterol). Scientists continue to uncover even more difficulties attributed to hyperinsulinism, including polycysfic ovarian syndrome and an increased death rate from breast cancer. And I fear that, as time goes on, the list will grow.

I pray that if you get nothing else out of this book, you get fixed in your mind the answer to following question: What causes a life-threatening elevation of insulin levels?

The primary cause is eating too much of the wrong kind of carbohydrates. To a lesser degree eating excessive amounts of protein can affect blood-sugar levels; however, when protein is used for its primary function of building muscle mass, insulin is not produced. And, most significantly, insulin is not required to metabolize either our stored fat or the fat in the food we eat.

Now that you know how to do Atkins, you know it by-passes the problem of excessive insulin by switching the body to a primarily fat-burning metabolism. All the millions of early-stage diabetics who are eating meals high in carbs and taking medications that may stimulate insulin production are quite innocently on a path to self-destruction. They may think that their present diet will protect them, but if those people are limiting their cai'os by limiting their calorie intake, it is likely that after a while they will become bored or frustrated by their restrictive dieL Then they are likely to revert to consuming too much of the wrong kind of earhohydrate, putting them back on the high-insulin pathway to trouble. But individuals who are doing Atkins control their carbohydrate intake and eat foods with so little glyeemic impact that they can normalize their blood sugar and become latent diabetics. (This term applies to those people with the disease who are able keep it under complete control.)

The Benefit of Experience

What a dramatic difference! In my clinical experience-reading food diaries kept by patients—I have seen time and time again that a diabetic following a high-carbohydrate, low-calorie diet with the emphasis on fat restriction will usually find that such a meal raises his or her blood-sugar level an average of 100 points if tested about ninety minutes. after the meal. That same person will note that a steak or rack of lamb or a broiled half chicken plus a tossed green salad with Italian dressing will raise the blood-sugar level no more than 20 points, if at all. I have looked extensively but have not found a single scientific study showing that the higher-carbohydrate diet achieves better control over diabetes than the controlled carbohydrate nutritional, approach that is Atkins, Certainly my clinical experience supports the position that the Atkins Nutritionai Approach is the preferred nutritional treatment for Type II diabetes.

The Two Types of Diabetes

At this point we should take one step back to clarify that the two types of diabetes are truly so different that they should be considered two quite different illnesses. This chapter addresses only Type II diabetes.

· Type I diabetes typically occurs in childhood or early adulthood and is unrelated to dietary habits. It appears to be an autoimmune disorder, in which the body mistakenly attacks the pancreas, largely or totally destroying its capacity to produce insulin. Only five to ten percent of all diabetics are Type i.

Type II diabetes is caused by a genetic propensity for the disease combined with improper eating habits. The research done by Cleave (referred to on page 314) showed that certain genetically predisposed races and cultures do not get Type II diabetes until exposed to significant amounts of refined carbohydrates. (I should point out, however, that it is possible to be at risk for Type II diabetes even if you don't have a family history of the illness.) The great majority of people who suffer from Type H diabetes actually produce more insulin than do those who don't suffer from the illness. The reason the diabetics have elevated blood-sugar levels is not due to lack of insulin, but rather to insulin resistance. Therefore, insulin and insulinstimulating drugs usually make matters worse. Only in the later stages of Type H diabetes does a person's insulin output decline.

Don't Underestimate the Danger

I fear that many of you think of diabetes as a rather innocuous condition that requires very little self-denial. "Oh, well," you may say, "if my blood sugar is out of control, I can take a pill to control it" Or if you are further along the path to diabetes, you might even say, "I'll just have to take insulin and watch the way I eat." Don't flirt with that radically incorrect viewpoint. Diabetes can be an innocuous condition all fight, but only if you eat appropriately. If you don't, diabetes can be a heartbreaking scourge. It's the largest single cause of new cases of blindness in the United States. It's also the leading cause of kidney failure, a giant stepping-stone toward heart disease, and can so severely damage the circulatory system that eighty-six thousand Americans yearly suffer amputations.? I won't catalogue any more horrors. Instead, heed my many years of clinical experience: If you are at risk for diabetes, you have to make a lifetime pledge to stay away from those foods known to turn it into a grim collection of maladies. I can think of few illnesses I would sooner avoid.

Diabetes May Be Creeping Up on You

Traditionally physicians have diagnosed diabetes in people in their fifties and sixties. According to a recent survey, however, the average age of onset in the baby boomer generation is now 37!

The crucial point is that whether you get this illness in your thirties or in your fifties, you've been building up to it over decades. Type II diabetes never springs forth out of nowhere. We eat our Way toward it, three meals a day, a thousand meals a year, ten thousand meals a decade.

Type II diabetes is:

· frequently diet-induced.

· almost always completely preventable.

· almost always convertible to a latent condition if caught early enough.

· virtually always improvable and partially reversible, even late in the illness.

It is only partially reversible because, once you have it, eating habits may keep it under control, but such eating habits cannot necessarily heal all the damage that has already occurred.

Diabetes is insidious. It exists as pre-diabetes, usually for several decades. It is during this period that a simple glucose-tolerance test (GTT) can establish its presence. Although the ADA currently estimates that one diabetic in three is unaware that he or she has the condition, we find, by doing GTTs on patients with symptoms and/or a family history, approximately three pre-diabetics for every one with established diabetes.

The Path to Diabetes

Let's outline the journey that diabetes typically takes.

As you now understand, the modern American diet is grossly tipped toward refined carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour, both of which comprise most junk foods and rank high on the glycemic index. Your caveman body is totally befuddled by such foods. When you eat them, so much blood sugar gets poured into the bloodstream that your pancreas has to pump out insulin as if it were handling an emergency.

When you were 18, the superb efficiency of your body may have meant that you hardly noticed any symptoms resulting from this flood of blood sugar and resultant insulin overload. Later the symptoms pile on, just as for many of us the pounds do. You should already have taken the Blood-Sugar Symptom Test and be aware of any blood sugarrelated symptoms you might have. The vast majority of overweight people on a high-carbohydrate diet display an extensive range of symptoms, the by-products of unstable blood-sugar levels.

A significant number of people who are overweight are insulin resistant. It may be that in most people, insulin resistance precedes hyperinsulinism, but either way, because insulin in not effective in doing its work, the pancreas reacts by pouring forth ever-increasing quantities of insulin. People who are both obese and pre-diabetic often have insulin levels some twenty times higher than the norm. The massive amounts of insulin cause blood sugar to drop to an inappropriately low level. The adrenaline the body releases to correct the blood-sugar level when it has fallen too low also produces many of those symptoms.

· Blood sugar/insulin difficulties become aggravated over the years. When the insulin response exceeds normal levelˉup to 20 units fasting; 100 units one hour after astandard glucose load for a GTT; and 60 units two hours later (thc thresholds we use at my clinical practice): it may be called hyperinsulinism. When obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides and unstable blood sugar are found, we can be certain that hyperinsu 'lmism is the common denominator.

Ralph deFronzo, MD, one of the nation's leading diabetic specialists, removes the confusion that leads:to a delayed diagnosis by pointing out that there are five stages of diabetes. The first three stages precede the actual diagnosis of the Hiness. That is because conventional medicine does not routinely recommend the GIT with insulin levels, so people at risk are rarely found in the early stages of the disease. I truly believe that early diagnosis could bring the diabetes epidemic to a screeching halt, so much so that I fully intend my next project to be a definitive book on how we can do just that, and, as a result, eliminate diabetes.

The stages are:

Stage lmInsulin Resistance OR) only.

stage 2—IR, plus hyperinsulinism (HO.

Stage 3—IR, HI, plus abnormalities in a GIT.

Stage 4—Type II diabetes, with high insulin levels.

Stage 5—Type H diabetes, with low insulin levels.

The road to diabetes isa continuum, with no sharp curves and no steep ascents. You just keep trudging along until you get there. You take the hi·ydrnte Unil, and you may, after many years of unstable blood sugar and excessive insulin release that you are not even aware of, finally arrive at that unpleasant destination. Since insulin is the body's premier fat creator, most of us will have picked up significant extra pounds along the journey.

Then, after you actually become diabetic, your blood-sugar level ceases to oscillate; it is now consistently high. Massive insulin resistance has been preventing insulin from effectively doing its job (Stage 4), or your pancreas will have exhausted itself after years of overproduction and will not be able to make enough insulin (Stage 5). Either way, you've waited a little too long to make the diabetes go away, but not too long to achieve a useful level of control.

This means that if you have not dealt with pre-diabetes, you are now in full-blown diabetes. You're in trouble! Blood sugar that cannot be transported by insulin into your cells (and liver) now spills over into your urine, wasting vital energy (Stage 4). Once your insulin has been reduced to impotence (Stage 5) you start losing weight inexplicably. Heavy urination leads to constant thirst. Your body bums anything it can find to fuel its daily operations, putting you in a state of ketoacidosis. You now know that something is very wrong. I took you through this scenario so you could attend to the early warnings long before you hit this juncture. To do that effectively, you need to know where you stand in the range of risk. A competent physician should be able to help you, but it is up to you to determine whether your doctor fits that definition.

An Important Test

You must remember how vigorously I encouraged you in Chapter 10 to have a GTT with insulin levels. This test demonstrates how your body reacts to receiving a fixed dose of glucose, the substance most readily convertible to blood sugar. Obviously, if your metabolism has been deal. ing with any of the assaults I've just described, the signs of such metabolic malfunction will be clearly evident on a GTT with insulin levels. I advocate that everyone take this test. However, if you arc overweight, have diabetes in your family tree, have high blood pressure or high triglycerides, or have symptoms that appear when you are hungry and clear up when you eat, I must insist that you get a GTT.

Be sure to get a five-hour GTT with insulin levels. Here is what will happen: Blood will be drawn So that both your glucose and insulin levels can be determined. After an overnight fast (with no food in your system for twelve hours) the first blood will be drawn so that your fasting levels, or baseline glucose and baseline insulin, can be determined. You will then swallow the glucose solution, and the practitioner will plot out the schedule for drawing your blood over the next few hours. Blood will be drawn thirty minutes after you drink the glucose, again at sixty minutes and so on during the remainder of the test. Your glucose level is checked each time blood is drawn. Your insulin level is checked at the one-hour and two-bour marks only, because insulin levels peak within two hours after you drink the glucose solution.

How to Understand the Readings of a Glucose-Tolerance Test

Depending on your glucose level at baseline, you fall into one of three categories:

Range Category

70.109 mg% Normal

110-125. mg% ImpeJrod Glucose

126 rog% or higher Diabetes

Beyond your baseline level of glucose, note that your peak glucose level measured within the first two hours alter drinking the glucose solution should not exceed 160 rog%, and your nadir glucose (after two to four hours) should be between 60-90 mg%. The delta (the difference between the lowest and highest reading) should be 30-8O mg%.

If the delta is higher than 80 points and you are over-weight, you most probably have hyperinsulinism. If the delta exceeds 100 points, the probability is very strong. If it exceeds 125 points, you unquestionably have hyperinsulinism.

The first number, your tastier baselineˉglucose level, is a standard criterion for determining if you have diabetes. The ADA now regards 126 mg% as the number at which diabetes should be diagnosed, and considers 110 to 125 as a measure of impaired glucose tolerance (Stage 3), One to two hours after you drink the glucose solution, the highest normal reading is 160 rog%. Between 160 mg% and 200 mg% shows a clear indication of the progression to diabtes, and anything higher than 200 rog% indicatas certain diabetes.

What Do Your Results Mean?

You add the first four glucose readings (at fasting, thirty-minute, one-hour and two-hour intervals) of your GTT together. This is called your glucose-tolerance sum. If the total (in mg%) is below 500, you are normal. If the total (in mg%) is above 800, you are considered diabetic.

The Tine gray area, between 500 and 800 mgm, is called impaired glucose tolerance, and nearly half of the significandy obese fall into that area. The closer Your total approaches the 800 rog% mark, the more probable it is that you wiU eventually be classified as a true Type Il diabetic. But there is still some good news for you: Even if you are well into the diabetic range and are heavy, normalizing your weight by permanenfiy controlling your carbohydrate intake can get you within—and keep you in. the normal range for life.

Clearly these lab results could show you whether you have diabetes, but more likely they will show whether you're on the road toward it. If you have a pre-diabetic finding aM especially a weight problem, you have an urgent reason to follow a controlled carb eating plan in other words, to do Atkins—with diligence.

What Is the Nutritional Answer to Diabetes?

Earlier in this chapter I pointed out that I have yet to see a study that showed that a high carbohydrate level in a diet is more helpful to diabetics than is Atkins. But I didn't tell you why. Even though the controlled carbohydrate approach was the standard diabetic therapy until 1950, the ADA abandoned it without ever doing a single test comparing it with a controlled carbohydrate eating plan that followed the Atkins approach.

Most studies that have been conducted were done with diets too high in carbohydrates to be consistent with the controlled carbohydrate approach that is Atkins.

Here is a small sample of the research done over the last seven or eight years. In the mid-1990s, researchers began to compare the effects of high monounsaturated-fat diets with the effects of high-carbohydrate diets in diabetic patients. A study by Dr. Abhimanyu Garg at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center showed that compared with the high-fat diet, the high-carbohydrate diet increased risk factors for heart disease—in the form of triglyceride levels and VLDL (very-low density lipoprotein) cholesterol levels—by twenty-four and twenty-three percent respectively. The high-carb diet also increased glucose and insulin levels by ten and twelve percent. The numbers are less impressive than we usually see in our clinical practice because, in the high-fat diet studied, the level of carbohydrate consumed wasn't low enough to trigger lipolysis.

In a somewhat similar Australian study, researchers noted that "the currently recommended high-earbohydrate, low-fat diet" produces unfavorable effects on both glucose levels and cholesterol levels in people with mild and severe cases of diabetes. By 1996, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York were testing a high-ketogenic, very low-calorie diet in comparison with a low-ketogenic, very low-calorie diet for diabetics. The high-ketogenic diet turned out to be considerably more effective in controlling blood-sugar levels?

All these studies indicate the superiority of almost any form of carbohydrate control over regimens comprising up to fifty-five percent carbohydrate foods. In Chapter 27, I'm going to show you in detail how formidable the evidence has become to indicate that the control of carbohydrates is not only heart-safe but also heart-protective. This is crucial to the diabetes question, for diabetes is a major risk factor for heart disease. Indeed, it's fair to say that if you have diabetes, you may also have heart disease. The damage done to the cardiovascular system by high insulin levels over decades is tremendous. Combine that damage with the health problems of being overweight and having high blood pressure, and you have what has become a new buzzword in medicine: Syndrome X. Turn to Chapter 27 for a thorough discussion.

The study closest to evaluating the effects of a controlled carbohydrate approach such as Atkins to diabetes control was done at Sansum Medical Research Foundation. There, diabetic subjects were put on a dietary regimen that courained only twenty-five percent ear,hydrate for eight weeks. They were then switched to a regimen that contained fifty-five percent carbohydrate for another eight weeks. On the controlled carbohydrate segment, the subjects' glucose values improved, their diastolic blood pressure went down and they lost weight. When they were placed on the high carbohydrate segment, one of the indicators for diabetes worse and none of the improvements seen on the controlled carbohydrate segment ocon-red.

· Appropriate research in which the level of carbohydrate intake results in lipolysis, as compared to a higher intake Of carbohydrates, is finally in progress (although not yet published). When these studies are published, the evidence that the standard dietary approach to diabetes should be changed will undoubtedly be compelling. The fact that by control. ling carbohydrate intake one controls glucose and insulin is hardly surprising. When you add to this the fact that a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach is outstandingly effective at decreasing the risk factors for heart disease, the medical world needs only to exert common sense and a little courageto overturn the standard clinical approach that has been so harmful to so many people for so many decades.

Can the Course of Diabetes Be Reversed?

If you want to know why I am so certain Sat the comparison testing will prove Atkins to be so effective, it is because in our clinical practice we have treated over five'thousand Type II diabetics. Of those taking insulin-stimulating drugs (sulfonylurea) we were able to get the vast majority off those drugs. And of Type.II diabetics taking insulin, more than half were able to cease their injections. Here is one of thousands of exciting case histories.

Janet Drake credits doing Atkins With saving her life and her leg. Only 47 years old, she had been diabetic for seventeen years. When she got a buster on one toe, it turned into ceHulitis, with a red line extending up her leg to her knee. One of the doctors at the hospital where she then worked as a nurse warned herthat she might have to have the toe or the whole leg amputated if she didn't get her blood sugar down fast Janet knew that her glucose level was 290, far too high despite the fact that she gave herself insulin injections two or three times a day and had been prescribed both Glucophage rand Glyburide, oral medications that help condiabetes.

The next day she went to see her eye doctor because she hsd been having headaches. He told her about an earlier edition of this book. Janet went directly to the mall, bought the book, came home, put her foot in a tub of Epsom salts and water and started to read.

"I started doing Atkins that day at lunch," she recalls. "By Friday my foot was healed, my headaches were gone and my blood sugar was down to 190. I dropped 16 pounds by the end of the second week. A week later my blood-sugar level was consistently 150 and my doctor took me off insulin. When I had lost 30 pounds, I was able to stop the oral medications as well."

Janet's numbers tell the whole story. Before doing Atkins, her blood pressure was a frightening 180/90. it now stands at 110/70. Her glucose level of 290 is now 114-well within the normal range. Her total cholesterol has gone down 30 points to 180. Her HDL (good cholesterol) is up 6 points. Her triglyceridos sure now normal. Her weight has fallen by 49 pounde. Janet has gone from being a diabetic woman who was probably entering the final decade of her fife to being a tit and healthy woman who recently started her own wellness center to counsel people-particularly diabetics-about nutrition and its role in health. Many of her patients are sent to her by doctors who were as impressed by her experience as she was.

The Atkins Nutritional Approach is not only the most effective treatment for diabetes curently available in the United States, but it is also a certain way to put an end tO the epidemic nature of the illness. Modesty may notbe my strong suit, but I would be a traitor to mankind if I said anything else.

Nutrients for Correcting Imbalance

Doing Atkins is a crucial first step to dealing with glucose/insulin disorders, ranging from unstable blood sugar to full-blown diabetes. There are also many supplements that can assist. First and foremost is chromium, which is an essential part of the ghcose-tolerance factor (GTF). This compound has such a profouad effect on correcting sugar metabolism that I consider it essential for anyone who is overweight. Chromium (both chromium picolinate and chromium polynicotinate are effective forms for the assimiliafion of this mineral) has an added benefit: It helps lower total cholesterol levels and raise HDL (good) cholesterol. The effective dose range of chromium is 200 to 1,000 meg per day. The second most important nutrient for individuals with blood-sugar/insulin imbalances is vanadium. Most research, done with vanadyl sulfate has shown benefits in combating both insulin resistance and lack of insulin. A typical dose range of vanadyl suffate is 30 to 60 mg daily. Vanadyl is one of the very few nutrients flat may place stress on the kidneys, so I always recommend that kidney function be monitored when using it.

The third most important mineral for blood-sugar disturbances is zinc.'s Other minerals probably advantageous for diabetics include magnesium, manganese and selenium.

Vitamins, especially vitamin C and the B complex group, are also important for diabetics and should be a liberal part of the nutritional supplement plan. Other promising nutrients are Co-enzyme Q, alpha lipoic acid and the essential fatty acids GLA and EPA (fish oil). To learn more about these and other diabetic control supplements,, you may refer to Dr. Atkins' Vita-Nutrient Solution.

As for the pharmaceutical approach, I have long opposedthe unrestricted use of drugs such as insulin and the insulinmimicking sulfonylurea type of oral anti-diabetes medications. Since the majority of Type Ⅱ diabetics produce too much insulin, those drugs simply make matters worse. It is necessary to gradually lower the insulinlike medication dosage beginning the day carbohydrate intake is lowered to prevent abnormally low blood sugar so as to avoid a possible overdosage of the drug.

One currently available drug, however, has special merit, for it works to overcome insulin resistance, and to the extent that it's successful, lowers both blood-sugar and insulin levels. This is mefformin, a pharmaceutical that also has positive effects for weight loss and can improve blood-lipid levels, If you have diabetes, you may want your doctor to consider it.

Prevention First

Of course, the best approach to diabetes is never to get it. The Atkins Nutritional Approach is your best insurance. The food you eat when you do Atkins is surprisingly close to what our primitive ancestors ate. Meat, fish and fowl; nuts, seeds and berries; vegetables and salad greens Mr. and Mrs. Caveman would have recognized most of those things. They certainly wouldn't have known what to make of all those boxes filled with sugar, white flour and salt in the middle aisles of the supermarket—and neither does your bewildered body.

If you have been doing Atkins for several weeks, the symptoms you used to suffer and that you recordS, on your Blood Sugar Symptom Test should be alleviating or disappearing now. Your blood sugar is normalizing and so is your insulin level. Unless you came to this nutritional approach too late, you have escaped diabetes, and momentum in that direction has been halted. In my opinion, you've been darn lucky.

Grim Glycation

In the last twenty years, science has discovered that elevated blood-sugar levels appear to play a significant role in the aging process itself.

Naturally, diabetes provoked these investigations; it is startling how this disease's effects on organs and tissues mimic the effects of aging at an accelerated pace.

Why should high blood sugar damage the skin, the nerves, the eyes, the joints and the arteries?

Part of the answer appears to lie in glucose's propensity, as it floats around in your bloodstream, to attach itself to proteins. That attachment is called glycation (or glycosylation). Scientists at Rockefeller University and other research centers have demonstrated that the process leads to Irreversible cross-links between adjacent protein molecules. Cross-linking significantly contributes to the stiffening and loss of elasticity found in aging tissues.

If you want to know whether your blood sugar ts generally elevated, ask your doctor to order a Hemoglobin Alc' (glycosylated hemoglobin) laboratory blood test for you. It measures your blood-glucose control over a sixto eight-week period.

Dr. Anthony Cerami, ltm pioneer in this field, gave the new' protein structures formed from this chemical collision an appropriate name: Advanced Glycosylalion End-products, or AGEs. Collagen, the flexible connective tissue that holds your skeleton together, is one of the first proteins to be affected. As collagen's flexibility is destroyed, your skin sags and your organs stiffen. And your arteries also take a major hit, which explains in part the connection between diabetes and heart disease. AGEs Mt. ach themselves to LDL (bad) cholesterol, and these LDL molecules then become more oxidated, causing severe damage to any arterial surface to which they become attached.

AGEs am truly a main contributor to aging; therefore, I advise you to keep your blood sugar weU down in the normal range so those glycating sugar molecules don't gaini a foothold on your body.