Let’s first hear from 3 brilliant doctors about what Metabolic Syndrome is….
Dr Aseem Malhotra
Let me explain what metabolic syndrome is. First, two-thirds of people now having heart attacks have metabolic syndrome. You have metabolic syndrome if you have any three of the following five. High blood pressure, pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, high blood triglycerides, low HDL and increased waist circumference. So think about those, metabolic being the biggest issue with heart disease, how quick can you reverse these risk factors? Within weeks, within 21 days. If you have got metabolic syndrome, you can get out of the definition of having metabolic syndrome within a few weeks of changing your lifestyle. Metabolic syndrome is a disease of modern civilisation. It’s a cluster of risk factors, and I think there is very good evidence to say that it’s not just about heart disease, but it’s about cancer and dementia as well.
Professor Tim Noakes
Dr Gerald Reaven, now emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford University, has spent the past 60 years studying the condition that intellectually he now owns, insulin resistance. His greatest contribution was to suggest that insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia (excess levels of insulin circulating in the blood) are the necessary biological precursors for at least four, but perhaps for all eight of the most prevalent chronic medical conditions of our day. The very eight that will bankrupt our medical services within the next two decades, unless we understand the crucial importance of his work and act without delay.
The eight conditions most likely caused by high-carbohydrate diets in those with insulin resistance are:
- Obesity
- Arterial disease
- Heart attack or stroke
- Disseminated type 2 diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)
- Cancer
- Dementia (Alzheimer’s disease, also known as type 3 diabetes)
Reaven’s metabolic syndrome refers to the combination of obesity, diabetes, abnormal blood lipid levels and high blood pressure existing in the same individual. It is this singular combination that best predicts heart attack risk. The key finding from Reaven’s work is that these conditions are not separate; they are different expressions of the same underlying condition. So, patients should not be labelled as having high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes or NAFLD instead, they should be diagnosed
with the underlying condition, insulin resistance, with the understanding that high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, NAFLD, heart attack, stroke, perhaps even cancer or dementia, are simply markers, symptoms if you will, of the basic condition. And that basic condition is insulin resistance, which, simply put, is the inability of the body to tolerate more than an absolute minimum amount of carbohydrates each day.
Dr Robert Lustig
Metabolic syndrome is the constellation of diseases that travel with obesity. Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease; turns out this is now 75% of all healthcare costs, in both the US and the UK. So, people thought this was about obesity, turns out it is not about obesity. It is true that obesity travels with these diseases. I don’t argue that. It is true that obesity is a risk factor for these diseases, but normal-weight people get all of these diseases as well. In fact, clinical depression causes weight loss but causes these diseases. Through the same mechanism, not just subcutaneous (just under the skin) fat you can see, it turns out to be the fat you can’t see. It’s the fat in your organs and the fat in your liver. And there are ways you get it. It turns out that sugar is the most potent way of getting fat in your liver, which in turn drives all of these diseases. And now we have demonstrated the mechanism. We even have the molecule, the intermediate, by which sugar is metabolised which causes all of these diseases. It is called methylglyoxal, it is an intermediary metabolite of the sugar fructose, and it poisons the liver cell, and in the process drives all of these chronic metabolic diseases.
At Health results, we believe the root cause of nearly all illnesses in our modern society, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis (MS), depression, asthma, obesity, heart disease, cancer, bipolar disorder, gout, high blood pressure, migraines, ADHD and many more, are mostly caused by metabolic syndrome. The numberone driver of metabolic syndrome is a poor diet.
In addition, but to a lesser extent, there are six more common causes:
- The poor state of our gut’s microbiome
- Toxins (not just eaten but absorbed through the skin or inhaled)
- Lack of fasting
- Sedentary or incorrect exercise
- Stress and lack of sleep
- Lack of sunshine
All seven of these are because we no longer live our lives in the way us Homo Sapiens have been programmed. We are no longer staying true to our primal design.
We believe we should not submit to illness. Some say that most of the modern diseases that finish us off are because we are simply living longer (even the fact that we are living longer is not true). Others say ‘we have to die of something’ and while, of course, they are right, wouldn’t you rather, just like the centennials in places such as Ikaria and Okinawa, die just of old age?
