Here is Part 3! I had the video transcribed below. Let me know if you have any questions!
Hey it is Dr. Spencer Nadolsky here again with part – 3 of how diabetes works and what to do about it especially with the supplement berberine.
Now in part 1 remember we talked about how our tissues the muscle fat became resistant to our insulin so our pancreas had to keep raven raven up to make more insulin to get the nutrients into our cells.
Part 2 we talked about how the pancreas and the liver became dysfunctional and that remember that hormone glucagon was turned on inappropriately and causing our sugar factory the liver to push up more glucose into our blood stream and our glucose would go higher than what we would like.
Now part 3 I want to talk about what is called the incretin effect and this is really interesting. It is called incretin because it is stands for INtestinal seCRETion of INsulin.
I am pretty fascinated in this because scientists found out that if you inject the glucose straight into your blood stream versus if you just drank it (or ingest it somehow ) your insulin would go higher when you drink it. You would think that if you put glucose straight into your blood stream your insulin would go higher but it actually doesn’t. The scientists figured that there has to be something going on with the gut. So let me go over what they found out.
In a healthy individual when you ingest some sort of glucose source (sports drink, pasta, whatever,) the glucose gets into your gut. Now there are some receptors in here that have to do with the incretins (I am specifically talking about GLP 1 – it is called glucagon-like peptide 1 it doesn’t really matter). What this does when the glucose hits the walls it sends out this incretin and that tells the pancreas to make more insulin and decrease that glucagon (remember glucagon turns on the sugar factory liver and insulin helps gets the sugar into your cells). It also decreases the gastric emptying (I said motility I meant emptying) which makes you feel fuller and that is why you lose weight when these things work and you feel more satiated.
Now an insulin resistant person (and/or diabetic) the story a little bit different. When they get the glucose source their incretin effect doesn’t work as well so that means you don’t get that special increase in insulin and you also won’t get that special decrease in glucagon so there is another reason why your sugar factory liver is pushing out more glucose into the blood stream. Just another reason why these poor insulin resistant folks diabetic folks have higher glucoses than normal people.
What can you do about this? We love berberine because it has the effects of insulin sensitivity as well as has effects of increase in this incretin effect. There are other pharmaceuticals drugs out there there are the gliptins (sitagliptin, saxagliptin linagliptin) that actually decrease the breakdown of this incretin effect, which allows more of your natural incretins to be around to help you out with this process. There are also injectables that mimic the effect of this the analogs the GLP analogs and these will help you lose weight and try to keep your blood sugar down without making you go hypoglycemic because the only way the system works is when your glucose in your blood increased from ingested glucose.
Alright I hope you learned something today and remember you’re actually making more insulin when you ingest versus injected okay until next time.
