The Historical Big Picture of Blood Sugar Issues and Where We Went Wrong

Diabetes is officially the 8th leading cause of death in the US, behind Cardiovascular disease, cancer, medical errors, respiratory disease, accidents, strokes (really another form of cardiovascular disease), and Alzheimer’s disease.  What these data about causes of death don’t show, however, is that Diabetes if the most expensive illness one can have over the course of their lifetime.

This is the big picture of the next few blogs I am producing. This first blog on this subject I’m going to focus on the basic definitions you need to know, and try to set the stage historically. 

Big Picture of Macronutrients

When we eat food, we are primarily consuming Macronutrients, macro meaning “large”; we need large quantities of Proteins, Carbohydrates, and Fats.  In a perfect world, these macronutrients we consume would also contain sufficient levels of Micronutrients.  Micro meaning “small” of course.  Micronutrients are vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids, and probiotics.  

Sadly, that perfect world of food quality doesn’t really exist any more.  If began disappearing about 100 years ago after about 50 years of abusive and erroneous farming practices were followed by a 10 year drought, during which most of the rich topsoils of the farming regions of our country blew away and are now mostly on the bottom of the oceans.  There was even one study that found soils from Kansas and Nebraska on the steps of the Capital building in Washington DC. 

How does this history affect our blood sugar problems of today?

When the drought finally ended and we were able to grow food again, the soils were depleted of nutrients, and food production was low.  Researchers figured out that there were three nutrients that make plants grow bigger: Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus, and these have become the basis for modern chemical fertilizers.  Unfortunately, while the crops may have grown larger, they were still deficient on other nutrients that we need to be healthy, and that the plants themselves needed to be healthy.  This mean plants were prone to infections molds and other illnesses, as well as insect pests.  The answer, more chemicals, bug killers, mold killers and weed killers, primarily.

For almost a century now, Americans have been eating food that doesn’t contain enough minerals or vitamins for our optimal health, and the result is gradually, or quickly, increasing rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.  All of these have nutritional deficiencies as one of the primary causes. 

When we eat foods, proteins begin digestion in the stomach, as our stomach acid activates the enzyme pepsin and starts breaking down the chains of amino acids that form protein.  In the upper small intestine protein digestion continues with help from the pancreas, and the amino acids are absorbed into our blood stream and circulated to organs such as the liver or muscles that need proteins for structures or energy.

Fats begin their digestion in the upper small intestine when bile is released by the gallbladder to break big fat globules into small fat globules, then additional enzymes from the pancreas break theses down into individual molecules which are then absorbed into the lymphatic system.  This leads the newly digested fats straight to the heart, which is our body organ that requires the most energy, as it must continue functioning 24/7 for our entire lifetimes.  Fat is the most energy dense of the three macronutrients.

Carbohydrates.

This brings us to carbohydrates.  These are primarily sugars and starches.  For humans living “in the wild”, these are relatively rare.  They occur in whole grains, root crops, and ripe fruits and berries.  All of these foods in their natural state contain a wealth of nutrients – vitamins, minerals, etc. – and only occur and small times of the year.  Grains and root crops were typically harvested in the fall and were a source of food during cold winters.  Ripe fruits were around only a few weeks and are laden with not only vitamins and minerals, but factors such as flavonoids or carotenoids that are anti-oxidant and provide many other health benefits.

When we eat these foods grown in mineral rich soils, we are getting all the nutrients we need to digest and absorb the food and utilize all its beneficial properties.

Since the mid 20th century, however, we’ve stopped eating these foods in their natural state, and moved more toward heavily processed foods devoid of nutrition.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the result of this change has been and epidemic of these chronic diseases.

This information about the history of our food supply and how it is affecting our current health is something I discuss in depth in my book “Heal Your Life, Heal the World”.  If you would like to learn more, please click the link below.

Please subscribe to my blog, and I hope to have you coming back on the next episode in this Blood Sugar Series where I discuss the origin of insulin resistance.