A must-read article for everyone who wants to live long and prosperous. :) You should lower your blood sugar, eat a low-carb diet, control your caloric intake, and go check out your genes.
The longest living animals share the following traits:
* Low fasting insulin levels * Reduction in fasting glucose * Lower body temperature * Low percentage of body (visceral) fat * Reduced thyroid levels * Low triglycerides * Low fasting leptin levels
Virtually the same genes appear to regulate the factors that determine longevity in nearly all forms of life, including humans. Caloric-restricted animals may not have been born with the profile of longevity, but their diet enabled them to express the genes that recreate it. In other words, eating less has reprogrammed their genes to extend their lives.
You too can create a favorable genetic environment that is likely to not only extend your life, but help to keep you "disease"-free for as long as possible. You can actually make your body decades younger and turn back the clock to a time when you weren't weighed down with all that extra fat, or when you didn't have diabetes or heart disease... and you don't have to live in a cage on a caloric-restricted diet to do so.
Normally leptin is secreted acutely in response to a meal or chronically in response to increasing fat stores. In a leptin-sensitive individual, leptin will reduce hunger, increase fat burning, and reduce fat storage. However, when one is leptin-resistant, as indicated by an elevation in fasting serum leptin, the part of leptin's message that would normally reduce hunger and fat stores, and increase fat burning does not get through to the brain (mimicking low leptin), so one stays hungry and stores more fat rather than burning it. However the message to increase sympathetic nervous system activity gets through all too loudly and clearly, so one stays hungry, continues to get fat, and gets elevated sugar, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, heart disease, and accelerated aging.
A strategic diet that emphasizes good fats and avoids blood sugar spikes coupled with targeted supplements (as recommended in my Rosedale Diet), will enhance insulin and leptin sensitivity so that you can once again hear their music, allowing your life to be the symphony it was meant to be.
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." -- Bertrand Russell
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
-- Thomas Edison (Harper's Magazine, 1890)
A woman's romance with motherhood, green living, finance, and this heady thing called life.
