Hello Health Champions. This video, the top 10 signs and symptoms of pre-diabetes, may be the most important video you will ever watch because pre-diabetes is the single greatest hidden health threat in the world today. Pre-diabetes also known as insulin resistance affect about 88 million people in the us today and even though the us is sort of the worst in the world so far, the rest of the world is catching up rather quickly.
And the thing we have to understand about insulin resistance is that it's not a condition that you either have it or you don't it's a gradient it's a question of where are you on the scale and the scale we're going to use here is hemoglobin a1c so what is that it's a really good measure of your average glucose because when you have blood sugar which everyone does some of that sugar gets stuck to the red blood cells and the red blood cells live for about three to four months and therefore if we measure how much sugar gets stuck it's a really good indicator of your blood sugar over a three to four month period and normal a1c is going to be somewhere around five so on the official criteria anything less than 5. 7 is normal then if you're over 5. 7 but below 6.
5 then you're considered pre-diabetic and anybody over 6. 5 is a type 2 diabetic and in the u. s today as i said we have 88 million people in the pre-diabetic range we have 35 million people with full-blown type 2 diabetes but here's why they call it pre-diabetes because around 75 of the pre-diabetics will get type 2 diabetes statistically not everybody but most people will get it and they typically will develop this somewhere around a five-year period so that means the diabetic epidemic that we've seen is just the tip of the iceberg because 75 percent of these 88 million people that's 66 million more so in just a matter of time we'll probably have a hundred million type two diabetics but if we don't just wait until we are pre-diabetic if we understand that there's a problem a little bit sooner than that and we understand that an optimal a1c is up to about 5.
3 then we realize that there's probably somewhere around 75 million people and this is my guesstimate there are no real numbers that I've been able to find but just based on what I've seen based on a lot of blood tests we probably have about 75 million optimal people have a normal and a good glucose tolerance and glucose handling so that means that there's people a lot of people between 5. 3 and 5. 7 and that would make up about 150 million people who are slipping and they're part of this massive momentum of eating the standard American diet of eating processed foods lots of sugar lots of white flour and that means that they are also moving they're slipping so unless they change then these people are just younger and they haven't abused their bodies long enough and if only about 75 million people are normal or optimal that means almost 300 million people in the U.
S. have some degree of a glucose handling problem and that means almost everyone that you know is affected by this that's why it's so important to understand these things the most common way they diagnose pre-diabetes is when blood sugar is higher than normal but not as high as a diabetic and that means that they measure and the glucose is between 100 and 125 milligrams per deciliter and if we measure the a1c we just talked about it's between 5. 7 and 6.
5 even though they estimate 88 million people have this they fall in this range ninety percent of them don't know it and why is it that they don't know it it's because we focus on blood sugar we measure blood sugar but blood sugar is something the body works very very hard at keeping in a very narrow range because it's super important for energy for focus for the brain to keep it at a constant level so we have multiple systems in the body that's going to raise it when it's low and lower it when it's high so if we measure something that is tightly controlled we're only going to see changes when the system has gone so far it completely failed and that's why when we measure blood sugar we'll see it be the same year after year after year no your normal no your normal come back next year no you don't have it yet come back next year so 10 years 15 years into it we basically won't see much difference but the way the body keeps it down is with insulin so if we measured insulin we would see how hard is the body working at keeping it down that's a true measure of insulin resistance so in the beginning we might see a pretty balanced relationship between glucose and insulin but a few years later we might see two to three times as much insulin but the same glucose the body is working twice as hard keeping it down so if we only measure glucose we miss it nine years later 12 years later 15 years later and I'm not exaggerating these numbers that a normal level of insulin is about three to four maybe five but by the time we get to diabetic we're at 25 and glucose changes very very very slowly like i said only when the system fails are we going to see a change whereas if we watch the insulin instead we will see almost a linear change so we would know where we are on that scale and if we look at the official criteria for insulin we see that it's a very wide range it's almost a tenfold difference normal is considered 2. 6 all the way up to 25 whereas glucose has a very very tight range and if we measured it then we would tell much much earlier where we are so sign number two of insulin resistance which really should be number one but it's very rare that they measure it is elevated fasting insulin sign and symptom number three is fatigue and this is especially if you have fatigue after a meal that's a sign of insulin resistance so when you eat food then the purpose of that food is to be turned into energy and this shouldn't take a whole lot of effort for the body it does require resources and after a big meal you often feel kind of relaxed a little tired but you shouldn't have like a fatigue that interferes with what you're doing and if you do get severe fatigue then it means that your carbohydrate machine is broken you have a system to process carbohydrates but if you have overwhelmed it over time now it's not really working anymore so now you ate carbohydrates but the cells are resisting because you've given them too much carbohydrate over too long a time and they're resisting that's insulin resistance so now instead of the food providing energy you have to use energy to dispose of the carbs because they can't stay in the bloodstream that's dangerous for the brain we have to control this blood sugar so the body has to use energy to convert the glucose into triglycerides and this is why triglycerides or blood fats will get high when you eat glucose so a lot of people on a low fat diet will have very very high blood fats because of this process sign number four is poor wound healing when you get a cut and it just kind of sticks around for for weeks and also number five numbness and tingling which is because of peripheral neuropathy and i group these together because they are essentially the same cause poor circulation and why do you get poor circulation because the excess glucose when you have a constant level of too much glucose some of that kind of leaks out into the tissues the surrounding tissues and it's going to bind a little extra water so we get swelling in the tissues and this prevents that blood circulation from functioning optimally and in the early stages you might find that things just happen a little bit slower and you feel a little funny and if this process continues uncontrolled then eventually in type 2 diabetes it could lead to amputation type 2 diabetes is the number one cause of amputations and you're not going to get amputations in pre-diabetes but that's why it's so important to understand the process and change it early number six is kidney damage and there's something called micro vessel disease which is related to the circulatory issues we just talked about and the kidney has an incredibly large number of tiny tiny blood vessels and if we get swelling then we also get some leaking and some destruction of those blood vessels and if we recognize the early signs we can reverse it but if it goes unchecked then we will probably at some point see kidney failures and type 2 diabetes is the number one cause of kidney failure leading to dialysis site number seven is blurred vision and this happens because of retinopathy disease of the retina which is the sensitive light detecting area in the back of the eye now i saw a video with millions of views it was one of those animated things with a computerized voice that said that retinopathy is swelling of the lens which of course is incorrect because the lens is up in the front of the eye and the retina is in the back so just like in the kidney it's a case of micro vessel disease you have tiny tiny blood vessels and when these blood vessels swell then we have damage to the retina and if this goes far enough it can result in vision loss you start with blurred vision then eventually you could have vision loss and again type 2 diabetes is the number one cause of blindness so you want to stop it long before that another thing we hear about very often is frequent urination and that is not a problem typically with pre-diabetes because pre-diabetes is when your blood sugar is 100-125 and there's something called a kidney or renal threshold if the blood sugar gets above 180 now there's too much sugar in the blood for the kidneys to resorb that so you filter it out with the water and then the kidneys reabsorb it but it has to get pretty high the diabetes has to be completely out of control before we start spilling sugar in the urine and losing water and getting very thirsty so that's a sign of a full-blown really poorly controlled type 2 diabetes another thing we often see claimed related to pre-diabetes is digestive issues and while you can have that it's not a causal factor it's an association the insulin resistance is not causing the digestive issues it is probably because you have dysbiosis you are screwing up your bacterial flora by feeding them the wrong foods when you have an unbalanced flora and now you keep feeding them carbs now you get bloating and digestive issues so yes you can have it but it's not the cause of the pre-diabetes number eight is joint pain and arthritis and while this does happen it's not for the reasons we think typically what I hear people say is I've had hundreds of people come into the office and they say I know my knees are hurting my back is hurting because of my weight if I just lost some weight I know I wouldn't have that pain and that is not how it works we've heard it so many times that we think that the weight causes the pain that there's a direct relationship there but that's not true instead insulin resistance causes inflammation and this inflammation causes the joint pain and the arthritis because whether it's osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis it's an inflammatory condition the osteoarthritis is a much milder form of inflammation but it's still inflammation and then of course insulin resistance also causes weight gain so that's number nine is weight gain we know this because that's the purpose of insulin insulin lowers blood glucose it guides that glucose into the cell where a tiny bit can be stored as carbohydrate and most of it gets stored as fat that's the purpose and we can watch this relationship this causal relationship by giving people extra insulin and watch them gain weight and this is what happens in the treatment of type 2 diabetes they're not treating the diabetes they're treating the blood glucose making the diabetes worse and making the weight worse and sign and symptom number 10 is hunger so even though you're gaining weight even though you're having more and more energy reserves on your body in the form of fat you're getting hungrier and hungrier because when you're insulin resistant your body has a tendency to store rather than retrieve so even though you have all that energy you can't get to it your body is in storage mode you're gaining weight but you're getting hungrier so you're gaining weight but you're getting hungrier and on and on and this is the real problem this is why we can't control our behavior that's why it's not about calories it's about insulin and insulin resistance but there's two more things that we have to realize is that you don't necessarily gain weight when you become insulin resistance because a lot of it has to do with the liver and a lot of people even thin people they might have a tiny little bit of a pot belly usually but you can become pre-diabetic and type 2 diabetic with a normal body weight and the other thing to understand is that this is the biggest health problem that we have but it's not the only problem so if you're watching this don't automatically think that all of what's going on with you is insulin resistance it is 80 or so of the problem for most people but it's not the only problem. 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