Obesity, Insulin Resistance And Diabetes

Researchers have known for three decades that many diabetics, particularly those who develop the disease later in life, do not produce too little insulin but, rather, too much. The difficulty faced by these diabetics appears to be that the body doesn’t respond properly to insulin, a condition known as insulin resistance, leading the pancreas to overcompensate by making too much of this hormone.

This syndrome of insulin resistance has been further linked to obesity, hypertension and lipid disorders. Now, some proponents of the high-fat/high-protein diets have used this association to claim that these higher levels of insulin are what cause obesity. They further suggest that elevated insulin is the cause of obesity in the general population, a conclusion that represents a significant distortion of the research data.

We know that about 25% of the general population is genetically predisposed to insulin resistance, probably due to abnormalities in the way their bodies process the hormone. This tendency usually becomes clinically evident when such a person becomes overweight, a condition that dramatically worsens insulin resistance and causes diabetes to appear.

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