Western Herbal Medicine and Nutrition by Gabriel MacSharry

Weight Loss

Weight loss is a big area, with high commercial interest and therefore a lot of fad diets and dubious claims. Read on to here the truth

How to loose weight

The bottom line here is eating the right diet for your specific metabolism along with exercise and lifestyle modification. Determining the right diet for your metabolism is complex and really you need to consult with a health professional who can determine your specific metabolic type. There are however certain health aspects that are applicable to all, that can have a profound effect on ones weight if corrected. Weight loss is a big area, with high commercial interest and therefore a lot of fad diets and dubious claims. Its such a big area that ill cover it one step at a time, so keep tuned into this health column in the future. This week ill focus on insulin resistance.

Having high body weight is not the problem, having increased body fat is the problem, in fact having increased muscle mass and a high body weight is actually beneficial. The research is quite clear, when our body fat percentage is too high it leads to a whole cascade of effects that increase our risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, inflammation and virtually every chronic degenerative disease, so there should be a grave focus on helping people get rid of excess body fat.

There is an epidemic of insulin resistance, insulin is an important hormone that not only regulates sugar but when the insulin binds to the receptor sites on our cells it opens up channels that allow not only glucose, but other nutrients to enter that cell. So insulin sensitivity is a very important goal for good health and we can achieve this through a good diet, exercise and the right life style choices. If you don’t have that insulin sensitivity it increases your risk of being overweight and developing type 2 diabetes and suffering all the consequences that this condition creates.

Human biology gives us a propensity towards weight gain. Why? Because nature wants us to survive so nature has built into our physiology a very unique system so that we over consume food when food is plentiful. The more we eat excess of our requirements the more it leads to the dampening of the hormone insulin, which also leads to abdominal fat gain, increased number of fat cells, increased size of abdominal fat cells, and this leads to the secretion of compounds that further dampens the effects of insulin so it’s a way to promote very quick weight gain, a weight gain that’s really designed to help us survive famines, however were not suffering from too many famines theses days in Ireland. So our built-in survival mechanism has become a liability.

The uncontrollable appetite

We know that dieting doesn’t work, deprivation doesn’t work, however a good well thought out, individualized program can work great. In essence what happens when we try to deprive our body form nutrition, is that our brain senses that its starving, so what it does is release very complex compounds that causes us to eat. Our brain requires two key nutrients, Oxygen and Glucose. We have very strong built in mechanisms that ensure adequate supply of these two nutrients to the brain. With this in mind, when one develops insulin resistance, there might me adequate glucose outside the cell but because the cell isn’t responding to insulin, inside the brain cell there is a relative deficiency of glucose, so the brain thinks its starving and it stimulates us to eat foods high in sugar.

If you asked some people to hold there breath, some people could hold there breath longer than others but eventually everyone is going to start breathing at some stage, its impossible to kill yourself by holding your breath, very powerful survival mechanisms will overpower your strong will. So if you go on a diet you further compound the situation, because you can have strong will power but it cant over come these very primordial, very deep-rooted survival mechanisms within the brain that are designed to preserve health, so what happens is people go on a diet and they end up weighing more in the end of the diet that when they started. This can also be associated with other brain problems like anxiety mood swings and depression.

Food Cravings

It’s the relative drop in blood sugar that causes food cravings, anxiety, irritability etc. People can have hypoglycaemia(low blood sugar condition) when their blood sugar is sky high, so it is not the absolute level of blood sugar it’s how quick that blood sugar is dropping, when the blood sugar is dropping rapidly the body compensates by releasing hormones like cortisol which raises not only the blood sugar but also increases the production of fat cells in our abdomen and antagonises insulin and just produces a whole lot of adverse effects on out physiology.

The key is to regulate your blood sugar levels and when you do, you get your appetite under control, you feel better, you sleep better, have more energy and weight normalizes. If you get your blood sugar under control you’ll get your appetite under control and weight loss can become somewhat effortless, and people naturally migrate to eating healthier foods.

Herbal Medicines

A fiber matrix in Ulmus ruba bark, can combine 300 times its weight in water creating a gelatinous mass which slows gastric emptying, and lowers the glycemic impact of food or a meal of up to 70%, meaning that if you have a food that elevates blood sugar rapidly and you ingest Ulmus before ingesting this it can reduce the impact by 30-70%. Again if you control blood sugar, you control appetite, and if you can control appetite then weight loss becomes a lot easier.

There’s a whole slue of gut hormones that have just been discovered recently that play a major roll in regulating appetite. Ulmus can lower the levels of the compounds that tell our brain that we’re hungry, while at the same time raise the level of compounds that tell our brain that were full, so in addition to the mechanical effects of filling people up, it has positive effects on blood sugar levels and insulin sensitivity, it also has this effect on these regulatory hormones that control our appetite. This can also be an effective supplement for type 2 diabetics. It should be taken an hour before or hour after taking medications as it may interfere with the rate at which the drug is absorbed.

Some herbs have a beneficial effect on gut microbes. Changes that will occur in the gut will be beneficial. There was a scientific study in the journal Nature last year where they had a population of skinny rats and a population of fat rats and they took the gut bacteria from the skinny ones and put it into the fat ones and they lost weight. Likewise they took the gut bacteria from the fat ones and put it into the skinny ones and they gained weight. Therefore it could be relevant to determine whether the manipulation of gut microbial communities may result in changes in weight and body mass index. Endo toxins in the gut are the fat compounds from the bacterial wall and these compounds can promote inflammation through out the body, and any time there is chronic inflammation the cells are too busy dealing with the inflammation so they’re less responsive to insulin leading to insulin resistance. Herbal medicines have the ability to bind endotoxins and promote their excretion.

Herbal medicines work very well to balance possible dysfunction in endocrine glands that may also be the cause of weight gian.

Also relevant here is the glycemic index. Eating a low glycemic index diet will have great effects on keeping blood sugar low and hence on suppressing appetite.

In Health

Gabriel

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