Jan18 wrote:I've never been told my blood sugars were an issue or that I had insulin resistance.
Not to scare you, but most of us are not told we have blood sugar/insulin issues until it is far progressed. If you do an advanced search on Dr Joseph Kraft in these forums, he’s been discussed many times. Long story short, he found that 80% of subjects who would be classified as “normal” under fasting glucose tests are not normal in their insulin response. Most doctors are even ignorant of this. As a result many people are “flying under the radar” thinking they're just fine and healthy when, if they continue with their diet and sedentary lifestyle, significant health concerns are inevitably in their future.
(Warning: Soapbox alert) I’m guessing this is because there’s no drug to prescribe for a problem that is waiting to happen and most folks dismiss their doctor telling them to modify their diet/lifestyle when they don't understand the problem and feel fine. Excuse my cynicism because I know there are good doctors out there, but it does seem that if drugs or surgery can’t be prescribed, there is no health issue in the eyes of modern medicine.
Given the ramifications we face, knowledgeable ApoE4s are very sensitive to the fact that we can't wait until there is a problem, especially with Alzheimer's, there is no drug that can be prescribed. I commend you for working with a functional doctor, I hope you two forge a true partnership to uncover the roots of any issues impeding your optimal health. (Okay, stepping off my soapbox.)
Back to why we should be concerned with blood sugar/insulin issues. This past February I heard a presentation by Dr Ted Naiman on Insulin Resistance, it’s available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd8QFD5Ht18. In the presentation he talked about how deaths can be placed in 5 categories. 30% of the deaths fall into 4 categories: toxic, kinetic, microbial, and genetic.
70% of the deaths fall into the 5th category, chronic disease. The three big hitters in the chronic disease category are: cardiovascular, cancer, and chronic neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Underpinning chronic disease is insulin resistance!
Jan18 wrote:I just wondered if you can isolate specific items in the diet if your inflammation markers are high.
Doctor Gundry uses adiponectin and TNF-alpha for lectin sensitivity. Adiponectin is a good marker indicating yes/no there is a sensitivity, but not necessarily the level of sensitivity, that’s where the inflammation marker TNF-alpha comes in. When he sees high adiponectin in his patients, he takes away major sources of lectins, their TNF-alphas dip to normal, and their adiponectin stays high. But the adiponectin lectin indicator can be “masked” by obesity, i.e. the obesity lowers adiponectin, yet the person can still be lectin sensitive. If you’re thin and have low adiponectin and don’t have any of the other inflammatory markers, odds are you’re not lectin sensitive. Here’s his abstract -
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/129 ... pl_1/AP354
So why, as ApoE4s should we care? When he looked at the medical literature, he found the women’s health study that showed skinny women with high adiponectin levels had a very high incidence of dementia.
Jan18 wrote:sourdough might be okay eaten infrequently? Or would you say to swear off ALL wheat products?
It might be okay for you. Plus we can't live our lives feeling continually deprived.
Personally, I stay away from all wheat products. We've found recipes for low-carb, wheat-alternative bread-like products (sounds yummy, huh?
). I hadn’t experienced brain fog, rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, or any of the other common wheat ingestion complaints, nevertheless, I tested lectin sensitive and gluten sensitive. I don’t have the celiac gene, but I react to gluten. I cheated
just a little,
honestly, over the holidays last year and my blood test in early January turned up bright red).
If I wasn’t lectin and gluten sensitive, and I was confident I had a healthy gut biome, I’d still definitely stay away from whole grain wheat products. Do you remember Dr Gundry discussing Wheat Germ Agglutinin in Plant Paradox? He wrote,
Wheat germ agglutinin is an especially small protein compared with other lectins, which are large. So even if the gut mucosal barrier has not been compromised, WGA can pass through the walls of the intestine more easily than other lectins can. But this is just one of the many ill effects caused by consuming WGA. It also: [cherry picked the ones of particular interest to ApoE4s here]
1. Behaves like insulin, disrupting normal endocrine function by pumping sugar into fat cells, where the sugar soon turns to fat, resulting in weight gain and the development of insulin resistance.
6. Crosses the blood-brain barrier, taking with it other substances to which it has bonded, causing neurological problems
8. Causes atherosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries from a buildup of plaque