[00:00:00] This is episode number 236 of the reversing diabetes with Delane M. D podcast. Welcome to reversing diabetes with Delane, MD, where women who are confused and worried about their type two diabetes come to learn strategies to fix it. I'm your host, Dr. Delane Vaughn. Ladies, if you know you are capable of doing badass things at work and for your family, but you're frustrated with why you can't seem to stop eating the chocolate cake, this podcast is for you. Let's talk.
[00:00:29] Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for taking some time for you and for your health today and for committing to your health. I want to talk about cleaning up your diet today. That's what we're going to go over.
[00:00:44] Insulin resistance and why we have to avoid processed foods is really the topic of the podcast episode today. But before we get started, I have a number of announcements, and I want to give you a warning. If you are medicated for your type two diabetes and you start to make the changes that I recommend in these podcast episodes and specifically in this episode, you're going to need to be very careful as you make those changes. The medications that you are given, that you've been prescribed by your provider have been given to you because of the way you've eaten in the past. And if you change the way you eat in the past, the way you've eaten in the past, if you change it going into the future, you are going to need to change those medications. And if you don't, you're going to end up really sick. So I need to tell you to be very careful for your well being. You can get sick in the kind of way that involves going to the emergency department, getting hospitalized, and even worst case scenario, death. Okay? So this is really important that you take this to heart. I want you, before you start making these changes, to call your primary care provider or whichever provider has given you these medications, these prescriptions, and I want you to call them, and I want you to tell them what you're doing, what you intend to do, how you intend to change your diet, and I want you to get clear on how they want you to share your blood sugars with them and how they intend to share with you the changes they want you to make with your medications. And this is to keep you safe. Okay?
[00:02:18] So I want to make sure you're aware of that. I also want to make sure you are aware of the 14 days to better blood sugar guide that I have developed to help you get better blood sugars. You can download this guide at Delanemd Combetter. Okay, so that's D-E-L-A-N-E-C-O-M-B-E-T-T-E-R. That will get you to the 14 day program. And it's straightforward, it's explained. If you have any problems with it, you don't hesitate to send me an email.
[email protected] this will also get you on my email list, which means you're going to get weekly newsletters with helpful information. You're going to get updates about when I do webinars and when I do training seminars and those sorts of things. So all of that will come to you through that email list. So on that note, as far as webinars go, there is going to be a webinar on Saturday, February 10. A lot of times I'm like, gosh, I wish there was a Saturday webinar. Usually I do the webinars on Thursdays and Wednesdays, but in February I will be doing one on Saturday. And this is going to be a training webinar to help you learn how to avoid pitfalls in food labeling. We're going to discuss some of that here, but certainly on the 10 February, I will be diving deeper into that. Follow me on Instagram. Follow me on Facebook. Watch for announcements there, the registration, the sign up and where you'll get emailed, the zoom link. All of that will be available on my social media at delanemD. So again, Instagram and Facebook at delanemd. As always, if you ever have any questions, don't hesitate to email me.
[email protected] and then lastly, I have a favor to ask. If you could like and rate this podcast. When people like and rate podcasts, those podcasts get put in front of more people. So if you have been finding benefit from the strategies and the techniques and the information that I have been giving you in this podcast, like it and rate the podcast on your podcast player so other people can get these same helpful pieces of information. So if you think about nine out of ten americans have insulin resistance or suffer from metabolic disease, even if they're unaware of it, nine out of ten of us are in that category. Lots of people need to hear that they do not need to be sick for the rest of their life, that they do not need to be tied to a healthcare system that does not create health. So if you rate and like this podcast, if you give a review to this podcast that helps other people get this information to them. All right, so let's talk about cleaning up your diet. Cleaning up your diet is a strategy that I teach my clients for reversing their type two diabetes I would offer to you. It's probably the most powerful and most important of the strategies that I teach. So, before I dive into what I mean by cleaning up your diet, I want to talk about insulin resistance. You have to understand what insulin resistance is. If you've ever heard me describe this in past trainings or webinars or podcasts, I feel that insulin resistance is the hub or the heart or the root cause of many different diseases. If you look at the medical literature out there, insulin resistance is the cause of polycystic ovarian disease. Insulin resistance is the cause of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Insulin resistance is the cause of dementia. Insulin resistance is associated with type two diabetes. Insulin resistance has a main player as a main causative biochemistry or disease process. In dyslipidemia, insulin resistance just impacts many different facets of the human body. And so learning what it means to be insulin resistant and then cleaning up your diet is the most powerful strategy that I teach for fixing insulin resistance. So, how insulin normally functions in the body. So, insulin is produced by the pancreas, and it's produced in response to elevated blood sugar levels, or glucose levels, in the bloodstream. Insulin goes. It's released by the pancreas, and it goes to insulin dependent cells, and it binds with them and allows those cells to open up and bring glucose inside. And that glucose then gets burned off as fuel. Okay, so, putting this all together, right, from mouth to gut or mouth to cell, when you put food in your mouth, your gut breaks it down, and it absorbs that food inside of the body into the bloodstream. When that food is carbohydrates, it absorbs the broken down version of carbohydrates, which is glucose, into the bloodstream. That elevated glucose level in the bloodstream is sensed by your pancreas. Your pancreas is like, oh, there's elevated blood sugar here. We better do something about this. The pancreas then spits out some insulin. The insulin travels in the bloodstream to cells that are insulin dependent cells, cells that use insulin to open up, and that insulin binds on those cells, and that causes those cells to open up and bring that glucose that's in the bloodstream inside of the cell, so the cell can burn that as fuel. Okay, so that is how this works. When insulin resistance occurs, which is what is the root cause of all these diseases that I just listed off, right? When insulin resistance occurs, something starts to block the insulin function. Okay. So these cells that are usually dependent on insulin to bring fuel glucose inside and burn as fuel become resistant, they no longer can utilize the insulin, which means they don't open up, and they don't bring that sugar, that glucose inside of the cell. That allows the cell to not have any fuel, and it allows the glucose outside of the cell to climb quite high, because we're not bringing that glucose inside. Okay. So when the pancreas is releasing insulin into the bloodstream, the cells come into contact with the insulin, but they're resistant to binding to it. They don't bind to the insulin, and that means they don't open up. Okay.
[00:08:44] Various cells have varying degrees of insulin dependency and insulin resistance. And what do I mean by that? I mean there are skin cells and there are gut cells, and there are heart cells, and there are liver cells, and there are kidney cells, and there are many, many other cells. And all of these different cells have different dependence on insulin. And then also, of course, have different insulin resistance because they depend on insulin differently. Okay.
[00:09:14] So there are a few biochemical processes that occur here that cause this insulin resistance. There are a few biochemical processes that are causing this insulin resistance. One is overexposure to insulin, and this is the one that I think is most widely accepted and widely described in the literature.
[00:09:36] So when your cell gets exposed to insulin all the time, those areas that bind the cell get overloaded with insulin, and suddenly there's nowhere else for new insulin to bind to. Okay, that's the, I don't know, a simplified version of what's happening. Okay? So that is primarily what we think of. And if we can stop exposing the cell to insulin, we're not having the overexposure, but instead, we stop exposing the cell to insulin that allows those binding sites to open up, and then the cell becomes responsive again, what we call insulin sensitive. Instead of being insulin resistant, it's now insulin sensitive. So that's the primary cause or thing that we think is causing biochemical process that is happening that causes insulin resistance. Other things that can lead to insulin resistance include other hormones like the stress hormone cortisol or epinephrine. And then also inflammation in the body can cause insulin resistance. So fixing this involves really decreasing the amount of insulin that your cells are exposed to. That's going to be the place you're going to get the most bang for your buck in fixing insulin resistance. There is no amount of.
[00:11:00] I always talk about, we have to manage stress, and we have to do things that keep our stress levels low, so our cortisol and our epinephrine and our norepinephrine will stay in check. Right. We have to manage stress. But what I want you to understand is there is no amount of zenness, there is no amount of levitating meditation that is going to create a biochemical environment that makes eating pop tarts. Okay?
[00:11:27] The biggest bang for your buck is going to be in not eating things that overexpose your cells to insulin. And that's kind of what I want to talk about today. So, carbohydrates are the overwhelming driver of insulin production in the body. Proteins will have an insulin production. It's a moderate insulin response when we eat proteins and then fats typically have a very negligible response. Insulin response when we eat fats. Carbohydrates are the primary culprit for driving high insulin levels.
[00:12:04] So what do we do about that? Cleaning up your diet is a strategy that I teach. So what this really means is that we avoid processed foods and that improves the insulin resistance. And everybody asks me, but wait, how does that work? Why does processed food cause me to make too much insulin? Why does processed food the main driver. Why are you delaying telling me that processed food is the main driver of my insulin resistance? Why do I need to cut it out of my life? Why isn't a little bit. Okay, why is this the problem? So, processing food typically concentrates the carbohydrate component of a natural food. When we take strawberries and we process it into strawberry jam or fruit roll ups or even dried fruit, dried strawberries, which does not sound appealing to me at all, but if we did that, that processing aspect, that element of processing, that procedure that we do, to, quote unquote, process food, that's cooking food, that's pulverizing food, that's combining foods with other foods. Right? That processing of food concentrates the carbohydrate component that the food had in its natural state. So you have a natural strawberry, and then you heat it up. That heating is a processing step, and it concentrates the carbohydrates. And you might ask, but how? Like, what are they doing to concentrate that carbohydrate when we heat foods from its natural vegetables or fruits, either ones, when we heat them, what that does is it breaks down. It breaks the bonding between the carbohydrate and the fiber component of the food. Okay, so strawberries, in their natural state, the carbohydrates, like off the vine, the carbohydrate, the sweetness, the sugars, the fructose that's in the strawberry is bound with fiber, cellulose and all sorts, pectins and all sorts of other things. It's bound chemically to that fiber. And what that does is when you go to eat the food and you get it into your gut, remember, and we're absorbing then the nutrients across the gut membrane, the fiber slows the absorption of the glucose, so it becomes slower. You don't get such an intense spike. It also causes your stomach and your gut to feel food full. Fiber causes your stomach and your gut to feel full, okay? So you eat less of it, and it absorbs more slowly. That's what happens with food in its natural state. That's what happens with strawberries in their natural state. When we heat that up, we break that bond between the carbohydrate and the fiber. And typically, the heat dissolves or breaks down or melts is not really the right word, but it breaks down the fiber component. So now you don't even have the fiber that makes you feel full and also slows the absorption of the carbohydrate. And instead, what you have done is you've just left the carbohydrate there, concentrated that carbohydrate, and now you have this huge surge of glucose that's absorbed into your gut, which is met with a huge surge of insulin. And remember that insulin on the cellular level is causing insulin resistance, especially when we consume this all day long. Okay? So when we think about processing food from its natural environment to a processed food situation, that's what we're talking about. Another great example of this is carrots, right? If you eat raw carrots versus cooked carrots, cooked carrots are not only softer, they are sweeter than raw carrots. And the reason this is, is because we have dissolved or melted or heated the fiber component to where it's gone. And all that we have is the sweet carbohydrate component, the sugar component of that food.
[00:16:13] So that's natural food that you can think of. Like, everybody can envision a carrot, everybody can envision a strawberry. We can envision wheat, a stalk of wheat that we would see growing in a wheat field. I live in Kansas, so I'm very familiar with wheat fields, right? With fields of food.
[00:16:35] That wheat that we see growing in the field is not the same as the wheat that we consume in a whole wheat bread. Again, we take that whole, that natural food full of fiber and nutrients and micronutrients and vitamins and minerals and all of these things we take that whole food, and we pulverize it into a flour, removing all of the fiber, removing all of the vitamins, all of the minerals, all of these micronutrients, and all we have left is the carbohydrate component. Okay? We concentrate the carbohydrate component when we process foods. And then there are other foods that are clearly, there's no natural counterpart, right? Like high fructose corn syrup and a Dr. Pepper, which, man, I love Dr. Peppers when I was a kid. High fructose corn syrup and a Dr. Pepper, there is no natural counterpart to that food. That is all manmade.
[00:17:35] That's all a processed foods source. That's all a processed food source, I guess I should say.
[00:17:41] Can you find, like, cane sugar in nature? Sure. But high fructose corn syrup is a far cry from the sugars that we find in nature.
[00:17:52] There is no resemblance at all of that natural food. So when we're talking about processed foods, it is very important that you remember that the reason that it's a problem is because we concentrate the carbohydrate, and the carbohydrate now is concentrated, which leads to a concentrated release of insulin, which means that insulin overwhelms our cells, and that leads to insulin resistance. This is why the most powerful tool that you have for reversing your type two diabetes and normalizing your insulin function is removing those processed foods from your diet. And I call this cleaning up your diet. It does two things. It decreases the amount of insulin. When you clean up your diet and you cut these foods. So you're cutting processed foods from your diet. It decreases the amount of insulin your cells are exposed to, and it decreases your blood sugar level, because you're not eating as much carbohydrate that gets absorbed and then drives your blood sugars high. You're not eating as much of that. And since you're not eating as much of that, your blood sugar levels are lower because you're no longer providing glucose into the system.
[00:19:02] These things together allow your cells to heal from their insulin resistance.
[00:19:08] And this has to be done sometimes for months before they can entirely heal. I like to use the analogy of a sunburn when we're talking about, what do you mean by healing my cells? Your cells have been overexposed to insulin to a point that they are diseased, they are damaged, they are not functioning correctly. When we go out into the sun, first day at the beach, and we spend 8 hours in the sun, we overexpose our skin to the sun so much that they're damaged, that it's damaged. Okay.
[00:19:43] To fix yourself, to heal that sunburn, you have to come inside and avoid the sun. The sun is not inherently bad. It makes vitamin D. It's good for us. It sets our circadian rhythm. Like the sun is not inherently evil. We've just been overexposed to it to heal our skin. We have to bring it out of the sun until it heals. When does that happen? Well, gosh, that's a little unique for every single human being out there. Depends on how long you were there. How much sunscreen did you have on? Did you get in any shade? Did you have any clothes on? How fair skinned are you? All of these things go into, how long does it take? It is the same thing with your cells. When you have put your cells, exposed your cells to insulin, so much for so long that they are damaged and diseased and they are not working correctly, you have to bring them outside, you have to remove the insulin exposure, bring them inside, and not let them get exposed to insulin. And then from that place, you have to let them heal. And how long that takes truly depends on you, the uniqueness of you. It takes as long as it takes.
[00:20:58] My experience is it takes usually two to three months of not exposing your cells to high levels of insulin for them to heal up.
[00:21:09] So I want to talk about some things as far as food label labels go, so that you can understand what you need to be avoiding. So, reading food labels with this cleaning up your diet concept in mind means that you are reading food labels, looking for ways that we have concentrated or even added sugar, added carbohydrates. What things are happening in this food that can be concentrating the carbohydrates? Because the concentrated carbohydrates leads to a high release of insulin in my bloodstream, and that release of insulin causes my cells to be sick. Period, end of sentence. So, when you're looking at ingredient labels, recognize one size serving size matters. You have to pay attention to serving size. If you look at a jar full of cashews or a bag full of cashews and the bag says you have, I don't know, 12 grams of carbohydrates in a single serving. Maybe it's a quarter cup, maybe it's a third of a cup, whatever it might be. If you have x number of carbohydrates in that serving, you have to eat that much. If not, you're overeating or undereating your carbohydrates. So if it says you have 12 grams of carbs and a quarter cup of cashews and you eat a half of a cup of cashews. You're now eating 24 grams of carbs, not just the twelve. So you really do have to pay attention to serving size. I would highly encourage you to learn to weigh somehow find out how you can get something to weigh your food. I found that a simple food scale that you can pick up, probably at your local grocery store, is adequate. You can put a paper plate on it if you need to. You can put a paper towel on it and then measure your food that way. So when looking at the labels, you need to know your serving size. That's the one main thing. And then you need to look at the carbohydrate count. Lots of people will talk about net carbs versus total carbs, my experience. So net carbs what this means, what is net carbs versus total carbs? Net carbs is when you take the total carbohydrate count in your food serving and you subtract the fiber count in that food serving, and that gives you the net carbs. My experience is women who want to only count net carbs, that's totally fine, but you typically have to eat less carbs to get the results that you're looking for.
[00:23:39] Sometimes it seems like you can eat more carbs that way, and that's not been my experience. So watching the carbohydrate count is the biggest thing that is going to help you decide if a food is processed. And is this something you need to be consuming? Because even unprocessed foods, bananas are unprocessed foods, but they're very high in carbohydrates. And while your cells are sick, you may not be able to consume those, to eat those without keeping your cells sick. Okay, so the other things you want to watch, artificial sweeteners, and I'm going to dive into that more in the webinar that I'll do in February. So definitely show up for that. But artificial sweeteners, definitely. They have a couple of things that happen with them. One, they can produce insulin in your body. There's mixed evidence on this, but there's mixed evidence as to how relevant this is. But certainly there is lots of evidence supporting the fact that even though there are no carbohydrates and artificial sweeteners, that the sweetness in the tongue sends a message to the pancreas to tell the pancreas, hey, we're going to get some carbs here soon. So go ahead and prep us with putting out some insulin. Why would this happen? Because in a natural situation, the human being only comes into sweet tastes when they are around carbohydrate rich foods. Okay, so artificial sweeteners can definitely cause an insulin surge. And if you're trying to protect your cells from insulin, you don't want to do that. So you're going to want to watch for artificial sweeteners. These are, I think, ace sulfate potassium or ace k sucralose, aspartomy or aspartame, depending on who you are and how you pronounce it.
[00:25:29] I can't even remember sweet and low, the old nutrasweet. Those sorts of old sweeteners are also what we're talking about.
[00:25:41] There are some natural versions. Stevia and Monk fruit are the big ones that tend to have less of this insulin surge. With it, I feel like all of the sweeteners will drive you to want to eat more sweet things. That is one issue with the artificial sweeteners that you have to remember. The other thing that you have to think about, especially with the non natural ones. So I'm not talking about stevia and monk fruit here, but all of the other artificial sweeteners. Certainly there is evidence that they negatively impact our gut microbiome and that keeps us sick. Not only it keeps us sick with a lot of things, ibs, IBD, those kinds of things, but also the gut microbiome is a huge metabolic player. So if we have disease of metabolism like type two diabetes and insulin resistance, we're going to want to keep that as healthy as possible to reverse that disease state. So artificial sweeteners are something you're going to want to watch for.
[00:26:34] You want to watch for food sensitivities, right? Like if you are sensitive to certain foods, if, you know they upset your tummy, likely, especially your gut. Like they upset your lower gut, they likely. There's an inflammatory response here and you're going to want to avoid that. So you're going to want to keep an eye on those things. And then other things that you're going to find on the label are like hidden sugars. And these are subtle and the frustrating part of it. So if you're not aware food labels, when you're reading the ingredient list, the first thing on the ingredient list has the, it is the highest by weight out of all the different things on the ingredient list. So, like when you look at bread, the first thing on the ingredient list is flour. It's probably enriched. Whole wheat flour is probably what they call it. That's the first thing on the ingredient list, because by weight, that food is made up primarily of flour. So a lot of times they will give different names for sugars because then they can list three different names instead of one thing, sugar. And they don't have to put sugar as the first ingredient in the food, even though the food is primarily sugar. Okay, so different names for glucose that you'd want to watch for. Dextrose, sucrose, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, fructose syrup, rice syrup, maple syrup, any syrup. The other things you want to watch for, maltodextrin. This is a carbohydrate that is added to food that makes intentionally to make you want more of the food. So that's another carbohydrate you have to watch through. It will be buried subtly in your food list, but definitely can drive up. Certainly you will have a blood sugar spike with it and an insulin surge with it. In addition to, you're just going to want more of whatever that food was. Then the other things you're going to want to watch for are hidden fats, specifically industrial fats. So these are things like corn oils, vegetable oils, canola oils. These are not great fats. They're inflammatory, they're high in linoleic acid. They're bad news. Stay away from them. And it makes sense, right? Like vegetable oil. What does that even mean? Which vegetables? Whoever named that was brilliant because, of course, it sounds so healthy. It's vegetable oil, for God's sake. But most of the time, what this vegetable oil actually is, is corn oil. And if you think about corn, corn is not a naturally oily substance. We human beings have to do a lot of chemistry to corn in order to create the oil that comes with it. So stay away from those foods. They are inflammatory, they're not great for you. There's nothing good coming from that.
[00:29:15] If you're wondering what fats to use, lots of people ask about this. Olive oil is what I always say. If you've got to lean on something, lean on olive oil. There's really good evidence about that. So the interesting thing about these fats, the corn oil, the vegetable oil, the canola oil, these fats are almost always used in these processed foods. They're combined with flour, they're combined with sugar. They're not found in typical foods like non processed foods. Just stuff your grandmother would made. She would not have made it with canola oil. Right? These things have been introduced over the last decade, I'm sorry, last century. And they are typically associated with your processed foods. So that's the other hidden aspect. Like, if you stop eating the processed foods, you're also going to avoid that hidden corn oil or that hidden industrial oil. That's not great for you. So pitfalls in label reading are something kind of rules of thumbs I want you to think about when you're reading food labels. One, if there is a complicated list of ingredients, stay away from it.
[00:30:24] If there are words on that ingredient list that you cannot pronounce, that you don't know, don't eat it.
[00:30:31] If it's all chemistry, stay away from that. The closer you can get to single ingredient foods, the better you're going to be. So an apple doesn't have an ingredient list. You don't need to read it. You don't need to figure out what things are. Because an apple has a single ingredient. It's an apple. Okay? The more ingredients on the list, the more processed it is. Okay? So staying away from long lists of ingredients is going to help narrow this down for you.
[00:31:05] So I want you, again, to be very careful if you are medicated for your type two diabetes and interested in making these changes. If you stop eating processed foods, if you clean up your diet, that's awesome.
[00:31:18] But recognize that your diet up until now has been made of concentrated carbohydrates and you've been medicated based on that. And if you stop eating that, you're going to have to change those medications. The meds at the biggest risk of hypoglycemia is clearly insulin, right? And hopefully, whoever prescribed you insulin should have given you clear instructions on how to use that. But there is a very significant risk of low blood sugars with insulin use. If you're changing your diet, you're going to need to change the way you're doing your insulin. So you need to call your provider. The other med category or medication family that has a lot of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar risks is the sulfonyurers. And that's your glyburide, your glomepparide, your gliposide. Those have a big risk also. So if you're taking those, please be careful. Pulling these processed foods from your diet while on these meds can be dangerous, and you really need to have somebody there to guide you. So remember, I'm going to be doing a webinar February 10. It'll be at 10:00 a.m.
[00:32:25] Follow me on Instagram and Facebook. There will be a registration link where you can get registered for it, but you can certainly get more information about food labels and kind of how to determine what is a processed food. And you know, why it's important to avoid it. But we can answer any questions during that webinar on that also.
[00:32:47] So check out my website if you want more information. Delane at delanem or I'm sorry, ww dot delanemd.com. Send me an email if you have any questions.
[email protected] download the 14 days to better blood sugars. That'll
[email protected] better. And then I will be back next week. But until then, keep listening. Keep avoiding the foods that make you sick. Keep making choices for your health and your vitality. We'll talk soon. Bye.
