Metabolic Health
As a team of qualified and experienced nutritionists, we're committed to providing women with individualised and sustainable solutions geared towards optimising metabolic health.
Metabolic health refers to your body’s ability to process the nutrients from food and produce energy that our cells can use or store energy safely in fat tissue.
This involves a constant interplay between our digestive tract, liver, muscles and fat tissue and involves several intertwined chemical pathways all of which are continually adapting to the amount of food being consumed and the amount of energy required by our bodies. Our ability to adjust quickly and easily to frequent changes in supply of and demand for energy is a very important marker of our health.
Signs of compromised metabolic health include rising blood glucose levels, elevated blood cholesterol and having fat deposits in the liver. The primary cause of poor metabolic health is carrying excess body fat, particularly around the organs of the abdomen (known as visceral fat) and so the best way to address poor metabolic health and its symptoms is to lose weight. While easier said than done, there are effective strategies for weight loss.
A sudden rise in blood glucose after eating is not an indicator of poor metabolic health.
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Eating food, especially carbohydrates causes the level of glucose in our blood to rise. This is recognised by cells of our pancreas, which releases insulin which travels around in the blood stream, binds to our cells and allows our tissues to extract glucose from the blood in order to bring blood sugar back into its normal range. Having spikes in blood sugar after eating is NORMAL. There is natural variation between people in the size of these spikes but as long as the blood sugar returns to a normal range within two hours, blood sugar spikes demonstrate that your body is working as it should.
What is not normal is having high levels of blood glucose if you have not eaten for a while, for example first thing in the morning before breakfast. This is why a key diagnostic test for type two diabetes is the fasting blood sugar. Another test that can tell you if your blood sugar control is going awry is the HbA1c test, which gives you an indication of your average blood glucose over the past few months. If you do not have diagnosed diabetes and these tests are out of range, you may have developed insulin resistance, which means that the pancreas is producing the insulin to bring your blood glucose down after eating but the tissues are responding less well to the insulin. This has serious implications not just for your blood glucose but also the way your body processes fats and your overall health.
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Insulin resistance is caused by excess visceral fat and about 60% of the adult population of the UK has it, which reflects the fact that 66% of the adult population of the UK is either overweight or has obesity. Insulin resistance is the precursor to type two diabetes, unless addressed with weight loss, it will continue to worsen until the pancreas is unable to make sufficient insulin to bring glucose into range and type two diabetes is diagnosed.
Type two diabetes is not caused by eating sugar. Eating too much sugar can be a reason why people gain weight, but it is the excess fat that causes disease, not the sugar.
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People who have insulin resistance and T2D have lower life expectancy because it is a disorder of energy metabolism that results in damage to the blood vessels and increases the rate of cardiovascular disease. Insulin resistance can be reversed with weight loss and regular exercise, as can type two diabetes in the early years after diagnosis.
Getting Started
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