What Is Insulin Resistance?

What is insulin resistance? What are the possible consequences to your body? What can cause this condition?

As you may see, there are lots of"WHAT” going around in your head. And you are right.

If you really want to prevent some diseases, the first thing you should do is to educate yourself in everything related to that.

What is insulin resistance?

It is actually a new condition to your body, in which your body cells (especially your muscle and fat cells) fail to respond to the effects of insulin.

You must keep in mind that glucose is you body cells’ fuel (the major source of energy, and unique for your brain cells).

If they do not have glucose for their survival, then your body produces other amounts of insulin to compensate insulin resistance.

As a consequence you’ll have hyperinsulinemia (high levels of insulin in bloodstream) and some of the cells that still remain sensitive to insulin will be stimulated more than usual (overstimulated).

You must understand that this is a continuous process which causes an impaired balance between glucose and insulin and further damages to your body.

Insulin resistance is part of Metabolic Syndrome (MS). People having  might have one of the following health problems:

- large waist (high BMI)

- high blood pressure

- high blood glucose (insulin resistance)

- high triglycerides/low HDL cholesterol

If one person is diagnose with metabolic syndrome, this increases the chances for diabetes and cardiovascular event. 

What consequences does insulin resistance have?

When you have insulin resistance, the first problem you may face are high levels of blood insulin and high blood glucose levels at the same time.

Second, insulin resistance prefers to affect your body’s lipids (fats). Thus, the amount of triglycerides and LDL will be raised up, while HDL will be fallen down.

As you may see from all the above, you’ll have increased risk of developing:

• blood clotting.
• various inflammatory changes.
• retention in your body’s sodium.

All these together will influence in increasing your blood pressure. That’s why most of the people with insulin resistance are accompanied with high blood pressure.What is insulin resistance – what can cause this condition? Actually there is no specific causes of insulin resistance . There are some risk factors that contribute in its onset, as listed below:

1- genetic hereditary (family history).

2- belonging to a population of high risk ( lation Americans, African Americans, asian Americans).

3- an imbalanced diet with too much sugar intake.

4- sedentary life, etc.

Diagnosis

Checking your blood sugar can help determine if you have insulin resistance. Usually, if numbers come out a bit higher than normal, then, you might be at risk or have insulin resistance. 

Treatment & Management strategies

Trying to change your diet and lifestyle habits is the key solution of treating insulin resistance. So, cutting off the risk factors will keep insulin resistance away. 

Last medically reviewed 12/24/2018

References:

• https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/what-is-diabetes/prediabetes-insulin-resistance
  
• https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/122501-treatment
  
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28778962