Mel Fourie explains the mechanisms of gut health in relation to Type 2 diabetes and what happens in your body when you eat nutrient-dense foods compared to empty calories.
Did you know that sugar consumption has gone from twenty teaspoons a year to twenty two teaspoons a day? When we primarily eat foods containing high sugar, dangerous trans fats, and low fibre, your body doesn’t know how to utilise these anti-biological nutrients which cause metabolic dysfunction and weight gain due to the proliferation of inflammatory gut bacteria. Your gut health (flora) becomes toxic spiralling your microbiome into dysbiosis, a term meaning imbalance.
Blood glucose imbalances, mood swings, weight gain, and sleep disturbances are just some of the many side effects that can happen when your dietary choices contain harmful ingredients.
At its very core, Type 2 diabetes can be understood as a disease caused by too much insulin, which your body secretes when you eat too much sugar.
Solving the problem – the quality of the food
Knowledge is power and presenting the problem this way is incredibly profound because the solution becomes immediately obvious. You can lower your insulin levels by reducing your dietary intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates thus improving your gut health.
This leads me to sharing a rather bold statement, that obesity and diabetes can’t be cured in a doctor’s office alone. The journey to healing diabetes begins on the farm, in the supermarkets, in the restaurants, in your kitchens, on your plates, and in your gut.
Depending on the quality of the food, it will have profoundly different effects. If you have, for example, broccoli or your favourite soda, they’re both carbohydrates, but they have very different effects in your gut and microbiome, as well as your biological responses.
Broccoli vs soda
To illustrate how this works, let’s follow a sequence of biological responses that occur as broccoli and soda enters your body.
Soda
Let’s begin with a few gulps of soda. Your gut quickly absorbs the fructose and glucose. The glucose spikes your blood glucose, starting a domino effect of high insulin and a cascade of hormonal responses that kicks bad biochemistry into gear. The high insulin increases storage of belly fat, increases inflammation, raises triglycerides, lowers HDL, raises blood pressure, lowers testosterone in men, and may contribute to infertility in women. Your appetite is increased because of insulin’s effect on your brain chemistry. The insulin blocks your appetite-control hormone leptin. You become more leptin resistant, so the brain never gets the I’m full signal. Instead, it thinks you are starving.
Your pleasure-based reward centre is triggered, driving you to consume more sugar fuelling a sugar addiction. The fructose makes things worse. It goes right to your liver, where it starts manufacturing fat, which triggers more insulin resistance and causes chronically elevated blood insulin levels, driving your body to store everything you eat as dangerous belly fat.
You may also get a fatty liver, which generates more inflammation. Chronic inflammation causes more weight gain leading to obesity. Anything that causes inflammation will worsen insulin resistance. Another problem with fructose is that it doesn’t send informational feedback to the brain, signalling that a load of calories just hit the body. Nor does it reduce ghrelin, the appetite hormone that is usually reduced when you eat real food. Now you can see just how easily your favourite soda can create biochemical chaos.
Broccoli
Let’s look at the digestive pathway of broccoli. As with your favourite soda, broccoli is made up primarily (although not entirely) of carbohydrates.
To clarify what that means, because the varying characteristics of carbohydrates will factor significantly into the contrast, carbohydrates are plant-based compounds comprised of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They come in many varieties, but they are all technically sugars or starches, which convert to sugar in the body.
The important difference is in how they affect your blood glucose. High-fibre, low-sugar carbohydrates such as broccoli are slowly digested and don’t lead to blood glucose and insulin spikes, while table sugar is a quickly digested carbohydrate that spikes your blood glucose. Therein lies the difference.
Slow carbohydrates like broccoli heal rather than harm. When you eat broccoli there is no blood glucose or insulin spike, no risk of fatty liver, and no hormonal chaos. Your stomach distends sending signals to your brain that you are full. There is no triggering of the addiction reward centre in the brain. You also get many extra benefits that optimise metabolism, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation, and boost detoxification.
The phytonutrients in broccoli boost your liver’s ability to detoxify environmental chemicals, and the flavonoid kaempferol is a powerful anti-inflammatory. Broccoli also contains high levels of vitamin C and folate, which protect against cancer. The glucosinolates and sulphorophanes in broccoli change the expression of your genes to help balance your sex hormones, reducing the risk of breast and other cancers.
This rather simple illustration clearly demonstrates that good nutrition is a fundamental cornerstone of well-being and gut health. When you shift your diet, you change your biology, so choose to eat well.
But what does it mean to eat well for good gut health?
Basically to eat whole foods in their most natural form, including all the colours of the rainbow every single day to ensure you are getting plenty of beneficial phytochemicals and antioxidants to support whole-body health.
- You can start by adding more veggies to every meal. Try incorporating high-fibre vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, peppers, and spinach.
- Substitute sugar-laden treats with low-glycaemic fruits like blueberries, cherries, kiwi, and raspberries.
- Add healthy fats like avocados, olives, extra virgin olive oil, organic coconut oil and cold pressed hemp seed oil.
- For those who choose to eat animal products, move away from industrially-raised meat products and start sourcing grass-finished or free-range meats and eggs as well as wild caught fish and seafood.
- Add a few anti-inflammatory nuts and seeds and incorporate a diversity of healing herbs and spices.
Exercise – the most powerful medicine
Did you know that exercise might be the most powerful medicine to manage blood glucose levels and make your cells more insulin sensitive? Walking, yoga, Tai Chi, or similar more gentle forms of exercise are great ways to start.
Final thought
Obesity and Type 2 diabetes are closely related, and generally, increased weight increases the risk of disease. The correlation is not perfect but, nevertheless, maintaining an ideal weight, eating nutrient dense foods, and taking care of your gut flora are the first steps to prevention.
- Broccoli vs Soda illustration adapted from The Blood Sugar Solution.
MEET THE EXPERT
Header image by FreePik