Atkins Diabetes Revolution by Robert C. Atkins Read Free Book Online Page A

pounds have started to damage your health.
    We tend to think of excess weight as simply the body’s way of storing extra fat—and we think of those rolls of flesh as soft storage banks. In fact, your body fat doesn’t quietly sit there; it’s metabolically active, continually secreting chemicals such as hormones and cytokines. These chemical messengers are innocent members of your body’s normal cell-to-cell communication system. In large amounts, however, they can cause inflammation in your cells. Just as an infection on your finger causes swelling, warmth, and redness in the area, this overload of chemical secretions from excess body fat does the same to your endothelium —the cells that line your blood vessels.The difference is that you can’t see or feel the inflammation. The process is complex and happens slowly at first, but it begins almost as soon as you start to put on extra pounds.
    The cells of the endothelium regulate how nutrients and other substances in your bloodstream get into your cells. When the endothelium becomes inflamed, normal body processes start to get out of whack. As you continue to gain weight—especially from an inactive lifestyle and a high-carb diet—the inflammation worsens and the effect on your endothelium becomes more severe. You develop endothelial dysfunction. And what goes hand in hand with endothelial dysfunction? Insulin resistance.In fact,it’s the chicken-or-the-egg scenario: endothelial dysfunction and insulin resistance are so intertwined that it’s extremely difficult to tell which triggers which. 2 , 3
    COINING A TERM
    For decades doctors noticed a pattern in a large percentage of patients. People who were overweight tended also to have high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.As a cardiologist, Dr.Atkins long ago saw a link between excess fat, insulin resistance, heart disease, and diabetes. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, however, that some perceptive researchers, particularly Dr. Gerald Reaven of Stanford University, started connecting more of the dots. What they noticed was that patients who had abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and sometimes high fasting blood sugar were more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and coronary artery disease. 4
    Doctors call a group of related signs and symptoms a syndrome, so Dr.Reaven coined the term for this cluster of signs syndrome X. It’s still sometimes called that, but today most researchers and doctors call it the metabolic syndrome. Although many nutritionally oriented doctors have been diagnosing this syndrome, with or without a name, for years, the American medical establishment accepted its existence only in 2001, when the third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) officially defined it. In keeping with the drug treatment approach to disease, which is the hallmark of Western medicine, the ATP III stated that control of the metabolic syndrome was secondary to the goal of controlling LDL cholesterol. This approach misses the point of correcting the underlying imbalance leading to the metabolic syndrome. We’ll discuss this further in the chapter on heart disease. 5
    Another definition for the metabolic syndrome had been released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1999. The two definitions are somewhat different, but because the ATP III definition is the one used in the United States, that’s what we’ll use here. 6 (See page 38 for the WHO definition.)
    DEFINING THE METABOLIC SYNDROME
    You officially have the metabolic syndrome if you have three or more of these signs:
     
Abdominal obesity: a waist circumference greater than 40 inches (102 cm) in men and 35 inches (88 cm) in women (more on this important risk factor on page 114)
High triglycerides: 150 mg/dL or more
Low HDL cholesterol: under 40 mg/dL for men and under 50 mg/dL for women
High blood pressure: 135/85 mmHg or greater
High fasting