How Does Glucose and Insulin Actually Work?

And why it matters to Ultra-Processed Food

Here is a deep dive into something I knew nothing about.

What happens when I eat sugar? How is it really “affecting” me? Why are 1/3 of Americans (99 million) suddenly prediabetic and no one’s talking about it or shouting the warning signs?

Step One: you ate an apple. Sugar, aka Glucose, enters the bloodstream after digestion.

Glucose is a wonderful, frenzied energy molecule, but it's not something you want floating around your bloodstream. It’s dumb and dangerous. It needs to be shuttled into the right place. Think car gasoline - it needs to go in the fuel tank. Anywhere else is bad. Glucose (because it's a vibrating energy), if it stays floating around your bloodstream, it would be inflammation.

So how do we get sugar out of the bloodstream?

Pancreas gets happy and sends Insulin, like a little zippy helpful baggage carrier. "I'll take your bags please and let's get you in the fuel tank -- aka the cells for energy!" Insulin carries your sugar to the brain cells, to the muscle cells. Brain and muscle cells are the fuel tanks to use up glucose (the fuel).

Great. Once the job is done, Insulin goes back down, and waits in The Office (aka The Pancreas) until its next job comes in.

And during that process hopefully you used just the right amount of glucose for energy. And if you had a little extra, it's okay, the body will store it as fat for later. The body *loves* storing glucose as fat because it means "yay, extra energy!"

And in a 2-million year system of human evolution that's exactly what extra calories were! Good news! We evolved a perfectly designed system for how to store the extra excess. You never had to worry about storing too much either, because nature never provided that much extra calories, for thousands of generations — up until 10,000 years ago when we started storing grain as surplus.

Speaking of extra calories: 40 years ago, the average number of calories in the supermarket per consumer was 2,000 – the normal daily amount, right?

Now, there are 4,000 calories placed on shelves for every consumer. We've doubled the available calories per human being – but we didn’t double our size. We’re not 11-foot tall giants needing 4,000 calories every day! Yet that is now what is available. And our body is still designed to accept those 4,000 total calories, to respond to the shiny honeycomb package and to eat it all. So we do. We eat it all.

Back to our story: the Body likes to store extra calories as fat…

When you get extra carbs, aka extra glucose that you didn't burn off (like a whole box of Keebler fudge grahams or 10 Reese’s cups), your genes will say: "WHERE should we store all this extra really important energy as fat in the body?"

(Remember: because of evolution your genes think those Keebler fudge grahams were *really* important and need saving for later because of the flavor. In Nature/Evolution, having that much maximal flavor meant: you just found a “honeycomb cache or a tree of juicy peaches or a slab of bison meat.” The Body doesn't know that you *didn't* want to store all the extra fudge calories, and that you *only* wanted the fleeting flavor [or that you were just eating them because you had a sad day at work – the Body thought you found an important honeycomb stash]—again, that's because nature made Flavor and Nutrition the SAME. See my earlier post “Flavor = Nutrition”)

So what does the Body do with the extra calories you overconsumed? Your genes will dictate WHERE and HOW you'll store it as fat.

There are only 3 places to store fat in the Body. And Diabetes is ALL about where fat is stored.

-First: your genes could store fat under the skin -- and *only* there, NOT near your organs. And so you can be obese for life, with fat stored in your blubber layer, but perfectly healthy in terms of: no strokes, no diabetes, and you have a pristine pancreas. Big & Beautiful & Healthy (Carrying extra fat poundage under your skin might cause other issues like respiratory problems or gout).

-Second, some people will store skin fat AND also organ fat. So a fatty body AND a fatty liver/pancreas, which = bad [“Fatty” used here literally not pejoratively]. These people are the ones we think of as being at obvious risk for diabetes. That’s because we use obesity as a visual predictor of organ fat: “If you are overweight, full of excess skin fat, then you must also have fatty organs.”

Which is generally true. These are the most common set of genes. On average, for every 2 lbs of weight gain, a person has a higher risk of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). And you can easily gain 2 lbs in one weekend of restaurant food and snacks.

-Third, some people have a fast metabolism and NO skin fat, but their genes say "extra fat goes right to the organs." It has to go somewhere, right?

Someone like me, genetically skinny, could have a fatty pancreas + fatty liver without knowing it. All the extra candy and carbs I ate? I think I burned them off simply because I didn't gain obvious skin fat. I don't see any evidence of eating a whole party-size bag of peanut M&Ms, so I must be “fine.” That's what makes this group so dangerous: they could mistakenly think they burned up the exact amount of glucose they ate, that it all went into the brain and muscle fuel tanks and never overflowed.

But that's definitely not possible if you ate a whole gallon of ice cream on the couch at 8pm or a whole bag of candy sitting at your desk at 4pm. So where did all those extra carbs go? Organ fat storage.

Organ fat is dangerous because you can’t see it. There’s no camera in your belly. That’s what an MRI or liver biopsy would tell you, it would let you “see” the gross, bubbly yellow fat literally deposited around those organs. It’s also generally symptomless until you’ve hit pre-diabetes and you can measure high glucose levels (aka high inflammation).

-and remember, another important side note here: humans evolved to be scared only of things we could SEE and FEEL: a lion, a broken arm, an oozing wound. Anything else wasn’t an actual threat to us. Germs didn’t exist until agricultural civilization (large amounts of people and animals, with sewer systems, breeding bacteria), and that was pretty recent on the evolution scale. Small nomadic tribes had no history of communicable disease. An earthquake or volcano was seen or felt. But gradual climate change? Imperceptible, so it was not a threat. Our biggest obstacle in the modern era is feeling, deep in our bones, the actual existential threats, all of which are “non-see” things and/or “non-feel” things. Like AI: show me (don’t tell me) how AI is going to trigger my adrenaline fight-or-flight response? It’s not, so I'm not treating it like the sabretooth tiger it is. We’re wired to make change and get protective only when we immediately see and feel it. If it’s not immediately sensory, it’s not going to trigger our survival mechanism. It’s why all the Green Lefties use “rational minds” and “facts” and “science” yet can’t convince the majority. Sure it’s all true. But none of that is felt or seen.

This is true on the personal scale: like me eating sugar and having a hard time really understanding—deeply, and feeling it—that it’s hurting me, because I can’t see the inflamed buzzing glucose molecules slamming into my pancreas, I can’t see the yellow fat bubbles or pre-cancerous cells growing on my liver. It’s also true on the group scale: a business or government agency that doesn’t think air pollution is harming anyone because it doesn’t see or feel the smokestack that they permitted causing asthma—it’s too disconnected from sensual perception.

Back to Organ Fat. It’s bad because it is also exponential and small amounts cause major disruptions.

A mere 5% increase of liver fat = 30% more likely to develop Type 2 Diabetes!

-Once you have a buildup of organ fat, shit shuts down fast. Insulin sags behind, Pancreas gets weak and doesn't produce insulin. That's what "insulin resistant" means. Those bright zippy baggage carriers who used to love doing their job? Now they're sad, sluggish lazy sacs who won't leave their break room. “Nah,” says Insulin. “Fuck it, let that glucose wander around the bloodstream, all lost and crazy” [i.e., inflammatory]

Now it's a feedback loop. The extra glucose is wandering around your blood, unaccompanied by Insulin who normally takes care of it. And glucose in blood is bad. Very BAD.

Remember: Glucose is inflammation. It's dynamic energy. But it's in the wrong place. Like gasoline outside your fuel tank and in your car vents, your seats, your muffler. It can explode. Heart attack. Stroke.

The good news? It's all reversible, if you start now. Eating an anti-inflammatory diet may sound daunting. But it just means natural food, food that we evolved to eat. Plants, fruits, vegetables, sweet potatoes, nuts, berries, fish, — you know, stuff from the earth:

It doesn’t need an ingredients label because you already know what it is.

Not this swill:

Regular food is the secret, and it's not all that secretive, yet we still struggle to do it.

Tune in next time to learn why it's so hard to eat real food and how we can break through it . . .