The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The Insulin Illness Connection

Most discussion of chronically elevated insulin levels, hyperinsulinemia, and insulin resistance

revolves around their relationship to body weight.

This is unsurprising, body weights what sells tickets.

It's why most people get interested in diet, health, fitness, and nutrition, to lose weight or avoid gaining it.

But improving insulin sensitivity and reducing fasting insulin levels have major ramifications for your health, longevity, and resistance to disease.

And it's not just because weight gain is unhealthy. Insulin itself in excess exerts seriously damaging effects.

Today I want to impress upon you the importance of controlling your insulin response by laying

out some of the health problems that stem from not controlling it.

Hyperglycemia.

If your insulin resistant, insulin doesn't work very well.

You need more of it to get the same effect an insulin-sensitive person would get.

When insulin doesn't work, its ability to shuttle glucose out of the blood suffers.

And blood glucose goes up and stays up.

That's hyperglycemia. Everyone knows that high blood sugar is bad, but why?

What exactly is wrong? Some cells are passive recipients of blood sugar, while others have

mechanisms that prevent excess blood sugar from entering their membranes. In the presence of

high blood sugar, the passive recipients begin producing

excessive amounts of reactive oxygen species, or ROS. ROS aren't pathological in and of themselves.

They're signaling molecules that our bodies need for healthy cellular function, but unchecked

ROS generation induced by hyperglycemia causes

...