What’s Lurking in the Cell Membranes of Many Diabetics? – And How to Get Rid of it and Get Healthy

If you believe what you read in newspapers and magazines, you may be under the mistaken impression that too much sugar, too many carbs, and obesity are the direct causes of the current diabetes epidemic. While these factors certainly don’t make things better, believe it or not, they are not the underlying cause of the diabetics epidemic in the United States and other Industrialized countries. The real culprit to this problem is lurking in our cell membranes and it hasn’t seemed to reach the popular press (or could it be that some of their most popular advertisers would scream bloody murder if they actually printed the truth about it).

You may be saying to yourself, “yeah right…” but I’m about to reveal to you a little known fact. When you eat anything that contains partially hydrogenated oil, you get a healthy dose of toxic, potentially lethal, artificial chemical called trans fat. OK, this isn’t exactly a secret anymore but keep reading. When you eat trans fat, it gets substituted in your cell membranes in place of healthy fats. The more trans fat that gets incorporated into your cell membranes, the less efficient they become at transporting glucose inside your cells. So, your body may still be pumping out adequate amounts of the insulin hormone when you eat to aid in transporting glucose across the cell membrane but if you have “sick” unhealthy cell membranes insulin can’t do its job. The glucose can’t get through the membranes and your blood sugar rises.

I want to emphasize this point. The real cause of type 2 diabetes is a deformation of our cell membranes caused by trans fat! Trans fat was introduced into the food supply of industrialized nations in the 1920’s and really took off in the 1930’s when the Great Depression hit and products with trans fat like Crisco and margarine were cheaper than the real McCoy. Guess what? Type 2 diabetes did not exist before this! There is a perfect correlation between the introduction of trans fat into our food supply and the advent and rapid rise of type 2 diabetes. This is a fact and it is actually well documented. Unfortunately, however, it is not well known by the general population. It’s amazing how millions of dollars of marketing hype can disguise important facts like these.

When type 2 diabetes first showed up, doctors didn’t have any idea what they were dealing with. Before this, when patients showed up that had elevated blood sugar, they knew they were probably dealing with type 1 diabetes. However, in the late 1920’s a new type of diabetes patient emerged. These were patients that had elevated blood sugar and other signs associated with type 1 diabetes BUT they did not respond to insulin. In other words, if they were injected with insulin, their blood sugar did not go down. They were “insulin resistant.”

Trans fat is hard to avoid these days as it tends to be in many processed foods which most of us eat in fair to large quantities. It’s also in pastries, other baked goods, snack foods, and many seemingly healthy vegetables oils. It is also found in many restaurant foods since they often fry in partially hydrogenated oils containing trans fats and use pre-processed food for easy prep that contains trans fat. You may even be getting it in salad dressings, butter substitutes, and sandwich spreads.