How Your Blood Sugar Works

Your body has a finely tuned system for controlling blood sugar. One of the key players is insulin,a powerful hormone that’s essential for helping move sugar from your blood into your cells. Below is a brief outline of how the process works – and how it can go wrong.

1. The basics – When you eat food that contains carbohydrates, most is absorbed as glucose into your bloodstream. As your blood-glucose level increases, your pancreas reacts by secreting the hormone insulin. Insulin then travels to the capillaries that deliver blood and nutrients to your muscles and brain. Once it’s in the capillaries, insulin is attracted to the receptors that reside on the outer membrane of your muscle and brain cells. It then binds to these receptors, like an electrical cord being plugged into a socket.
   
   
2. Healthy Response – In a person with normal blood sugar responses, the connection of insulin to its receptor sends a signal to a pool of glucose transporters – called GLUT -4 proteins – inside the cell. When the signal is received, these GLUT -4 proteins move out of their vesicle towards the surface of the cell, where they help glucose move across the cell membrane. This causes blood glucose to decrease and provides your muscle cells with sugar for fuel.
   
   
3. When the System Goes Bad – In a person with insulin resistance, the insulin receptor sends out a garbled signal. This is tantamount to a disconnected mobile phone call. Some or all of the GLUT -4 proteins never receive the message to move to the surface of the cell. As a result, glucose has no way in. The fewer GLUT -4 proteins on the surface of the cell, the higher your blood sugar remains. Ultimately, much of this excess blood sugar is diverted to the liver, where it’s converted to fat and can lead to increased insulin resistance – and higher blood sugar.
   

Often people with insulin resistance will struggle to lose weight despite making a concerted effort to exercise more and eat less. The damage is already done as per point 3 above. Only a committed approach to exercise and dietary change (under the supervision of a health professional) over an extended period of time will see the effects of insulin resistance nullified.

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