Heart Muscles and Insulin Resistance
The heart is responsible for pumping blood throughout the body. The heart is made of muscles known as cardiac muscles. Unlike your bicep or calf muscles, you cannot exercise direct control over your heart muscles.
Your lifestyle and habits, however, can indirectly influence both the quality and capacity of the heart muscles to function.
Heart muscles rely on a continuous supply of energy to function effectively. Glucose and fatty acids primarily provide this energy.
In order for your heart muscles to use glucose, your body produces a hormone known as insulin. Insulin is like a key that opens the cell wall, allowing glucose to enter and power your heart muscle.
Insulin resistance is a condition where the body's cells, including heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes), do not respond effectively to insulin. This inefficiency leads to reduced glucose uptake and utilisation.
Fat, especially visceral fat, is an important indicator of insulin resistance. The presence of excess visceral fat suggests that your energy intake and consumption are out of balance.
Visceral fat also releases various pro-inflammatory cytokines and free fatty acids into the bloodstream.
These substances have the potential to interfere with insulin signalling pathways in the heart muscles, reducing their ability to respond to insulin.
Remember that insulin resistance can occur long before you become a Type II diabetic. When an individual's HbA1c exceeds 6.5, we classify them as Type II diabetic. However, you could have been pre-diabetic for several years prior.
So the chances are that if you are pre-diabetic and have visceral fat, you are likely overweight. The excess weight, in turn, puts pressure on your heart to pump. You may be reluctant to exercise because you feel tired.
So, in a twist of irony, we are now the victims of everything that we have done to ourselves.
If you find yourself or someone you know in a similar situation, ask them to focus on the quantity of food they are eating.
Too much food is the primary cause of excess weight.
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