Discovery of a remarkable principle promises to help us maintain normal blood sugar.
[background: Dr. Charles Jarowski, formerly Director of Research and Development at Pfizer and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at St. John’s University until his retirement, was motivated in his research by the fact that members of his own family experienced deteriorating health and death stemming from blood-sugar complications. At the age of 69, his father lost a leg due to loss of circulation, and his sister, too, lost a leg at the same age, 69. Both passed away at a young age.
By contrast, Dr. Jarowski lived almost to 93 in good health, until an accident, having followed his own diet and supplement strategies. Even as a young man, his research led him to carefully supplement his own diet, and he devoted his life to finding ways for all of us to enjoy good health. Six decades of research and four patents later, Dr. Jarowski made his findings available for all of us.]
How does “normal” blood-sugar erode your health?
Americans have become calloused. We have become accustomed to hearing the news of our fellow citizens being carried away, 800,000+(1) per year due to cardiovascular disorders, and 500,000+(2) per year due to cancer. Only the nurses and relatives see the hopeless, downward progression. To the rest of us, it all seems like just another made-for-TV drama. Sad to say, we can only hide from such statistics for so long. To anyone who reads about health, it is now becoming common knowledge that we are sliding deeper into yet another crisis.
The important part to understand is that you do not need to be diagnosed with a disease to suffer irreparable damage from “normal” roller-coaster blood sugar.
As explained by Dr. Steven Joyal, MD, most aging people are never diagnosed with a blood-sugar disorder, but in time your health is eroded by the daily blood-sugar ups and downs that are considered “normal.” This is where modern medicine fails to see the danger. As Dr. Jarowski has demonstrated, we all need to follow basic blood-sugar strategies to protect against the most common age-related disorders.
When you consume a meal, especially a high-carbohydrate meal, your blood sugar becomes elevated, then later comes down. How elevated and how often are the key concerns, and these blood-sugar oscillations often increase with age. This is commonplace in our society, given our heavy dependence on breakfast cereals, fructose-saturated “health” drinks, and a diet loaded with grains, potatoes, starch and sugars.
Blood glucose is important, but it is only one indirect measure of what is actually taking place. Less well-known to the public are the dangers of high insulin levels, hemoglobin A1c, and the production of other harmful waste-products.(7)
To take an example, it could be that you have normal fasting blood-sugar levels. In this case, your pancreas may be healthy and strong, but it may be pounding your cells with high levels of insulin… pushing glucose and other nutrients into your liver, muscle, and fat cells – despite strong opposition from your cells. This may go on for years, but you are paying a price.
Hemoglobin A1c is different. Unlike insulin, hemoglobin A1c is not made by your body. It is an accident that happens inside your body. As such, hemoglobin A1c is only one well-known waste-product of a process called “glycation.”(10)
Glycation and Aging
Glycation is defined as the random, uncontrolled reaction of sugar with proteins and fats. This reaction sometimes is known as the “browning” reaction – the same browning that happens when you cook a steak or toast your bread. This happens in the foods you cook, and it happens in you. The effect is the same.
According to researchers in the field of aging, glycation end-products, known as AGEs, are one of the most important contributing factors in aging. As explained by the noted cosmetology expert, Dr. Nicolas Perricone, MD, the effects of glycation slowly show up in your skin. Even before you see dark discolorations, you skin becomes tough, leathery, and wrinkled.
Unseen, though, is the damage to your nerves and blood vessels.
One of the most closely studied of these destructive chemicals is hemoglobin A1c. When your blood sugar rises in response to a meal, glucose molecules bind with the oxygen-carrying protein in your blood called hemoglobin, producing hemoglobin A1c. This molecule can stay in your blood, damaging small capillaries and causing havoc, for up to four months – the lifespan of a red-blood cell – before being eliminated from your body.
You may feel normal; your blood glucose may appear normal, but according to Dr. Jarowski and researchers of his stature, daily blood-sugar fluctuations create molecules that, in a sense, grind away at the smallest, most fragile capillaries in your eyes, kidneys, and brain, long after you have finished the meal that created them… long after your blood-sugar level has stabilized.
What needs to be understood is that the very same destructive processes go on undiagnosed in all of us. We all are cutting our lives short by not doing a better job of controlling the sugar roller-coaster we provoke, several times a day, by our poor dietary choices.
More than one type of sugar?
The traditional method of testing glucose and calling it blood “sugar” is incomplete. Glucose is just one component of blood sugar. There are a number of common types of sugar in your food and blood. Fructose is becoming a big part of our diet as high-fructose corn syrup invades more and more items on our grocery shelves. The trouble is that both fructose and galactose (a component of milk sugar) are far more reactive than glucose as blood levels go up.
Disregarding the other common sugars would seem to be a serious oversight, considering the rising levels of fructose in our diet. The bottom line is this: every sugar you consume contributes to your background levels of glycation. The consequences of glycation are serious, of course, but they go mostly unnoticed due to their slow and insidious nature.
Researchers have been puzzled by the fact that people who live over 100 years old have hardly anything in common. Some smoke and drink, and some do not. Some have low cholesterol and some do not. Some have a pleasant personality, and some do not.
One of the few things they do have in common, though, is relatively low blood sugar and low triglycerides. In a recent study reported in May, 2010, entitled, “Found: genes that let you live to 100” one of the study’s authors stated, “People who live to a great age metabolize fats and glucose differently, their skin ages more slowly and they have lower prevalence of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension.”
It is interesting to note that until his passing in 2010, both Dr. Jarowski and his wife (96) followed his dietary rules and research findings for many years.
When did sugar problems begin?
Health problems that we now link to blood-sugar and insulin levels were first recorded over 3,500 years ago in an Egyptian papyrus. Although data is rather limited, the incidence of the problem appears to match the ancient Egyptian dependence on starchy grains.
At that time, 3,500 years ago, blood-sugar complications would have been just as terrifying as they are today. Then as now, as high insulin and hemoglobin A1c did their insidious work, victims gradually acquired a terrible condition characterized by constant thirst, frequent urination, and insidious loss of weight. Back then it was almost as though victims were being dissolved by all the fluid passing through them.
By the middle ages, careful examination of urine had become a common tool for diagnosing illness, just as it is now. Because of the unusual properties of urine when sugar begins spilling over into urine, with a smell and color resembling honey, physicians could diagnose blood-sugar disorders. The problem was that by this time it was too late.
Back when Dr. Jarowski first became Director of Research and Development at the largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in the world, insulin had recently been discovered. Dr. Jarowski knew, though, that insulin was no solution: it was prescribed only in the most severe cases, when all else had failed, and insulin is far from a benign remedy. The challenge, as he saw it, was to start early and to help maintain blood-sugar and insulin within a healthy range.
As all the data show, this is a particularly important goal for people of African and Mexican and American-Indian ancestry.
This, too, is a goal for today’s children. As Dr. Dean Ornish, MD, observes, due to poor diet and alarming weight gains, this may be the first generation in which children live a shorter life span than their parents.
Over the next four decades, as Dr. Jarowski tenaciously dissected the problem – investigating our dietary habits and every twist of human biochemistry – his research began to uncover some disturbing things about improperly-balanced proteins in our diet.
We all know that proteins are chains of amino acids. Literally, amino acids are connected together, end-to-end, in long chains that coil and flex in ways that hold you together and allow you to perform work. Every protein, however, whether it comes from beef or chicken or pinto beans or cheese, has a unique composition of amino acids… more of some amino acids and less of others.
The human body, too, has a unique composition of amino acids. Although beef and chicken are animal sources of protein, when you eat beef or chicken you mostly get protein from muscle, not from the entire animal.
Hence, the balance of amino acids in your meal, even though it comes from an animal source, really only matches the amino-acid profile of your muscles, not of your skin, organs, hair, or connective tissue. It is rare, then, for a meal to match the amino-acid profile of your body.
Whatever the source, when you eat a protein meal your body looks at what you are consuming versus what it needs to repair and rebuild itself. If there is a discrepancy, your body will burn the surplus amino acids for energy. This involves a process called “gluconeogenesis” that converts many amino acids to sugar (glucose), and this sugar then spills back into your bloodstream.
Early on, Dr. Jarowski realized that proteins are something of a Trojan Horse. They can change character once they are inside you… first when proteins split into amino acids, and then when these same amino acids split into sugar and ammonia (the same chemical found in window cleaner).
So you see, even if you do not consume sugar or starch, if the amino-acid balance of your meals does not match what your body needs, your blood-sugar and insulin levels may rise. Plus, your kidneys and liver must deal with higher levels of nitrogen waste products – composed of ammonia, uric acid, and urea.
Understanding this problem and motivated by his own family history, Dr. Jarowski already knew that it is a controllable chemical process that we are fighting. Thus, he began to look for a simple solution.
Because it would not be feasible for the average American to balance the amino acids in every meal simply by his or her selection of foods, Dr. Jarowski reasoned that a supplement might be the solution.
He began his ground-breaking work in his laboratory by taking 60 high-protein foods that Americans commonly eat and then identifying the essential amino acids most frequently lacking.
After years of study, he found that L-Tryptophan, L-Methionine, L-Valine, and L-Lysine are the four most-limiting amino acids. “Most limiting” means that in any meal they nearly always were the ones in short supply.
After further years of study and calculations, he determined the ratios by which these same amino acids should be supplemented. His conclusion was that simply by supplementing these four amino acids in their proper ratios, before a meal, more of the protein in a typical meal could be utilized by the body, rather than be converted to waste ammonia and sugar. These discoveries were the basis for his early patents.
The theory and evidence both suggest that when the protein in your meal is well-utilized, much less protein is converted to ammonia, urea, uric acid, and sugar, and your blood chemistry is more likely to stay balanced.
When an ordinary meal was consumed containing protein, fats, and carbohydrates, he continued to see measurable improvement… suggesting that by some undiscovered mechanism, these same essential amino acids could be capable of improving insulin efficiency.
That his painstaking research has been rewarded might be attested to by the fact that Dr. Jarow-ski lived two decades longer than some members of his childhood family, with whom he shared familial genes. He always had his sights set on a long, healthy life.
As Dr. Jarowski saw it, shortly after World War II, when his research began, many of the above medical terms and problems were undiscovered or hardly known. It is sad that they have become so well-known today. Dr. Jarowski spent the better part of his life proving that there is no need for this destruction of health.
Shun the Sugar for Sweeter-Looking Skin By Tamar Nordenberg An Interview with Nicholas Perricone, M.D. Yeah, right – now it’s rice cakes that can be the downfall of your diet? Yes, that is right, according to dermatologist Nicholas Perricone, M.D., an expert on facial rejuvenation and best-selling author of The Wrinkle Cure and The Perricone Prescription. The doctor’s Rx for winning skin (and, by the way, for staying thin) calls for staying away from sugar and high-glycemic carbohydrates, which the body rapidly converts to sugar. Discovery Health Online asked the doctor to share what he knows about sugar’s destructive effects on the skin, and about the complexion-complimenting effects of staying away from the sweet stuff, as well as some foods you once considered to be stay-healthy staples.
Q: Does the fact that you eat too much sugar really show on your face? A: Absolutely. I believe that inflammation is at the basis of aging in all organ systems, including the skin. One of the reasons inflammation occurs is from a rapid rise in blood sugar, which causes biochemical changes in the cell that result in accelerated aging. You can have deterioration of the brain or the heart muscle, and likewise of the skin. Of the internal causes of inflammation, one of the big ones is diet. In addition to biochemical changes, sugar causes damage to the skin in another way: When blood sugar goes up rapidly, sugar can attach itself to collagen in a process called “glycation,” making the skin stiff and inflexible. Losing this elastic resilience of young skin will give you deep wrinkles and make you look old.
Q: Is it the standard sweets – like candy bars and chocolate cake – that sap the skin of its youthful resilience?
A: It’s those, and it’s what people eat that they don’t realize is converted rapidly into sugar – pasta, bread, potatoes, rice. Even when people think they’re being conscientious, they could be taking in high amounts of cell-aging sugar. Quite often, a patient will come into my office, very proud that all they had for lunch was a baked potato with nothing on it. What they don’t realize is that the plain potato converts into large amounts of sugar – as much as a couple of candy bars.
Q: What steps can sugar junkies take to save their skin? A: People will experience a rapid rise in blood sugar from eating skin-destroying sweets and carbohydrates, but what goes up must come down, and their mood will soon crash and give them a real addiction craving for more sugar. The best thing a sugar addict can do to deal with their cravings is to very carefully control their blood sugar and insulin by staying away from the bad carbohydrates and eating more protein for just a few days. At the same time their skin is becoming firm, their blood sugar will stabilize and their cravings will go away. They’re free! Then they might have a piece of chocolate once in awhile, but it’s based on their free will instead of “I have to have it.”
Read more about sidestepping sugar to keep your skin dazzling – it’s in Chapter 3 of The Perricone Prescription.
Lidtke GlycoTrol was designed by Dr. Charles Jarowski MDto improve eye, kidney, and circulatory health. Dr. Jarowski has spent years at the highest levels researching blood sugar glucose, cholesterol and the mechanisms controlling them.