While many regularly check and monitor their blood glucose levels, insulin blood markers are commonly overlooked by healthcare professionals even thought it is vastly important to overall health and wellness. Insulin levels are vital to diabetics and non-diabetics alike. Insulin levels that are too high can lead to major health complications down the road and even accelerate the aging process and encourage things such as tumor growth. In this article, we will help you understand what insulin is, how to measure it and why it is so important. We’ll also help explain the relationship between insulin and weight gain and discuss why fasting insulin levels affect overall health.
What is Insulin?
Very simply, insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas. When you eat, insulin is released from your pancreas to help glucose enter cells in your body for energy. Insulin helps glucose enter cells by opening the doors on the cell surface. When insulin opens these doors, it stimulates sugar transport into the cell.
How Does Insulin Work?
The function of insulin is to help cells absorb glucose, a sugar that fuels our body’s tissues. Glucose is generated from the foods we eat and the breakdown of stored fat within the body. When you have too much sugar or glucose in your bloodstream, your pancreas releases insulin into the bloodstream to put the excess away for later use (to make more cells or store it as fat). These processes happen throughout the day: when you eat a meal with carbohydrates, your pancreas responds by secreting extra insulin to move that glucose into your muscles and liver so it can be used as energy immediately or stored for later use if needed.
When there’s excess insulin floating around in our bloodstream, either because we’ve eaten too many carbs or our body has become resistant to its effects—it makes sense that this could lead to increased fat deposition onto our bellies and other areas where we don’t want it!
Insulin resistance occurs when muscles do not respond enough to glucose after eating. A high-fiber diet can cause this as fiber absorbs liquid into muscles, which means less liquid, and glucose gets absorbed. Hence, most people consume smaller amounts of these food sources instead.
How To Measure Insulin Resistance?
The most common way is to use the fasting insulin level. An average fasting insulin level is below 5µU/ml, and any value above suggests insulin resistance.
A more advanced method of measuring insulin resistance is calculating HOMA-IR (Homeostatic Model Assessment – Insulin Resistance). Only doctors can do this test in their office or lab. It involves calculating your fasting blood sugar, triglyceride, and HDL cholesterol ratios. Then the computer calculates how much of your blood sugar level is used for energy production and how much remains unused as glucose in the bloodstream. If there’s a lot of unused glucose in your body, then you’re more likely to be insulin resistant than if all that extra glucose was converted into energy for use by cells and tissues instead!
The Matsuda index can also be used as an indirect measure of IR because it uses several other factors, such as BMI (body mass index) and waist circumference measurements in various parts, like stomach fat. This is a measurement of visceral fat, primarily inside our bodies, versus subcutaneous fat, which resides just beneath our skin on the top layer. Also, keep in mind that visceral fat has more inflammatory markers than subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT), which makes sense since white fatty tissue doesn’t generate inflammation but rather stores excess energy until it needs extra calories.
Why You Should Get Your Fasting Insulin Checked
Like many, you’ve may have never heard of fasting insulin. Typically we hear mostly about fasting glucose levels and maybe even hemoglobin a1c levels. However, fasting insulin is the amount of insulin in your body after an extended period without eating. And yet, it’s a surprisingly powerful predictor of health—and even weight gain. That’s why I’m here to help explain what fasting insulin means and how to measure it. Understanding this simple test can improve your overall well-being and set you up for long-term success.
1. It measures fat gain
A fasting insulin test is a blood test that measures the level of insulin in your blood. Insulin is the hormone that helps your body use sugar (called glucose) for energy.
Fasting insulin levels are one of the best indicators of fat gain, leading to health problems like diabetes and heart disease. High fasting insulin levels are associated with an increased risk of death from all causes, not just those related to diabetes and heart disease!
2. Its predictive power is striking
You may have heard of insulin as a hormone that helps the body process nutrients, but you may not know that high levels of this hormone are associated with weight gain and diabetes. High fasting insulin levels can be an early warning sign for pre-diabetes (a precursor to type 2 diabetes).
Insulin resistance is associated with obesity and metabolic syndrome—a cluster of risk factors that includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar levels, excess body fat around the waistline, abnormal cholesterol levels, and other metabolic abnormalities that increase your risk for heart disease and stroke.
3. It can help you lose weight
If you’re trying to lose weight, it’s important to keep your insulin levels in check. Insulin is a hormone that tells the body when it’s time to store energy (as fat). When your insulin levels are high, the hormone’s “storage” function is activated, and you start storing fat. Low insulin levels (not just low but very low) tell your body that it needs to burn stored energy for fuel.
Fasting insulin testing can help determine how much or little insulin is in your system at any given time and whether or not your body is using its stored energy appropriately. This can help with losing weight because:
- If there is too much insulin in the bloodstream at any given time, then more fat cells will fill up with extra fat as they try to keep up with processing all this excess sugar being released during digestion;
- If there isn’t enough glucose being processed by the liver because there isn’t enough circulating insulin around after eating something sweet like a candy bar (or even worse if you eat white bread), then some glycogen stores could begin breaking down into glucose before they should be—creating higher than average amounts circulating through your bloodstream.
4. Fasting insulin can be easily obtained
The easiest way to measure fasting insulin and glucose levels is by drawing blood after you haven’t eaten for at least 8 hours or overnight (like at 3 am). The results should be obtained by a healthcare professional, but if you’re interested, home kits can also help measure these levels.
An average fasting insulin level should be below 5 milliunits per liter (mU/L). If your level is over 5 mU/L, it may indicate pre-diabetes or diabetes mellitus type 2.
Fasting insulin is an important health marker and one that can be easily addressed with a few lifestyle changes.
Fasting insulin is a good indicator of long-term health. Many factors influence fasting insulin levels, including physical activity, diet, and genetics. You can make changes to your lifestyle to improve fasting insulin levels.
Why are blood sugar and insulin interlinked?
Insulin is a hormone that helps the body to use glucose for energy. Blood sugar and insulin levels are directly related, meaning that if your blood sugar level is high, your insulin level will also be increased. Similarly, when you have low blood sugar, your insulin levels drop as well.
The correlation between these two factors is important because it allows researchers to monitor both conditions simultaneously by checking just one marker—insulin!
What are Insulin Blood Markers?
Insulin is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar. Your body uses insulin to move glucose (sugar) from your blood into your cells, storing fat. When you eat, your pancreas releases insulin, which signals the muscles and liver to absorb sugar. If you have low blood sugar levels, it can cause symptoms like dizziness, confusion, and fainting.
Insulin markers check your body’s response to insulin after eating or drinking something high in carbs (carbohydrates). They can also monitor how well treatments such as oral medications control diabetes.
The relationship between insulin and weight gain.
Insulin is a storage hormone that helps regulate blood sugar. As you eat, the pancreas releases insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels. The more carbohydrates in your diet, the more likely your body will have a spike in blood glucose after meals. For example, if you eat pasta with tomato sauce at dinner and then follow up with some fruit for dessert, this can cause an excess of carbohydrates (carbs) in your bloodstream, which results in high levels of circulating insulin as well as high levels of stored fat around your waistline.
Why are Insulin Blood Markers Important?
Insulin resistance is a leading cause of many health issues and diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
Insulin controls the amount of glucose (sugar) in your body. Glucose comes from the food you eat and is stored in your muscles or liver as glycogen for future use. Your pancreas releases insulin to help move glucose into cells for energy or storage. When the body doesn’t respond correctly to insulin—insulin resistance—you may have high blood sugar levels that can lead to diabetes if left untreated. The American Diabetes Association estimates that about 8 percent of Americans have diabetes but don’t know it yet because they haven’t been tested or diagnosed with any form yet.
What is a healthy fasting insulin level?
A fasting insulin level of 5 or below is considered healthy. At the other end of the spectrum, a fasting insulin level above 10 indicates a high risk of type 2 diabetes.
Fasting glucose levels between 100 and 125 mg/dL are normal, while anything above 126 mg/dL is considered diabetic.
Conclusion
Insulin markers are a very important indicator of health. They can help determine the risk of developing diabetes, monitor your treatment plan, and predict future health risks.
Insulin markers are a great way to measure how your body metabolizes food. In particular, there are three markers that we recommend you get tested regularly: fasting glucose levels, fasting insulin levels, and HbA1c. If these numbers are high, it’s important to find out why this may be happening so that you can take action before any serious consequences occur.
References
- Rahman, M. S., Hossain, K. S., Das, S., Kundu, S., Adegoke, E. O., Rahman, M. A., Hannan, M. A., Uddin, M. J., & Pang, M. G. (2021). Role of Insulin in Health and Disease: An Update. International journal of molecular sciences, 22(12), 6403. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms22126403
- Understanding Your Lab Work: Fasting Insulin Test. (2022, January 7). Knew Health. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://knewhealth.com/understanding-your-lab-work-fasting-insulin-test/