How Insulin works in our body?

Diabetes is a problem inside your body with how the body is using the food that you eat and how your body is using the hormone that is called insulin. Insulin is made in your pancreas. From our stomach our body absorbs sugar into our bloodstream so that after we eat it is normal for a blood sugar count to start to go up. As our blood sugar level starts to go up there is an automatic message that goes to our pancreas and that message tells the pancreas to make insulin. The pancreas will squirt the right amount of insulin that is needed into the bloodstream.

All of our tissues, all of our body cells, need the energy in them to work during the day. So what insulin is going to do, is to take the sugar from the blood and it is going to move that sugar into the body cells. Insulin is what helps to regulate the blood sugar level and when insulin works properly it should keep the blood sugar count somewhere between 3.3 and up to 6.1 mmols/L. That is the normal sugar count first thing in the morning before you have eaten anything. It gets a little more complicated than that because in between our meal times and during the night when we sleep our blood sugar count does not drop down to zero. If you have a teenager at home and they sleep for fifteen hours and they are not eating for the fifteen hours their blood sugar is not going to go down to zero. That is because of our liver. One of its functions is to make sugar and in between our meals and during the night the liver actually pushes a little bit of sugar into our bloodstream to keep our blood sugar count regulated.

Sugar comes from two different places. One is in the liver and that is in between our meals and during the night and the other one is from the food that we eat. The pancreas actually makes insulin two different ways and the way I like to compare the pancreas is to an engine. Let’s say a car engine idles all day long. The pancreas idles all day long and it makes little bits of insulin to help deal with the little bit of sugar that the liver makes through the day. Every time we eat food the pancreas has to make a big squirt of insulin to deal with how much sugar went into our blood, so it is like the engine’s revving. When the insulin works properly it moves the sugar from the blood into these body cells so that these body cells get the correct energy they need to work during the day time. Something goes wrong with this picture when somebody has got diabetes. For some people what happens is that the pancreas gets pooped-out. It is like the engine has been working so hard and it just tends to tire out. So some people get born with a Cadillac engine and it works for their whole life and some people get born with a Pinto engine and it starts to wear out. Another problem is seen right here at the cell. What the researchers have found is that these body cells have what is called insulin resistance. The body is making the insulin but is not being used properly by the cells. For some people what happens is that they get a leaky liver. The liver actually pushes too much sugar into the bloodstream. There are actually three different possible places that there could be a problem. When we look at who gets diabetes, there tends to be more diabetes found as we get older. It looks like the pancreas naturally starts to wear out and research says that in people over the age of 80 probably 40% have diabetes. That is quite a bit. In the general population it is about 5-6%.