40 Billion Capillaries Under Siege

Day 7
August 14, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 154
Blood Pressure 120/83 72 bpm.

40 Billion Capillaries Under Siege

　
To begin with I would love to claim that the recent life style change is responsible for the wonderfully lower blood pressure numbers this morning but the truth is I think that the half tablet of Levitra I took before I went to sleep has probably has more to do with the lower blood pressure numbers--unless it is even better tomorrow. I told you at the beginning that I was going to be honest.

What can be tied to the diet change is this. When I started this seven days ago, my morning blood sugar was up to 285 and that is a bad number. While I would like to think that it was an artificially high number, I really have no idea because I had not been testing in a while and had been deliberately eating whatever I felt like eating for several weeks before starting this program. I had also fallen into the habit of eating late at night, eating starchy foods with oil and putting sugar in my coffee on a regular basis. I even had a few of those HFCS poisoned sodas–I like the A&W Root Beer because it sort of reminds me of going to the A&W with my Dad when I was a kid. The long and the short of it is that I have been working on eating healthier for quite a while and have found that the advice I am offering you in these blogs works, but it only works if you keep doing it. Just as I have demonstrated by going back to my old ways, if you don’t commit and stay with it, this daemon will come back to live in the house we built for it. The only way to keep it out is not to do the things that opened the door in the first place.

I had planned on writing about something else this morning but looking back at the beginning paragraph I see a couple of things I would like to follow up on.

The first one is and isn’t related to diabetes and affects an enormous number of men. That would be Erectile Dysfunction which I first heard about from a man I met in the lobby of a hospital when I was about 29. He was about the age I am now-maybe a few years older. He was probably 40 pounds overweight and his skin as gray. In fact everything about him was gray. His hair, his clothes, his personality and his mood. Well, actually, his mood was a much darker shade of gray. He was angry and bitter. He had heart problems, his hips hurt, his wife was in the ICU, he had type II diabetes and a bad case of "limp dick." That seemed to bother him more than anything else. Being young and strong and no problems in that department other than not having a lover at the time I really didn’t understand. In fact, at 29 I didn’t understand much of anything he was telling me. Looking back on it I think he was trying to warn me, but as with most young people, I could see his mouth moving but nothing worth listening to was coming out of it and I didn’t understand the implications of what he was trying to tell me.

Now I do. All too well. I  read an article just the other day that mentioned the the fact that when a man goes in to see his doctor and tells the doctor that he "can’t get it up" or that it won’t stay up, the doctor now assumes heart disease, even in young men. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple. The penis relies on blood flow and the ability of the blood vessels to relax and fill up with blood to achieve an erection. If they can’t do it, you can’t either. There can be other problems, low testosterone, physical damage and so on, but when you walk in and have high blood pressure-as I do, and have erection issues then the doctor can be pretty certain you have a 90 percent chance of having some degree of heart disease. Oh happy day.

Diabetes goes hand in hand with that as well. One of the reasons is that you have about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in you body and they range from the very large major distribution and return arteries to the smaller ones you can see near the surface. The greatest number-about 40 billion of them are the capillaries. They are so small that they only allow one blood cell at a time to pass. If you’ve ever taken a large dose of Niacin you know that you can feel every single one of them as they dilate to allow more blood to flow through. These little guys are everywhere in our bodies. They directly feed each of the cells and carry away the cell’s waste products. It is an amazing system.

Diabetes messes with that system by tearing up the smooth lining of the capillaries. Imagine a nice healthy blood cell, just like the ones you saw pictures of in your grade school biology book. That perfectly smooth cell goes zipping through your body as easy as grease through a goose. But when you have high blood sugar levels something really ugly happens. The excess sugar molecules are as sharp and jagged as gravel and they piggy-back onto the blood cells and make it all sharp and jaggy. It is not too bad a thing, not great but not horrendous, while the blood cells are all bumping along in the larger blood vessels, sure they are scraping along but the real damage happens when they hit the capillaries. The are being pushed by the heart and have no choice but the jam their way through, but being all sharp and jaggy they sort of grind their way along like a chunk of rock and as a result the lining of the capillaries is scarred. When they do enough damage the capillary can rupture under the pressure and then the blood clots and seals it off. Without blood supply all of the cells the capillary served start to die and this is a very bad thing. It leads to the death of nerves, blindness, erectile dysfunction, kidney failure and every one of the indignities that comes with the daemon that our friend Bob would invite in with his endless demand to be satisfied.

Just because men have this handy gauge of their heart health doesn’t mean that the very same process isn’t happening in women’s bodies as well.

You remember I mentioned the A&W Root Beer and how I liked them because it reminded me of spending time with my Dad. A lot of the foods that are bad for us are like that, they affects us emotionally because their tastes and smells take us back to better, happier times. A little bit of that, now and again, is not a bad thing but a lot of it starts the process that will kill us off a little piece at a time.

I don’t advocate never eating cake ever again, but suggest (very, very strongly) that a few bites once in a while is just fine, but not the whole cake every day.

Enough for today, more to come,
Jim