Insulin Resistance and Diabetes

“Insulin resistance”, or diabetes is the next likely step in this slowly developing disaster. Insulin is just a hormone, a messenger boy. Insulin does nothing by itself. It simply asks cells to expend energy, using phosphor as the fuel, in order to convert some glucose into glycogen so that it can be stored for later conversion into phosphor (ATP) fuel. This happens when there's too much glucose around for immediate use – when more glucose is coming in than is being converted to ATP fuel by mitochondria, say after a big meal. Insulin resistance just means that this request for action is being ignored by the cells in our body. They've been asked to convert and store sugar, but they aren't doing it, like rebellious kids. There are various reasons why that might happen – for example, unused muscle cells tend not to store glycogen because they have no later use for it, thus they shrink or atrophy, for example. Cells that are already plump with stored glycogen will also refuse or ignore the order from insulin to store more because they can't, they're full already: thus champion Sumo Wrestlers usually become both insulin-resistant and diabetic during the competition season as a result of their force-feeding (and then recover, more or less, afterward.) [http://academic.sun.ac.za/medphys/insulinresistance.htm]