CHAPTER THREE

STRESS, INSULIN, AND THE NON-RESPONDER

Two of your friends are stressed out. One of them seeks to alleviate her stress by consuming what has popularly been called “comfort foods”—items such as cookies, ice cream, potato chips—that are quickly broken down and converted to glucose by the body. The rising levels of glucose make her feel less irritable, less edgy, and more relaxed. Your other friend seeks to relieve his stress by going to the gym. He makes a point of working out every day for at least an hour. Such physical activity temporarily takes his mind off of his problems, burns through the glucose stores in his muscles, and releases certain hormones that make him feel better. These scenarios reveal one problem (stress) with two common approaches to dealing with it (eating and exercise). However, it could be that both of these approaches are doing more harm than good.

Let us consider the case of your first friend: her consumption of foodstuffs that are easily and rapidly converted into glucose can be disastrous as it creates a situation whereby insulin has to be secreted in greater quantities in order to deal with the increasing levels of sugar in her bloodstream. Excess glucose invariably gets converted to bodyfat, and her chronically high insulin levels can often leave the lining of many of the cells within her body inflamed. This cellular inflammation can grow and spread throughout her body, until it becomes systemic. And here is where real health problems can begin, as inflammation on the surface of cells will be mortared by cholesterol (which is all that cholesterol is—mortar to patch inflamed areas on cells). When cholesterol levels become high, physicians will often prescribe a class of drugs known as statins to lower their patients’ high cholesterol levels. However, this only treats the symptom (the higher cholesterol levels) but leaves the source of the rising cholesterol levels (the cellular inflammation) untouched. As a result, many of us continue to live—with or without statins—with chronically inflamed cells. For such people, engaging in exercise of any stripe is definitely not a healthy thing to do, as exercise can also produce an inflammatory effect in various cells within the body, which will only compound the problem. For these people it is better not to exercise at all until they have corrected the lifestyle issues that have produced their chronically inflamed states. To throw exercise into the mix at this point would be the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire in the hope of extinguishing it.

The same would apply to the second friend in the above scenario; even if his genetics were such that he responded favorably to the stimulus of exercise, if he were truly under stress and seeking to relieve his stress through exercise, any results he might have stimulated would be prevented from being produced as a result of an overabundance of stress hormones such as cortisol that his system would already be awash with. If by chance either of the two people in our above example liked to drink and smoke, then both of them would have not only chronically inflamed systems, but systems that are working overtime trying to put out the numerous internal fires that their poor lifestyle choices keep setting on a daily basis. In this context, adding the stress of exercise to an already stressed-to-capacity physiology could be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Knowing this, the popular conception of exercise being a “stress reliever” is revealed to be without physiologic foundation. According to the late medical doctor and stress research pioneer Hans Selye, stress is everything in your life and only death can liberate you from its influence. Consequently, you can’t relieve stress simply by changing its form. If you want to diminish the amount of cellular stress that your body is under, then back away from the potato chips, the refined sugars, the flour, the excessive intake of grains and cereals, the soft drinks, the alcohol, the tobacco, and all of the other agents that are causing your physiology to work overtime in order to tamp out the cellular (and systemic) inflammation. Doing so will do infinitely more to reduce your stress levels in a very literal sense than knocking off 45 minutes on a treadmill, taking an aerobics class, punching a heavy bag, or lifting weights. How such activities have acquired a reputation as being stress relievers is that engaging in them causes one to focus on these activities—rather than whatever personal issues had been consuming their psyches. Worry can be defined as mental stress, so any distraction serves the purpose of temporarily getting your mind off of the subject or event that is consuming or otherwise bothering you. But mental angst is not the same as metabolic stress, which is a physiologic cause and effect scenario. In some instances, mental angst can result in psychosomatic disorders if the problem that is vexing you is not faced, dealt with, and resolved. Indeed, mental worries can in some cases lead to ulcers, which is a physiological event. But if we are talking about a stressed physiology, doing things that will only exacerbate such a condition, such as overeating or overexercising, is a step in the wrong direction. Don’t misunderstand me—exercise can help to reduce cellular inflammation, but only to a degree that can easily be overwhelmed by one’s continuing to consume foodstuffs and ingest agents that keep one’s system in a perpetually inflamed (stressed) state.

DUMPING GLYCOGEN

In the quest to reduce metabolic stress, not all exercises are created equal. A certain type of exercise can actually serve in some capacity to reduce cellular inflammation somewhat, but only if it is performed in a manner that taps the muscle fibers that store the most glycogen (polymers of glucose or blood sugar). These fibers, known as Fast-Twitch fibers, are typically the fibers of last resort for your body to employ during a given exercise. If the load placed on working muscles is great enough, your body will cycle through all (or most) of its three classes of muscle fibers (Slow-Twitch, Intermediate-Twitch, and Fast-Twitch) to keep your muscles working at such a high level of effort. If the energy level your muscles are outputting is high enough, your body will recruit most of these fibers instantaneously; if the energy level you are outputting is low, then your body will eventually recruit them over a longer period of time. Either method will take you to this destination; the latter simply takes longer to get there and runs up a greater amount of wear and tear (and hence metabolic inflammation) in the process. But it is important to know that once you tap these glycolytic fibers you are causing them to dump a huge amount of sugar (glycogen) from your muscles, thereby creating empty reservoirs for your circulating blood sugar to refill. Without this glucose evacuation, when you consume foodstuffs that are converted to glucose quickly, insulin must be brought in immediately to help process the rising level of sugar in the bloodstream, but since the muscles (which, along with the liver, store most of the glycogen in the body) are still filled with untapped glycogen, insulin will have no option but to transform the new glucose into additional fat cells, thus making you fatter. Prior to this, however, insulin will first attempt to enter your muscle cells with these glucose molecules but will be denied entry. However, the insulin will keep “scratching at the door” of the muscle cell and this “scratching” is what causes the inflammation on the lining of the cell/s.

This is why popular lower-intensity endurance (or “cardio”) exercise can actually be a step in the wrong direction if one is seeking to reduce one’s cholesterol levels in any meaningful way. An endurance activity requires an endurance fiber, which happens to be a Slow-Twitch fiber, and Slow-Twitch fibers just happen to store the least amount of glycogen of the three classes of muscle fiber, meaning that it takes almost no time for the miniscule amount of glycogen they possess to be emptied and replaced, which leaves one suffering from high cholesterol levels right back where he or she started from prior to performing his or her cardio workout.

And, if a person continues to perform his cardio (i.e., low-energy output, longer duration) exercises frequently enough his body will eventually get the message that the other two fiber types are not required and will send a signal to downsize the unused Intermediate and Fast-Twitch muscle fibers, which are the human body’s biggest reservoirs for glucose storage. If this person continues to perform his endurance exercise, these large glucose-storing fibers will continue to diminish in size over time through lack of use, thus giving his person’s body no exit from the systemic inflammation, save severe dietary restriction. This is why walking as an exercise really does little to nothing from a health standpoint once one initially adapts to it. While it’s true that to a couch potato walking may be a demanding activity at first, his body will adapt quite quickly to this activity (for reasons I’ll get to shortly) and, over time, will require less of his higher-order fibers to participate in the activity, landing the walking advocate in the position indicated above.

Again, the single best cure for systemic inflammation and the higher cholesterol levels that attend it is to stop inputting into one’s system the materials that are causing the inflammation in the first place. The reduction or elimination of the foodstuffs and exogenous agents that are causing one’s system to become inflamed will do more for one’s health than any exercise program. Exercise is fine—after you’ve tended to the lifestyle issues.

EXERCISE & THE NON-RESPONDER

In returning to a point made earlier, it must be remembered that apart from the problems indicated above with regard to exercise and stress, there is also the fact that there exists a percentage of people who, despite their diligence in investing hours, weeks, months, and years in the venture of exercise, will never experience any of the benefits that exercise has the potential to bestow. A study out of Finland revealed that there exists a portion of people who simply do not respond to strength training and some people who simply do not respond to endurance (aerobic) exercise. There are even those who simply do not respond to either. The researchers took 175 sedentary adults and put them on a 21-week exercise program. The subjects were divided into groups that jogged, walked, lifted weights, or combined the three activities. The fitness and muscular strength of the subjects were measured prior to and at the conclusion of the study and, to the surprise of the researchers, the data was all over the board, running from a -8 percent (meaning that some became 8 percent less fit than they were prior to starting the exercise program) to a +42 percent.¹ Some of those who lifted weights became stronger, but some didn’t. Some of those who jogged and walked developed more aerobic endurance, but some didn’t. In other words, it was revealed that some people respond very well to the stimulus of exercise, but (and this is a big “but”) some do not respond at all or actually lose ground in terms of their fitness and health.

Jamie Timmons, a professor of systems biology at the Royal Veterinary College in London, in her review of the foregoing study indicated in the Journal of Applied Physiology that, “there will be millions of humans that cannot improve their aerobic capacity or their insulin sensitivity, nor reduce their blood pressure through exercise.”² Now if ever there was an “ah-ha!” moment with regard to the fitness industry, surely this was it. Think about the implications of this study for a moment; if you engage in an exercise program—irrespective of whether it is aerobics-based or strength-based, there exists the possibility that the activity you are engaging in will make you less aerobically fit, weaker, or, at best, do nothing for you at all. Now ask yourself why such a landmark study never made it onto the front covers of the nation’s fitness magazines. Not one of them carried it. The reason is self-evident: it would have been bad for business.

The results of this study were/are so remarkable that it left many people looking for reasons as to why the conclusion came out the way that it did. In an attempt to look into the matter more thoroughly, New York Times writer Gretchen Reynolds contacted Dr. Timmons, a researcher who has studied the role of genetics in exercise response. Reynolds reported the following about her conversation with the good doctor, citing a study conducted by Dr. Timmons to determine who would respond most favorably to endurance exercise. Timmons’s study revealed that:

Researchers accurately predicted who would respond most to endurance exercise training based on the expression levels of 29 different genes in their muscles before the start of the training. Those 29 genes are not necessarily directly associated with exercise response. They seem to have more to do with the development of new blood vessels in muscles; they may or may not have initiated the response to exercise. Scientists just don’t know yet.

In other words, this issue is as intricate as the body itself. There is a collection of compelling data that indicate that about half of our aerobic capacity “is genetic,” Dr. Timmons wrote in an e-mail. “The rest may be diet,” or it could be a result of epigenetics, a complicated process in which the environment (including where you live and what you eat) affects how and when genes are activated. “Or it could be other factors,” he said. Although fewer studies have examined why people respond so variously to strength training, “we have no reason to doubt,” he said, “that genetics play a similar role.”³

It has come more clearly into focus over the years that an individual’s physical characteristics are determined more by his or her genetics and lifestyle choices than it is the particular exercise program he or she happens to embrace. Unfortunately, many of the dietary and lifestyle choices that most people make put them on a road to ill health from which no trainer or exercise program can extricate them.