Chapter 8
A Tool in the Fight Against Metabolic Syndrome, Type 2 Diabetes, and Obesity

Metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes are an intertwined basket of health issues that add up to serious, and even life-threatening, consequences.

Our modern lifestyle has mired us in these diseases. Much of our collective problems are directly linked to the Standard American Diet (SAD) of high sugar and highly processed foods, a sedentary lifestyle, and unrelieved stress.

Read on to understand more and to learn how French grape seed extract can help you overcome these dastardly health risks.

Metabolic Syndrome

Let’s start with metabolic syndrome. This is a collection of symptoms – or health markers – that can cause heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, if they are not addressed.

There are five conditions that the medical profession generally agrees comprise metabolic syndrome:

• Large waistline: Belly fat is dangerous, pure, and simple. An apple-shaped figure and/or that dreaded beer belly are sure signs that you are at risk.

• High triglyceride levels: If your blood work shows your triglycerides over 150 mg/dL, or if you are on triglyceride-lowering prescription drugs, you are at risk. What this means is those excess carbohydrate calories you consume are stored in your fat cells. There is some evidence that high triglyceride levels contribute to atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries —and, at extremely high levels, to acute pancreatitis.

• Low levels of HDL cholesterol: HDL or the so-called “good” cholesterol is what you need to balance the effects of LDL cholesterol, which can increase the risk of heart disease. So, in the case of cholesterol, the higher the HDL number, the better. In men, this is at least 40 mg/dL and women, 50 mg/dL.

• High blood pressure: Elevated pressure of blood rushing through arteries can, over time, lead to plaque buildup as coronary artery disease, if your blood pressure is consistently over the ideal reading of 120/80 mm Hg. Medical science has recently adjusted those numbers to keep a “normal” reading of 140/90 mm Hg, although it’s safer to keep your numbers in that lower range.

• High fasting blood sugar: Even mildly high blood sugar can be a sign of early diabetes. When you awaken in the morning before you eat or drink anything, normal blood sugar should be between 70 and 100 mg/dL. Anything from 101-126 mg/dL signals impaired glucose tolerance, and anything above 126 mm/dL is diagnostic of diabetes. If you know someone who has a blood sugar monitor, it’s easy to do a nearly painless finger stick blood test. If not, your doctor’s office can do it, or have it done at any number of clinics.

If you have three or more of these risk factors, you have metabolic syndrome. The more of these risk factors you have, the greater your risk for heart disease, stroke, or diabetes.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2015 that nearly 35% of the American adult population and 50% of the population over the age of 60 have metabolic syndrome.

Obesity

Please read over the list of metabolic syndrome risk factors above. All of them are directly associated with obesity. As a nation, we are becoming fatter and fatter. And it turns out; it’s not just a national problem. It’s global.

Nearly four in ten (39.6%) of American adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s even more alarming that this figure is almost triple for the worldwide obesity levels. Another startling fact? Nearly three-quarters of American men and 60% of American women are overweight or obese. Statistic show that 30% of our children are obese.

Obesity is a disease. Not only does obesity increase the risk for metabolic syndrome, according to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, it also vastly increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Sound familiar?

Obesity also increases the risk of cancer, especially colon and breast cancer, along with osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, infertility, and fatty liver disease.

The underlying causes of obesity and the ways to fight it could be the subject of several books, but let me say that a healthy diet and active lifestyle could quite literally save your life.

Inflammation is part of the link here, which will become clearer when we start talking about grape seed extract in a few pages. Inflammation, the silent killer, is a huge cause of chronic diseases, including obesity.

Exciting new research just published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology shows that grape seed OPCs have another superpower rare in the plant world: they can cross the blood-brain barrier and suppress leptin, the appetite-stimulating hormone that contributes to overeating and obesity.

French grape seed extract supplementation gives you one of the most formidable tools science has against obesity, a disease that is extremely difficult to treat and reverse.

Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes was once called “adult onset diabetes” and was mostly the domain of people over 50. In recent years, that signature has been dropped because we’ve experienced an epidemic of obesity in children and teenagers. The result has been a similar alarming rise in type 2 diabetes among young people. More than 90% of people with this form of diabetes are overweight.

The increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes has closely paralleled the obesity epidemic, with nearly 10% of the adult population (30.2 million people in 2012) with the disease. However, 28% of them do not know they have it, according to the CDC. Another 84 million or more have elevated blood sugar and are at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes in the next five years. Worse yet, CDC researchers project that 40% of Americans currently alive will develop type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes.

Type 2 diabetes occurs when your body can’t use the insulin naturally produced by the pancreas (called insulin resistance), increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. Its other tragic side effects include blindness, poor circulation that can lead to amputations, kidney failure, impaired mental function, Alzheimer’s disease, and more.

In people with diabetes, excessive blood sugar links to the flexible heart muscle like cement through a process known as glycation (AGEs – advanced glycation end products). This results in serious heart problems over time, including heart failure and heart attacks.

The Terrible Trio

Diabetes, obesity, and heart disease are so intimately connected that many doctors treat patients with any of these health issues as though they have all three. This often means they are given 6, 8, 10, or more prescription drugs, each of which has its own side effects requiring more medication to control. It’s easy to see that this is a downward spiral that will eventually have fatal consequences.

All of this may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Read on and learn how you can overcome all three of these terrible diseases.

French Grape Seed Extract Vanquishes the Terrible Trio – and More

Yes, inflammation is a key underlying cause of obesity, heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, so it only makes sense that a powerhouse anti-inflammatory like grape seed extract would give the answers we need to vanquish them.

But the FGSE goes much farther than that.

We’ve said before: We believe that the single most important thing you can do is to follow a healthy eating plan and adopt a healthy lifestyle that includes a moderate amount of exercise, good sleep, and stress management to manage your weight and prevent diabetes. But it is abundantly clear that grape seed extract can help you get back to good health and stay there.

For example, a small, but important pilot study in Thailand found that people who ate a high carbohydrate meal and then took 300 mg of grape seed extract reduced blood sugar levels after a high-carbohydrate meal. The OPCs in grape seed can help stop the roller coaster of high and low blood sugars that lead to insulin resistance and, eventually, to type 2 diabetes.

Important animal studies from France and Spain confirm that overweight hamsters dramatically reduced their waistlines with grape seed extract, even when they were fed a high-fat diet. In addition, the grape seed extract reduced blood sugars, increased the ability to use insulin produced by the pancreas, and lowered blood fats—all important stepping stones to eliminate and prevent heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Further research confirms that grape seed extract can protect against damage caused by diabetes, including diabetic neuropathy that can lead to amputations.

In an impressive Saudi Arabian study, patients with fatty liver disease, commonly associated with obesity, were given 100 mg of standardized grape seed extract for three months. Their liver function and liver enzyme greatly improved, including severely limiting the number of fat cells that were able to infiltrate the liver. Positive effects were even seen in patients given only 50 mg daily.

And Chinese researchers found that grape seed extract has a powerful antioxidant effect against those dreaded AGEs (advanced glycation end products) that are at least partly responsible for the deadly link between diabetes and heart disease and other complications.