Magnesium improves beta-cell function

Written by Dr Mark Sircus on April 19, 2024. Posted in Current News

Mg²⁺ regulates insulin secretion in pancreatic β-cells. In pancreatic β-cells, Mg²⁺ directly influences glucokinase activity by acting as a cofactor for adenine nucleotides

The product of this enzymatic reaction, G6P, undergoes glycolysis, generating ATP. Magnesium, when used as a medicine, improves beta-cells ability to compensate for variations in insulin sensitivity in non-diabetic individuals with hypomagnesemia.

Pancreatic beta cells that do not produce sufficient insulin in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D) are not permanently damaged during the early stages of the disease.

We already know that magnesium has been shown to manage hyperglycemia, hyperinsulinemia, and insulin resistance (IR) action.

Type 2 diabetes is a progressive disease over time, and previous research has suggested beta cell failure is the root cause of decreasing insulin production and increasing the severity of T2D.

Magnesium is a second messenger for insulin action, and insulin itself has been demonstrated to be an important a regulatory factor of intracellular magnesium accumulation.

Every day, more than 4,000 people are newly diagnosed with diabetes in America. Nearly 115 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes. The World Health Organization says that about 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, and 1.5 million deaths are directly attributed to diabetes each year.

Both the number of cases and the prevalence of diabetes have been steadily increasing over the past decades.

However, diabetes is the disease it is today because of the devastating effects of medical treatments. Doctors do not really know what they are dealing with. They do not believe it can be cured, so they never cure diabetes.

Doctors regard diabetes as incurable; thus, all effort is directed at controlling or managing it. However, with other good doctors, I believe that most cases are curable and that early diabetes 1 and most diabetes 2 are possible to cure with a suitable diet, mega doses of magnesium, plenty of sun, pH balancing with bicarbonates, and Carbon Dioxide Medicine.

Added aids include breathing control, iodine, selenium, sulfur, and hydrogen gas.

These medicines can all help yield a cure, but drastic diet changes are still required. A more natural diet must be adopted as much as possible. For some, this is easy and a small price to pay for regaining health, while for others, it is not worth living without their favorite foods.

However, what can be done with the above natural medicines even when non-optimal diets are continued is amazing. Heavy magnesium supplementation deserves superhero medicine status when it comes to diabetes and prediabetes.

Diabetics are striving to manage their lives while living with the disease without a clue that a significant part of the reason is magnesium deficiency, which is endemic in modern populations.

Doctors refuse to tell them, unfortunately, that it is much easier to manage or avoid diabetes if magnesium levels are topped off daily. However, Beta cell function inevitably gets worse over time after Type 2 diabetes is diagnosed because doctors are miserable failures in treating this common disease.

Researchers have found that patients with good glycemic control have high magnesium levels. Magnesium is closely related to vitamin D and is necessary for the transport and activation of vitamin D in humans. Combined supplementation Vitamin D and magnesium improve glycemic control in patients with diabetes.[i]

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the nation’s leading voluntary health organization fighting to bend the curve on the diabetes epidemic and help people with diabetes thrive.

For nearly 80 years, the ADA has driven discovery and research to treat, manage, and prevent diabetes while working relentlessly for a cure. Still, somehow, they have left people to suffer endlessly because of their magnesium deficiencies and because they do not warn people about the dangers of sugar.

Type 2 diabetes is a reversible condition, and remission can be achieved and sustained. Beta cells can start working again. Research Professor Taylor, Director of Newcastle University’s Magnetic Resonance Centre and co-primary investigator of the DiRECT trial, said:

“This research provides real hope for people with Type 2 diabetes that they may be able to return to healthy blood glucose levels. We now know why the body can recover.“

The previous assumption that insulin-producing cells are damaged forever in people diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes is incorrect. A further study by Professor Taylor and his team, presented at a Diabetes UK Professional Conference, found that the pancreas increases in size in people in remission.

How About Type One?

Type 1 diabetes is estimated to affect around 1.25 million children and adults in the United States. The condition arises when the immune system mistakingly attacks the pancreas’s insulin-producing cells or beta cells, or so it is thought.

Still, the possibility remains that a combination of chemical and heavy metal toxins, acid pH conditions, and nutritional deficiencies are the real sludge hammers that crash the Beta cells.

University of Florida Health researchers have made a striking discovery: some of the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin may remain for decades in people with Type 1 diabetes.

After studying the pancreata of those with Type 1 diabetes, researchers found insulin levels were low to undetectable among most — an expected finding given the absolute need for insulin therapy for all such patients.

However, researchers found that the amount of proinsulin, a protein precursor to insulin, was near-normal and comparable to that of people without diabetes. The researchers also noted that a few insulin-positive cells remain in the pancreata of long-term Type 1 diabetes patients.

Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden found that nearly half of patients who had been living with diabetes for more than 10 years produced some insulin.

Moreover, these insulin-producing patients also had higher blood levels of immune cells that produce a protein called interleukin-35 (IL-35), which is believed to suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation.

Dr. Daniel Espes of the Department of Medical Cell Biology at Uppsala University and colleagues reported their findings in the Diabetes Care journal.

If remission is achieved, the pancreas’s insulin-producing capacity can be restored to levels similar to those in people who have never been diagnosed with the condition.

Professor Knut Dahl-Jørgensen and PhD student Lars Krogvold are leading a research project that “Found that the insulin-producing cells still have the ability to produce insulin when they are stimulated in the lab,” Lars Krogvold explains. “But what’s new is our additional discovery that the cells increased their ability to produce insulin after a few days outside the body. Indeed, some became roughly as good at making insulin as cells from people without diabetes. Some of the hormone-producing cells in the pancreas, the beta cells, produce insulin when they are stimulated by sugar. Previous work has shown that you do not immediately lose your ability to produce insulin when you are first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.”

“Our findings might mean that insulin production can be partially restored if we can find a way of stopping the disease process. The potential for insulin production is greater than previously thought. The risk of developing health problems later on is lower for those who manage to maintain a certain level of insulin production. Less supplementary insulin means that you will be better off as a patient,” says Krogvold.

“The really exciting thing here is that insulin production increases when the cells are removed from the body and placed in an environment that is not diabetes-inducing. That your cells produce a little insulin the day after you have been diagnosed with diabetes is not unusual. What surprised us was that the cells increased their ability to produce insulin over time and that after a few days, the level was approaching normal,” says Krogvold.

Fasting Is One Way to Produce Non-Diabetic Environment

US researchers say a fasting diet can trigger the pancreas to regenerate itself. In animal experiments, restoring the organ’s function—which helps control blood sugar levels—reversed the symptoms of diabetes.

The study, published in the journal Cell, says the diet reboots the body. Experts said the findings were “potentially very exciting” as they could become a new treatment for the disease. These experiments showed that diet regenerated pancreas beta cells.

Dr. Valter Longo, from the University of Southern California, said:

“Our conclusion is that by pushing the mice into an extreme state and then bringing them back—by starving them and then feeding them again—the cells in the pancreas are triggered to use some kind of developmental reprogramming that rebuilds the part of the organ that’s no longer functioning.”

These mouse experiments benefitted both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

What is the biology behind remission?

Magnesium, bicarbonate medicine, and sugar reduction illuminate the biology behind remission. Because serum magnesium does not reflect intracellular magnesium (it’s all in the cells), the latter making up more than 99 percent of total body magnesium, most cases of magnesium deficiency are undiagnosed, yet mainstream medical science admits as high as 67 percent of populations are magnesium deficient.

It is easy to conclude that 100 percent of patients with chronic diseases are magnesium deficient. High doses of magnesium alone can remove the diabetic diagnosis from mild cases.

Supplementing with magnesium has been found to improve b-cell function and insulin secretion in pre-diabetic subjects with low serum magnesium levels.

The progressive failure of the pancreatic b-cells to secrete enough insulin to overcome insulin resistance is associated with worsening of glycaemic control and treatment failure; therefore, preservation of b-cell function is an essential component of T2DM management.

Thus, magnesium supplementation can slow disease progression in T2DM by improving or maintaining pancreatic b-cell function. Therefore, assessing magnesium status in diabetic patients is an important aspect of treatment, and magnesium supplementation must be a key component of any clinical treatment strategy aimed at supporting diabetic patients.

Elevated blood glucose increases glucose uptake into pancreatic B-cells. This causes intra-cellular magnesium to bind to adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which triggers the closure of potassium channels and the opening of calcium channels and results in membrane depolarization.

This, in turn, triggers the release of insulin into the bloodstream.

Moderate carbohydrate restriction can reduce markers of chronic inflammation associated with atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes. When type I diabetics fast appropriately, their blood sugar levels often return to normal and may remain normal as long as only selected non-allergenic foods are used.

With other foods, however, blood sugar levels may immediately go very high.

Dr. Nancy Appleton wrote:

“One of the biggest offenders of inflammation is ingesting sugar. By sugar, I mean table sugar, brown sugar, raw sugar, turbinado sugar, honey (even raw), maple sugar, corn sweetener, dextrose, glucose, fructose, and any other word that ends in an “ose,” barley malt, rice syrup, liquid cane sugar, concentrated fruit juice, and others.

Don’t be fooled by the name organic when it applies to sugar. Sugar is sugar, organic or not, and the following will explain exactly what can happen in the body when you eat as little as two teaspoons.”

“Every time a person eats as little as two teaspoons [of sugar], we can upset our body chemistry and disrupt homeostasis, the wonderful balance in the body needed for maintenance, repair, and life itself. One of the many changes this upset body chemistry causes is for our minerals to change their relationship with each other. Sugar in the amount we eat today (over 150 lbs, or over 1/2 cup a day) continually upsets our body chemistry, causes the inflammatory process, and leads to disease. The less sugar you eat, the less inflammation, and the stronger the immune system to defend us against infectious and degenerative diseases,” Appleton concludes.

According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, sugar poses a health risk—contributing to around 35 million deaths globally each year. So high is its toxicity that it should now be considered a potentially toxic substance like alcohol and tobacco.

Its link with the onset of diabetes is such that punitive regulations, such as a tax on all foods and drinks that contain “added’’ sugar, are now warranted, the researchers concluded. They also recommend banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on selling such products.

Dr. Robert Lustig, a leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country, makes a hard case for defining sugar as a toxin or a poison.

Dr. Lustig is not only talking about the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal—technically known as sucrose—but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

Dr. Lustig thinks America needs to go to rehab for sugar addiction. According to brain scans, sugar is as addictive as cocaine, the California-based endocrinologist told CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”

It causes a euphoric effect that triggers dopamine, the chemical that controls pleasure in the brain. The average American eats a third of a pound of sugar every day—130 pounds a year. Lustig says his research proves that the sweet stuff causes heart disease and cancer, as well as type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Sugar excess, chemical and heavy metal contamination, mineral deficiencies, and dehydration work powerfully to create inflammation in the body, and this starts a long process that ends up with people facing major diseases.

Dr. Luc Tappy says, “The equivalent of the fructose in 8-10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day—is a pretty high dose, leaving people to become insulin-resistant, and triglyceride increases in just a few days.”[ii]

In 2005, a report by the Institute of Medicine acknowledged that plenty of evidence suggested that sugar could increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes—even raising LDL cholesterol, known as the “bad cholesterol.” Dr. Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California-Davis, believes that a calorie isn’t just a calorie and that overconsumption of high-fructose corn syrup increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.

According to her research, when a person consumes too much sugary food and drink, the liver converts some of that fructose into fat. This fat can lead to an increase in dangerous LDL cholesterol, forming plaque in the arteries.

Too much sugar is also linked to many kinds of cancers, including breast and colon cancer.

Conclusion

Thirteen years ago I published New Paradigms in Diabetic Care and in about a month will publish an online course on treating diabetes with the book contained in the last lesson.

I have discovered much in terms of treatment possibilities in these years so the course will be a hands on practical course in treatment using all the substances mentioned in this essay and more.

See more here drsircus.com

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