The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marksissons and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

25 ways to improve your insulin sensitivity.

Insulin does a lot of important things for us.

It pulls glucose from the blood and fritters it away into our cells to be burned for energy

or stored as glycogen.

It prevents hyperglycemic toxicity to neurons, pancreatic cells, the arterial walls, and the generation of excessive levels

of reactive oxygen species. It even promotes muscle protein synthesis and helps augment

muscular hypertrophy, especially following resistance training. Clearly, we need insulin. Without it, we die,

as type 1 diabetics readily do without an exogenous source. But insulin has other effects,

like inhibiting the breakdown of body fat into free fatty acids for energy production.

Although locking fatty acids into body fat sounds terrible,

it isn't evidence of insulin being malicious.

Lipolysis is temporarily blunted

so that we can burn or sequester the glucose coming in.

Once the glucose is handled,

lipolisis resumes. We oscillate between fat burning and glucose

burning, seamlessly switching fuel sources when needed. Sure, we're not burning any fat when insulin

is elevated, but once our insulin levels normalize, we'll be back on track. When you're insulin sensitive, this is pretty much how it works.

You secrete enough insulin to get the job done, but not so much that you gain weight and stop

burning fat.

What if a person secretes too much insulin in response to a glucose load?

What if, for whatever reason, and there are dozens of possible culprits,

...