Author: TomsWrite

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Insulin Resistance

After adding the previous post to my newsletter, blog and social media I thought to create a chapter on Insulin Resistance from the various references to it in my book. After all, if blood sugar spikes and insulin resistance are so destructive to our health, it pays to point up the factors we can implement to reduce our exposure to them. This is the result. If you would like access to a compendium of my over 17 years of gathering health tips, here is the link to my book:  https://howtolivethehealthiestlife.com/

(Also read the preceding chapter Glycemic Index for more important data on insulin resistance.)

Frequent blood sugar spikes force the pancreas to release more insulin repeatedly. Over time, this constant demand can cause insulin-producing cells to wear out or stop working properly. This contributes to insulin resistance and reduced insulin production—both key drivers of Type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes develops gradually, with insulin resistance and inflammation starting decades before symptoms appear.

High blood sugar and insulin levels dramatically speed up the aging process and are primary risk factors for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, reduced immunity and more.

Fasting Insulin Level

According to Dr Mercola, your fasting insulin level should be under 3. The higher it is the more at risk you are for a bunch of diseases, type 2 diabetes being a major one.

Antibiotics

A primary contributor to insulin resistance and diabetes is dysfunctional gut barrier. This can be caused by a single course of antibiotics.

Artificial Sweeteners

Research has repeatedly shown that artificial sweeteners promote insulin resistance and related health problems just like regular sugar does, including cardiovascular disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease.

Ashwagandha

Ashwagandha is an adaptogen, meaning it helps your body adapt to challenges by balancing your immune system, metabolism and hormonal systems. The root reduces cortisol levels, restores insulin sensitivity and helps to stabilize your mood.

Body Weight

Mitri noted that excess weight is tied to inflammation, “Someone with a higher BMI may have more difficulty responding to insulin,” she said, noting that this can worsen insulin resistance.
From: https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/french-fries-versus-baked-potatoes-one-raises-diabetes-risk-20-percent-the-other-doesnt-5897553

Butter

And this presentation is very informative and enlightening on the benefits butter has even in what many would consider excessive daily amounts. Weight remained constant, glucose and insulin levels went DOWN on 10 spoons of butter a day!
From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhNGRB14TTE

Carbohydrates

If you were to elect one single bad guy to target right now, day one, it would have to be simple carbohydrates. Because every starch turns into sugar as soon as it hits your blood stream carbs are just sugar in disguise. They set the stage for insulin resistance.

Chromium

The mineral chromium enhances insulin activity playing a major role in the regulation of insulin release and its effects on carbohydrate, protein and lipid metabolism. Chromium also assists in metabolism of carbohydrates.

Diets

…all of the diets listed require that sugar and ultra processed foods be avoided. That grains are either eliminated or severely curtailed. Which means that the “western habitual diet” was least beneficial at improving a lipids profile, insulin resistance and inflammatory markers.

Want to get healthy? Stop eating ultra processed foods, sugar and excess grains.

From: https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15010076

Interesterified Fats

Due to all the bad press trans fats have received of late, food manufacturers in the US are replacing trans fats with interesterified fats. Similar to the hydrogenating of vegetables oils, this produces hard fats as well as molecules that do not exist in nature. They contain chemical residues and other hazardous waste products full of free radicals that cause cell damage.

“Studies show that interesterified fat raises your blood glucose and depresses insulin production. These conditions are common precursors to diabetes, and can present an even more immediate danger if you already have the disease.

“After only four weeks consuming these fats, study volunteers’ blood glucose levels rose sharply – by 20 percent. This is a much worse result than seen with trans fats.

“Natural vegetable oils that have been processed in any way will create problems for your body at the cellular level. These fats are no longer in their natural state, and your body doesn’t know how to handle them. Your system will try to make use of them and in the process, these fats end up in cell membranes and other locations where they can wreak havoc with your health.“

From http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/12/24/Trans-Fats-Can-Be-Deadly.aspx

Food Sequencing

Read the chapter Food Sequencing to learn about the benefits of eating veggies and protein before starches.

French Fries

“French fries are typically deep-fried at very high temperatures, which can produce harmful compounds,” Mousavi said. One such compound is acrylamide, which is formed during browning and linked to inflammation, insulin resistance, and blood vessel damage.

Keto

While short-term ketogenic diets may aid weight loss, new research links prolonged ketosis to liver stress, impaired insulin secretion, and cardiovascular problems.
From: https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/food-cooking/studies-raise-questions-about-keto-s-impact-on-liver-and-heart-health/

Malnutrition and Hunger

When your body lacks the nutrition it needs, it sends hunger signals to your brain. These signals make you crave sugary, starchy junk foods that rapidly convert to blood sugar which stimulates insulin. Excess blood glucose is stored in the liver and muscles but they can only hold so much of it so the rest is stored as… …that’s right – body fat!

The solution are two-fold:
1. Don’t starve yourself so you fall victim to cravings.
2. Eat high nutrition foods, not empty calories.

Maltodextrin

The Carbohydrate That’s More Dangerous Than Sugar.

Glycemic Index:
Sugar…65
High Fructose Corn Syrup…87
Glucose…100
Maltodextrin…136

A Carbohydrate not classified as sugar, but acts like sugar in a much more deadly way because it spikes insulin….

Maltodextrin is a type of carbohydrate, but it undergoes intense processing. It comes in the form of a white powder from GMO rice, corn, wheat, tapioca or potato starch.

Maltodextrin is a polysaccharide derived from starch hydrolysis and used as a thickener and filler in processed food. On labels, it does not have to be listed as sugar or added sugar, even though it has a higher glycemic index & causes blood sugar to spike and contributes to insulin resistance.

Labeled not only as Maltodextrin, but also Modified Food Starch, Modified Corn Starch and within the “blanket term” Natural Flavors.

Food manufacturers add the powder to a wide range of processed foods such as artificial sweeteners, baked goods, yogurt, beer, nutrition bars, weight loss supplements, cereals, meal replacement shakes, low fat and reduced calorie products, condiments, sauces, spice mixes, salad dressings, chips, pie fillings and snack foods.

Starches

Some great data on how to do one of the most effective things you can do to reduce your insulin spikes.

Cook your rice, potatoes and pasta with a teaspoon of coconut oil, then cool it for 12 hours (24 is better) hours before reheating.

This simple process can increase the resistant starch content of rice by up to 10 times! The coconut oil interacts with the starch molecules, making them more resistant to digestion, while the cooling process further crystallizes the starch.

The body cannot process resistant starch so it becomes a probiotic, feeds the gut bacteria and more butyrate gets produced. This is great for reduced colon cancer risk.

From: https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/food-cooking/the-shocking-truth-about-white-rice-and-how-to-make-it-healthy-again/ and to view Dr Mandell’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxTIt43exM0

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Claire Sylvia

Claire Sylvia

She woke up craving beer. She’d never liked beer. Then came the chicken nuggets. And the green peppers. And a walking stride that wasn’t hers. Inside her chest: the heart of an 18-year-old boy who died with chicken nuggets in his jacket. What happened next made doctors run when they saw her.
May 1988. Claire Sylvia was dying.
At 47, the professional dancer could barely breathe. Primary pulmonary hypertension—dangerously high blood pressure in her lungs—was killing her. Her heart was failing from the strain.
Without a transplant, she had weeks. Maybe days.
Then Yale-New Haven Hospital called. They had a donor. Heart and lungs. She’d be the first person in New England to receive both organs at once.
The surgery took three hours. When she woke up, a reporter asked what she wanted most now that she’d received this miracle.
“Actually,” Claire heard herself say, “I’m dying for a beer right now.”
The words shocked her as they left her mouth.
She had never liked beer.
That was just the beginning.
Within days of leaving the hospital, Claire stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken—something she’d never done before—and ordered chicken nuggets. With green peppers.
She’d always hated green peppers. Would pick them out of any salad.
Now she craved them.
Her daughter noticed her walk had changed. Claire moved differently—a heavier, more lumbering stride. More masculine.
Her energy exploded. At 50, she backpacked through Europe, something the delicate dancer she’d been would never have considered.
She felt restless. Hyperactive. Like her heart was running faster than it should.
And she kept having the same dream.
A young man. Tall. Sandy hair. The initials T.L.
In one dream, she kissed him and inhaled him into her body.
She woke up knowing—somehow knowing—that Tim L. was her donor.
But transplant recipients are never told their donors’ names. Privacy laws protect both families.
The hospital refused to tell her anything except that the donor died in a motorcycle accident in Maine.
Claire couldn’t let it go.
Nine months after the transplant, she had another dream. In it, her friend Fred Stern dreamed about an obituary for Tim L. the night before they met at a local theater.
When she told Fred about the dream, he was stunned. He’d had the exact same dream.
They went to the public library together and searched through Maine newspapers from the week before her transplant.
And there it was.
Timothy Lamirande. Age 18. Saco, Maine. Killed in a motorcycle accident. The day before her transplant.
Claire stood there reading and felt her knees go weak.
Tim L. from her dreams was real.
She wrote to the Lamirande family. Asked if she could meet them.
They said yes.
When Claire walked into their home, Tim’s sisters gasped.
The way she moved. The way she carried herself. Her energy.
“It’s like meeting my brother all over again,” one sister said. “Seeing him alive.”
Claire started asking about Tim’s personality. His habits. His likes and dislikes.
The family confirmed everything.
Tim had been hyperactive since childhood. So energetic his parents kept him on a leash as a toddler or he’d run off. At 18, he was working three jobs while attending college.
And yes—he loved beer.
Claire mentioned her strange craving for chicken nuggets.
Tim’s sister stared at her. “Are you kidding? He loved them. But what he really loved was chicken nuggets.”
The green peppers?
Tim’s favorite.
Then the family shared one more detail.
When they collected Tim’s belongings from the accident, there was a box of chicken nuggets under his jacket.
He’d died with them.
Now Claire was craving the exact food that had been with him in his final moments.
The implications were staggering.
How could she crave foods she’d never liked? Foods that happened to be her donor’s favorites?
How could she dream about a man named Tim L. before she knew his name?
How could her walking stride change to match his?
Claire spent the next decade researching. She found other transplant recipients with similar experiences.
One woman received a heart and developed an inexplicable craving for the donor’s favorite foods.
A man received a kidney and suddenly took up his donor’s hobby.
A child received a heart and began having nightmares about the donor’s murder—details that proved accurate when investigators checked.
Claire formed a support group for transplant recipients. Not everyone experienced these changes—most wanted to forget about their donors and move on.
But enough did that she couldn’t dismiss it.
In 1997, she published her story: A Change of Heart: A Memoir.
The medical community was split.
Some doctors dismissed it entirely. Coincidence. Suggestion. The power of belief.
Others weren’t so sure.
Dr. Paul Pearsall documented 74 cases of transplant recipients experiencing personality changes matching their donors. Heart recipients seemed most affected, but kidney and liver recipients reported changes too.
The theory: cellular memory.
The idea that cells—particularly heart cells with their complex nervous system—might store memories, preferences, even personality traits.
It sounds impossible. Memories are in the brain, we’re told. Not in organs.
But the heart has 40,000 neurons. It sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to it. It responds to emotions before the brain registers them consciously.
What if organs remember more than we think?
Claire never claimed to fully understand what happened to her.
“I’m not saying I know the answer,” she wrote. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
The Lamirande family believed her completely.
Joan Lamirande, Tim’s mother, said: “As long as she was living, it was as if my son was still alive.”
Claire kept in touch with Tim’s family for the rest of her life. She’d call on his birthday. They’d share memories—hers from after the transplant, theirs from before.
She learned Tim’s favorite colors were blue and green. She’d been drawn to those colors since the transplant.
The Lamirandes were French Canadian. Claire developed an inexplicable desire to visit France.
On what would have been Tim’s 22nd birthday, Claire dreamed about 22 motorcycles revving up for a commemorative ride. She woke up, realized the significance, and asked a friend to take her on a motorcycle ride.
It was exhilarating, she said. Something the old Claire would never have done.
In 1998, ten years after the heart-lung transplant, Claire received a kidney transplant from a former dance partner.
The same thing happened.
She suddenly developed a love for cooking and baking—activities she’d never enjoyed. Her donor’s mother had been an avid cook.
“Doctors run when they see me,” Claire joked in interviews. “They don’t know how to take it.”
She appeared on Oprah, The Today Show, 20/20. Her book was published in 12 languages and made into a TV movie starring Jane Seymour.
Claire died in August 2009 at age 69, 21 years after receiving Tim Lamirande’s heart and lungs.
Joan Lamirande said through tears: “Now that she’s gone, I know that my son is gone.”
But Tim’s sister Jackie had said it best years earlier:
“Why would she dream about her donor unless God was trying to tell her who we were? To show that there was good out of everything.”
Science still hasn’t explained Claire Sylvia’s story.
Maybe it’s cellular memory. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s something we don’t have words for yet.
But one thing is certain: Claire Sylvia craved chicken nuggets and green peppers after her transplant.
Timothy Lamirande died with chicken nuggets under his jacket.
And that’s not a coincidence you can explain away.
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Robert Plant

Robert Plant

His name was Robert Plant, and on July 26, 1977, he received the phone call that would redefine everything he thought mattered.
He was in New Orleans with Led Zeppelin—the biggest band on Earth. They’d just sold out stadiums across America. Millions of dollars. Infinite momentum. The machine had no off switch.
Then his wife called.
The first call said their five-year-old son Karac was sick—a stomach virus, nothing unusual.
The second call came hours later.
Karac was dead.
Robert Plant—the golden god of rock, the voice that defined a generation, the man who seemed untouchable—fell apart in a hotel room half a world away from where his child had taken his last breath.
There was no warning. No goodbye. Just a sudden infection that killed a healthy five-year-old boy in a matter of hours while his father sang for strangers.
The tour was cancelled immediately. Plant flew home to England.
And when he arrived to bury his son, only one of his three bandmates showed up.
John Bonham—Led Zeppelin’s drummer—came to the funeral. Bonham’s wife Pat came. They stood with Plant’s family through the unbearable.
Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones did not come.
Different accounts exist about why. Some say Page was on a bender. Others say Jones was on vacation. Page later said, “We were all mates. We had to give the man some space.”
But Plant didn’t want space.
He wanted his friends.
Years later, Plant would say about that absence: “The other guys were from the South [of England], and didn’t have the same type of social etiquette that we have up here in the North that could actually bridge that uncomfortable chasm with all the sensitivities required.”
He was more blunt with tour manager Richard Cole: “Maybe they don’t have as much respect for me as I do for them. Maybe they’re not the friends I thought they were.”
Biographer Mick Wall wrote: “Until then, Robert was still in thrall to Jimmy and what he had created with Zeppelin. After that incident, Jimmy no longer held the same mystique for Robert. It was also the beginning of Robert having much more power over what the band did or didn’t do next. He truly no longer cared and therefore was ready to walk at any point.”
Something fundamental broke.
Plant retreated home with his wife Maureen and daughter Carmen. He stopped everything—the drugs, the alcohol, the persona. “I stopped taking everything on the same day,” he said later. “The most important thing to me is my family and when I got off my face, I found it difficult to be all things to the people that meant a lot to me.”
He told Rolling Stone: “I lost my boy. I didn’t want to be in Led Zeppelin. I wanted to be with my family.”
Plant applied for a job at a Rudolph Steiner training college in Sussex. He was serious about walking away from rock entirely. The man who’d sung “Immigrant Song” and “Whole Lotta Love” to millions wanted to teach children in a quiet English countryside school.
“I just thought: ‘What’s it all worth? What’s that all about? Would it have been any different if I was there—if I’d been around?'” Plant recalled. “So I was thinking about the merit of my life at that time, and whether or not I needed to put a lot more into the reality of the people that I loved and cared for.”
John Bonham convinced him to return—not with arguments about duty or money, but with friendship.
“After the death of my son Karac in 1977, I received a lot of support from Bonzo,” Plant said. “He had a six-door Mercedes limousine and it came with a chauffeur driver’s hat. We lived five or six miles apart, and sometimes we’d go out for a drink. He’d put the chauffeur driver’s hat on and I’d sit in the back of this stretch Mercedes and we’d go out on the lash. Then he’d put his hat back on and drive me home.”
Bonham would drive past police while drunk, and the cops would wave them through: “There’s another poor fucker working for the rich!”
“He was very supportive at that time, with his wife and the kids,” Plant said. “So I did go back for one more flurry.”
But Plant was different when he returned. The swagger was gone. The mythology felt obscene.
“I didn’t really want to go swinging around,” he said. “‘Hey hey mama, say the way you move’ didn’t really have a great deal of import anymore.”
Led Zeppelin released one more album—In Through the Out Door in 1979. Plant wrote “All My Love” about Karac, a song that became both tribute and testimony to what had been lost.
“I think it was just paying tribute to the joy that he gave us as a family and, in a crazy way, still does occasionally,” Plant told Dan Rather decades later. “His mother and I often… the memory gets… changes, the contrast and the focus changes as time goes on. It’s a long time ago that we lost him. 40 years ago.”
Plant and his wife had another son, Logan, in 1979. “We were blessed with another boy who came along about two years later and the two images are blurred. The definition between Karac and Logan is—it’s a tough one to chip through the two things, but he was a little nature boy, you know? He was a mountain man.”
In 1980, Led Zeppelin prepared for their first North American tour since Karac’s death.
On September 24, 1980, John Bonham—Plant’s closest friend in the band, the man who’d sat with him through the darkest grief—arrived at rehearsals and began drinking.
He didn’t stop.
By midnight, Bonham had consumed approximately 40 shots of vodka—roughly 1.5 liters of alcohol in 12 hours.
He passed out. Someone put him to bed on his side.
The next morning, September 25, 1980, tour manager Benji LeFevre and bassist John Paul Jones found Bonham dead. He’d choked on his own vomit during sleep. He was 32 years old.
On his last day alive, driving to what would be his final rehearsal, Bonham had told Plant: “I’ve had it with playing drums. Everybody plays better than me. I’ll tell you what, when we get to the rehearsal, you play the drums and I’ll sing.”
The North American tour was cancelled.
On December 4, 1980, Led Zeppelin issued a statement:
“We wish it to be known that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”
Led Zeppelin was over.
No farewell tour. No final album. No goodbye spectacle.
The most profitable band in rock history simply stopped.
For decades afterward, the offers came. Reunion tours worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Festival headlining spots. Record-breaking paydays. Every offer bigger than the last.
Plant said no to all of them.
Fans called him selfish. Ungrateful. Cowardly. The industry kept waiting for him to crack, to need the money, to miss the glory enough to resurrect the machine.
He never did.
Instead, Plant did something radical: he dismantled the voice that made him famous.
He lowered his range. Abandoned the scream. Explored folk, bluegrass, world music, African rhythms. He collaborated with Alison Krauss on Raising Sand—an album of quiet, intimate songs that won five Grammy Awards including Album of the Year.
Critics called it decline. Plant called it survival.
“I couldn’t be that man anymore,” he said. “He died with my son.”
People remember Robert Plant as the golden god of Led Zeppelin—shirtless, screaming, invincible. That image freezes him in 1973, before the damage, before the loss, before the choices that revealed who he actually was.
His real legacy is harder and more important.
He proved that sometimes the most shocking act isn’t destruction—it’s refusal.
Refusal to monetize grief.
Refusal to let momentum consume the people caught in it.
Refusal to resurrect something that only survives by killing parts of the people inside it.
This story matters because it exposes a truth most people live with quietly: the world will keep asking you to return to what worked, even when returning would destroy what’s left of you.
Plant didn’t fade away. He didn’t burn out in a dramatic collapse.
He stopped.
He walked away from the most profitable brand in music history because his child mattered more than the mythology.
He refused reunion tours worth hundreds of millions because he’d already learned what momentum costs.
He changed his art entirely because staying the same would have required becoming someone he could no longer be.
In an industry built on endless resurrection, on squeezing every dollar from nostalgia, on never letting the machine stop—Robert Plant’s decision to simply walk away remains the most radical thing he ever did.
Not the screams. Not the stadiums. Not the golden god mythology.
The refusal.
The quiet, permanent, non-negotiable refusal to sacrifice what remained of his humanity for what the audience wanted.
Forty-five years later, Robert Plant is 76 years old. He still makes music. Still tours. Still creates.
But he’s never been Led Zeppelin again.
And he never will be.
“Every now and again Karac turns up in songs,” Plant said in 2018, “for no other reason than I miss him a lot.”
That’s the real Robert Plant.
Not the golden god frozen in 1973.
The father who buried his five-year-old son, lost his best friend three years later, and chose to protect what was left rather than feed it to the machine that wanted more.
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Quote of the Day

“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
Henry Ford – Industrialist (1863 – 1947)

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HOW TO BLOCK GLUTAMINE — CANCER’S SECOND FUEL

How To Block Glutamine

Cancer survives by adapting. When sugar is limited, it switches to glutamine.  Science shows:
• Tumors rely on glucose + glutamine (Front Cell Dev Biol)
• Glutamine fuels cancer stem cells (Cancer Metabolism)
• Ketones cannot be efficiently used by cancer cells

Terrain-supportive strategies:
Balanced protein (not excess)
Ketogenic / low-glycemic nutrition
Anti-glutamine foods (sprouts, matcha, garlic, mushrooms)
 Intermittent fasting
Stress reduction
Starve the fuels — don’t starve the body.

Certain foods naturally interfere with glutamine metabolism:
Broccoli sprouts — sulforaphane downregulates glutamine transport
Green tea / Matcha — EGCG inhibits glutamine-dependent pathways
Garlic — sulfur compounds disrupt glutamine signaling
Medicinal mushrooms — reduce cancer stem cell reliance on glutamine
Lemon peel — polyphenols interfere with metabolic signaling