The Hidden Triggers of Insulin Resistance and How to Restore Balance

• Insulin is produced by special cells in your pancreas called beta cells — Insulin moves through your bloodstream and attaches to receptors on each cell’s surface. Once connected, it signals your cells to open channels so that glucose can enter and power all the chemical reactions that keep you alive.

• When everything works well, insulin levels naturally rise after you eat a meal — Your pancreas senses an increase in blood sugar from the foods you’ve just eaten — especially carbohydrates — and it responds by releasing insulin. This insulin quickly ushers sugar out of the bloodstream and into your cells, preventing excessively high blood sugar levels.

• At the same time, insulin keeps your body’s energy production stable — This allows you to think, play, learn, and do everything else without feeling tired. Even though insulin’s work is done on a microscopic level, the effects are enormous. From clear thinking and physical movements, everything depends on your cells having the right amount of energy.

• A big reason insulin matters so much is that it ties directly into how your body stores fat and uses muscle — It even signals your brain about how hungry or full you feel. If your body needs more energy later, insulin also helps store some of that sugar in your liver or muscles as glycogen which is a special form of stored sugar in your muscles and liver.

At the right time — when you’re active or during the hours after you’ve finished a meal — your body can easily tap into those stored reserves. This entire system is orchestrated by insulin, making it one of the key players in your overall health. Whether you’re eating an apple or a bowl of ice cream, insulin’s job is to ensure that what you eat translates into energy, helping your cells keep up with the demands of daily life.

• It’s like trying to pour more water into a clogged sink — While the water might eventually drain, the blockage underneath remains, causing ongoing problems. Meanwhile, if you keep eating sugar and living in an environment with mitochondrial poisons, your cells keep struggling, and you rely more and more on these quick fixes.

• True healing won’t happen unless you clean up the mess inside the mitochondria — If your environment stays filled with harmful substances, and your food remains high in sugar and unhealthy fats, the fundamental damage keeps piling on, even if medicine is holding your blood sugar at safer levels.

• Using insulin or other medication can be lifesaving in some cases — However, it doesn’t restore real metabolic health if the deeper issues remain. In other words, you may see your blood sugar numbers go down, but the trouble inside your cells lingers, and you stay on a path toward diseases associated with insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction.

• This prevents you from collapsing from extremely high blood sugar — However, it sets you up for long-term damage such as fatty liver, nerve problems, and a higher chance of diseases like Type 2 diabetes. Kids see sugary foods everywhere — birthday parties, vending machines, and fast-food menus. It’s no wonder so many people grow up never realizing the potential harm they’re doing to their inner power plants.

• Fortunately, knowing about this process early on gives you a big advantage — You can make better decisions, like choosing water over sugary drinks and eating more fruits and vegetables at mealtimes.

• Over time, your cells become progressively less responsive to insulin’s signals — Your pancreas senses that glucose is not getting inside your cells and responds by making even more insulin, hoping a higher level of it might fix the problem. At first, this extra insulin might succeed, but it rarely, if ever, addresses the root cause of the “rust” inside the lock.

• This process doesn’t happen overnight — It typically starts in early childhood, especially if you eat a diet is high in processed sugars, or if there’s too little exercise to help burn off the extra fuel. Insulin resistance almost always begins silently, with no obvious signs. People might still have normal blood sugar levels for a while because the pancreas is working in overdrive.

• However, this high-insulin state leads to weight gain, especially around the waist — It also triggers mood swings and energy crashes after meals. Eventually, if your cells stay resistant for too long, the pancreas might become exhausted, and that’s when blood sugar starts to climb to unhealthy levels.

• The type of sugar you ingest matters — There’s a big difference between eating a piece of whole fruit, which has fiber and nutrients that help slow sugar absorption, and drinking a soda or eating candy packed with refined sugar.

The latter floods your bloodstream with glucose. Without fiber or other helpful nutrients, your blood sugar spikes quickly, forcing your pancreas to release a lot of insulin. Over time, these repeated surges in insulin numbs your cells to the hormone’s effects.

• Another key contributor is the type of fat you eat — Seed oils like soybean and corn oil have become part of nearly every processed food. These oils degrade and oxidize easily, especially when heated, forming harmful byproducts that harm your cells and impair their ability to respond to insulin.

• These oils also change the composition of your cell membranes — This further complicates how your insulin receptors work. Combine that with the fact that many people are exposed to environmental contaminants — like certain plastics that release chemical compounds — and to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from electronic devices, and you have a recipe for metabolic disaster.

• Other factors that contribute to insulin resistance — Additionally, modern lifestyles often include chronic stress, inadequate sleep, and not enough movement. All of these factors increase the likelihood of insulin resistance. Stress hormones, such as cortisol, make your cells less responsive to insulin when they remain high for too long. Poor sleep can also disrupt hormones that regulate hunger and blood sugar.

• Your brain and body rely on a steady supply of glucose — Most adults need somewhere around 200 to 250 grams of it every day. This isn’t an optional requirement; it’s absolutely essential for keeping your cells and organs functioning properly.

• What happens when you deprive yourself of the carbohydrates you need? Your body resorts to creating glucose in other ways. While this might sound like a handy trick at first, it often involves triggering the release of stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, and glucagon.

• The hormone that raises the biggest red flag is cortisol — Cortisol, which spikes when you’re emotionally stressed, also surges when your body senses it’s not getting enough glucose from your meals. In either case, the hormone’s action is identical: it breaks down muscle tissue to harvest amino acids, which are then converted into glucose. This process keeps your blood sugar high enough to survive, but it sacrifices precious muscle mass in the process.

Over the long run, this muscle breakdown contributes to frailty and loss of strength, especially as you age. Think of it as your body’s emergency measure. It’s great in a pinch but problematic if it becomes a daily occurrence.

• Cortisol is harming your metabolic health — You might feel energetic at first when you drastically cut carbs, but beneath the surface, cortisol is chipping away at the very tissues you need for mobility, balance, and metabolic health.

That’s why it’s wise to include healthy, whole-food carbohydrates — like fruits, and white rice — rather than eliminate them entirely. By doing so, you provide your system with the glucose it requires without forcing your body to tear down muscle.

• How to get your HOMA-IR score — Unlike other cumbersome procedures, HOMA-IR only requires two basic blood tests done first thing in the morning before you eat: one for fasting glucose and one for fasting insulin levels. These tests are relatively affordable and widely available at most labs. Armed with those numbers, you then plug them into a straightforward formula to get your HOMA-IR score:

• The goal is to see just how hard your body is working to keep your blood sugar in check — If your HOMA-IR is higher than 1.0, it’s generally a warning sign that you might be edging into insulin resistance territory. The lower your score, the better your insulin sensitivity, so even values that hover around 1.0 deserve some attention if you’re looking to optimize your health.

• The beauty of HOMA-IR lies in its simplicity — You don’t have to schedule multiple visits or endure complicated test procedures. You wake up, don’t eat or drink anything other than water, head to the lab for a quick blood draw, and get your results shortly after. Alternatively, Mercola Labs has a dried blood spot card that allows you to prick your finger after you get up and put drops of blood on a card and mail it in, which is far more convenient and less expensive.

• It’s a far cry from the gold-standard research method known as the euglycemic hyperinsulinemic clamp — This requires participants to be hooked up to an IV for hours. In the clamp procedure, researchers administer insulin and glucose simultaneously, measuring exactly how much glucose is needed to keep blood sugar at a steady level when insulin is being pumped in.

Although extremely accurate, this process is time-consuming, expensive, and inconvenient, making it unfeasible for routine monitoring in a clinical or everyday setting.

That’s why HOMA-IR remains such a powerful tool in both scientific research and personal health management: it balances accuracy with practicality. It’s not a perfect snapshot — no single test can capture the full complexity of your metabolic health — but it’s solid enough to highlight when your body starts resisting insulin’s signals.

• If your cells don’t get glucose, they send signals to let your body know they’re hungry — Your brain receives these signals and responds by telling you to eat more. But if you eat more refined sugar or processed foods, blood sugar spikes again, your pancreas tries to produce even more insulin, and your cells resist even harder. This vicious cycle can go round and round for years.

• As your cells resist the action of insulin, your body switches to burning more fats as an energy source — But if that switch is not carefully balanced, it can lead to issues like high triglyceride levels, changes in cholesterol, and additional stress on your liver.

• Your liver is a major player here — When it becomes insulin resistant, it struggles to properly regulate fat and glucose. This leads to fat building up inside your liver, a condition known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and the domino effect continues.

This then impacts how your other organs function. Many people end up with high blood pressure, systemic inflammation, and a weakened immune system, all because insulin’s job is being compromised day in and day out.

• This downward spiral also extends to your gut health — The community of helpful bacteria in your gut are disrupted by poor diet, plastics, and synthetic chemicals. A troubled gut lining then causes harmful substances, like endotoxin, to leak into your bloodstream, further fueling inflammation. Inflammation, in turn, makes cells even more insulin resistant, which propels the cycle forward.

• Over time, this reduced capacity makes your mitochondria less efficient — They begin to produce fewer molecules of the energy currency known as ATP. Without enough ATP, cells can’t perform all their normal tasks, which affects tissues throughout your body — from your muscles to your brain.

• Your mitochondria also need a stable environment to function properly — Insulin resistance often leads to an environment of increased oxidative stress. When your cells are unable to handle glucose correctly, there’s a higher chance of harmful byproducts building up. These byproducts, called “reactive oxygen species” or ROS, are not automatically bad — they are part of normal metabolism.

However, too many of them damages your cell membranes, proteins, and even DNA. This kind of stress can further disrupt the function of the mitochondria, creating a feedback loop: unhealthy mitochondria add to insulin resistance, and insulin resistance keeps stressing the mitochondria.

• Scientists have also noted that insulin resistance can alter how cells burn fat for energy — In a healthy state, cells can switch smoothly between burning sugars and fats. However, when insulin signals aren’t getting through, that switch doesn’t happen as smoothly.

This leads to a buildup of partially burned fuel in the mitochondria, which increases reductive stress. Reductive stress, in turn, worsens oxidative stress. Also, toxins, like those found in plastics or introduced by heavily processed foods, directly harm your mitochondria, making them more vulnerable.

• Another key dietary factor is limiting or completely avoiding damaged fats — These include those found in vegetable oils such as soybean, corn, and canola oil. These seed oils can break down under heat and release substances that harm cells and disrupt insulin signaling.

• Environmental factors are also crucial — Plastics release chemicals that act like hormones or otherwise disrupt normal bodily functions. Reducing plastics in your kitchen — for example, by using glass containers or stainless-steel bottles — will lower your exposure.

• Minimize unnecessary EMF exposure — Turn off devices when not in use or keeping them as far away from you as possible. Your cells can thrive when they aren’t bombarded by stressors day and night.

• Eliminate processed foods to protect your gut microbiome — Gut health often improves when you swap out processed foods for whole, nutrient-rich meals that include vegetables, healthy fats (like grass fed butter and coconut oil), proteins, and complex carbohydrates. A healthy gut means fewer inflammatory signals, which translates to better insulin sensitivity.

• The good news is that many of the remedies are within reach — Replacing processed foods and snacks with whole foods, and harmful seed oils with healthy cooking fats like butter and coconut oil, reducing exposure to plastics and EMFs, and getting more physical movement every day are all practical strategies that help prevent and reverse insulin resistance.

• Remember that we’re not demonizing sugar altogether — In the context of whole foods — like fruits — sugar is packaged with fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other beneficial compounds that slow down its release into the bloodstream. The real problem arises when sugar is refined, extracted, and consumed in large amounts without those protective factors.

Pair that with other stressors, like poor sleep, chronic stress, and toxic chemicals, and you can see how the body’s delicate balance can be easily upset. Addressing insulin resistance is akin to mending an essential bridge in your metabolism, one that allows for the smooth flow of energy into the cells.

• Small changes can have enormous effects — Life is busy, and change can seem daunting, but small daily adjustments can accumulate to produce significant results. For example, a single day of choosing water over sugary beverages can reduce that insulin spike and give your body a chance to recalibrate. Over time, as your cells become more sensitive to insulin’s signals, your energy levels stabilize, and your overall resilience improves.

• When glucose isn’t being burned properly, your body has to protect itself from dangerously high blood sugar — To do that, it finds alternative routes to get rid of or transform the extra sugar. One of these backup routes is known as the sorbitol pathway (also called the polyol pathway).

• This important enzyme converts glucose to sorbitol — In this pathway, an enzyme called aldose reductase converts glucose into a sugar alcohol called sorbitol, which is then changed into fructose by another enzyme.

At first glance, this might sound like a clever solution — rather than letting blood sugar run wild and harm your cells, the body funnels some glucose into another chemical pathway. However, just because it’s a backup plan doesn’t mean it’s always good news.

• When the sorbitol pathway kicks into high gear, large amounts of sorbitol build up in tissues that don’t normally handle it — Like nerves in your fingers and toes or the lenses of your eyes. Sorbitol is sticky and tends to pull water into the cells, which can make those cells swell and become damaged over time.

• What happens when there’s excessive amounts of fructose? The liver stores it as fat, leading to fatty liver disease. So, the body is stuck picking between a rock and a hard place: high blood glucose can cause harm right away, but converting that glucose into fructose only harms you more slowly.

Your body uses this quick fix strategy to prevent you from dying in the short term from excessively high blood sugar. But as this pattern continues, you start risking long-term damage.

• This damage includes many issues — Insulin resistance grows worse, liver problems occur, and other disorders like heart disease could develop down the line. It’s not something that usually makes you drop dead immediately, but it does wear your system down, resulting in disease and a shortened lifespan if the cycle isn’t stopped.

• This surge of fructose can then feed into the sorbitol pathway in a different way — Instead of helping your body “take a break” from high glucose, an overload of fructose creates an environment where there’s always too much sugar of one kind or another. Whether it starts as glucose or fructose, once your cells are overloaded, the sorbitol pathway works overtime.

The same scenario that applies to glucose overload applies to fructose overload: consistently pushing too much sugar (from any source) into your cells will make your body scramble for ways to protect itself.

• Clearing sugar from your bloodstream becomes more difficult due to insulin resistance — If insulin resistance is already present — meaning your cells aren’t responding well to insulin — it becomes even harder to clear sugars from your bloodstream. Extra fructose ramps up the pressure, and you end up with sorbitol and fructose swirling around, forcing your liver to work overtime and harming nerves, eyes, and other tissues.

• Your mitochondria also remain under strain — Reductive stress lingers because too many loaded electron carriers are waiting in line, and not enough are being used effectively for energy production.

• Shifting sugar into the sorbitol pathway might temporarily reduce blood sugar levels — However, the original problem — impaired mitochondrial function — never actually goes away. When this cycle of insulin resistance, high blood sugar, and sorbitol buildup persists for weeks, months, or even years, it sets the stage for chronic metabolic dysfunction.

• Lowering your blood sugar with medication will only address the symptoms — The deeper issues — like overwhelmed mitochondria and ongoing reductive stress — remain. If those aren’t fixed, your body will keep seeking detours, activating more stress responses, and damaging delicate tissues along the way.

• Another key step is improving your insulin sensitivity — This can be done by eating balanced meals with enough protein, fiber, and healthy fats, staying physically active, getting good quality sleep, and avoiding constant stress. When your insulin sensitivity is better, glucose can enter cells more easily via the normal “highway,” making the sorbitol pathway less necessary.

• Remember, not all carbohydrates are the enemy — White rice, fruits, and vegetables contain important nutrients and fiber that help regulate how quickly sugars enter your bloodstream.

That means your pancreas doesn’t have to pump out as much insulin at once, and your cells don’t get overwhelmed with incoming sugar. With proper balance, your body has less need to rely on backup plans like the sorbitol pathway, and you reduce the chance of ending up in that uncomfortable cycle of damage and stress.

Ultimately, understanding the sorbitol pathway and the role of fructose isn’t just about memorizing new vocabulary. It’s about realizing that your body works like a finely tuned machine that has multiple ways to handle fuel.

• Different types of fiber have different functions — While fiber is generally considered beneficial, not all forms of fiber work the same way in every person’s body. In individuals who have impaired gut health or insulin resistance, most fibers will feed harmful bacteria in the colon, leading to a rise in endotoxins — compounds that fan the flames of inflammation throughout your body.

• Processing affects the quality of brown rice — When brown rice is processed into white rice, the outer bran and germ layers (which contain the majority of the fiber and certain fats) are removed. This bran is rich in fiber that may be beneficial for some people, but for those already dealing with excessive pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria in their gut, this fiber becomes food for the wrong microbes.

As these bacteria feast, they produce more endotoxins, which can move through the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream. Your body then mounts an inflammatory response, which can worsen insulin resistance and put extra stress on your mitochondria.

• Individuals with insulin resistance often have compromised gut health to begin with — The delicate balance of bacteria in their intestines is already off-kilter, and even otherwise healthy fiber can feed the bacteria that trigger harmful cascades of inflammation.

• Why white rice is better for most individuals — While removing fiber from rice might seem counterintuitive — since fiber is usually recommended to keep digestion smooth — it’s better for people with these specific health challenges to reduce fiber sources that worsen endotoxin production. White rice, stripped of most of its bran and germ, is easier for your body to digest and less likely to aggravate bacterial imbalances.

• Another crucial difference between white and brown rice involves the types and amounts of fats present — Brown rice, along with many other whole grains, contains oils that are relatively high in omega-6 fats. Although small amounts of omega-6 fat is essential, most people in modern societies consume far too much.

• Excess omega-6 shifts the balance of fats in your cell membranes and promotes mitochondrial damage — This is particularly relevant for those suffering from insulin resistance and reductive stress, because a backup in electrons in the mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) will further hamper your mitochondria’s ability to produce energy.

Mitochondria need a stable and well-regulated environment to function at their best, and constant exposure to inflammatory signals degrades their performance, making insulin resistance worse.

• White rice, having most of its bran removed, ends up being much lower in these omega-6-rich oils — This means that by opting for white rice over brown, you’re not only sidestepping certain problematic fibers but also reducing your intake of extra omega-6 fats that can make mitochondrial dysfunction and insulin resistance worse.

• This doesn’t mean white rice is free of all concerns — It still breaks down into glucose, so portion control and overall dietary balance remain important. But in a world where many people already battle too much inflammation, too many harmful gut bacteria, and too high a load of omega-6 fats, white rice is a cleaner, simpler carbohydrate source.

It’s also worth noting that white rice has been a staple in many cultures where metabolic conditions like obesity and diabetes were once rare. Historically, people in these regions paired white rice with protein, vegetables, and other nutrient-dense foods, making sure not to rely solely on rice for their nourishment.

• Start eating healthy — That means cutting back on vegetable oils and seed oils, soft drinks, and processed foods with artificial ingredients, and eating more nourishing foods like vegetables, fruits with their natural balance of nutrients, and clean proteins. This helps your mitochondria burn fuel more smoothly.

• Another important step is moving your body daily — Whether it’s sports, dancing, or other activities, being physically active helps your cells use stored glucose.

• Over time, these changes can reverse the pattern of relying on the sorbitol pathway and building up harmful fructose — The idea is that if you supply your cells with good fuel and keep them from being overrun by poisons, your body won’t have to keep looking for backup pathways that cause further damage.

• Methylene blue helps your body utilize glucose more efficiently — It temporarily allows the mitochondria to burn glucose more efficiently, instead of turning it into fructose or letting it build up in the blood. As such, it can help with the immediate stress on the system.

• Methylene blue is not a magic remedy — If someone goes back to guzzling soda and consuming chemical-laden foods right afterward, they’ll soon be back in the same predicament.