If you have been keeping up with the posts on our site, you have already come across several serious conditions which regular intake of resveratrol can help combat. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and problems caused by obesity are a few of these.
It turns out that studies prove resveratrol combats diabetes as well. Diabetes is a disease which can occur both in genetic patterns and due to unhealthy habits. There are three types of diabetes, with Type 2 being the most common. Let’s look a bit further into diabetes before outlining what resveratrol does to mitigate the disease in the body.
Diabetes
All three types of diabetes are the result of the body failing to recognize, respond to, or produce the hormone insulin. Insulin is the hormone which lowers glucose levels in our blood. It does this by encouraging glucose uptake – or absorption – into muscles and tissues within our body.
Insulin also plays an important part in telling our bodies when it is time to store excess glucose, and when it is time to stop producing glucose, specifically from the liver.
High blood sugar levels (glucose levels) cause the bodies of diabetes victims to react in several different ways. They may have dry skin, excessive hunger and thirst, drowsiness, and most seriously wounds both external and internal are slow to heal.
What Resveratrol Does
As with so many of the conditions it has been shown to combat, resveratrol controls diabetes in several ways.
First, it activates the enzyme SIRT1. This hormone is known to increase the sensitivity of our bodies to insulin, so it is allowed to do its job causing glucose absorption.
Resveratrol also helps lower blood sugar levels on its own, by encouraging that absorption into the tissues we were talking about earlier as well as telling the liver to stop producing the sugar.
Resveratrol sends messages to the kidneys and the liver which tell these organs to metabolize carbohydrates faster, skipping the storage of excess carbs as glucose.
Finally, resveratrol activates the hormone AMPK as well as SIRT1. AMPK is the enzyme which speeds up the absorption of glucose, and also oxidizes fatty acids in our blood.
Once again, resveratrol has been shown to help fight one of the developed world’s more serious diseases. With many known diabetes treatments causing further problems (such as hypoglycaemia), it may be the best hope for the diabetes sufferer.
