Diabetes & Muscadine Resveratrol.

There's more to diabetes than most folks imagine. People concerned with the disease know that diabetics either don't produce enough insulin ... or that the insulin they do produce is not doing its job of getting glucose inside the body’s cells. Either way, the sugars that diabetics eat with their food builds up in the blood stream.

But what is less well known is that there are some very subtle, cellular changes which lead to diabetes in the first place, and then to the progression of the disease. These microscopic changes affect the smallest atoms and energy cells of the body … and combine to create the disease we know as diabetes.

Importantly, once you understand these cellular triggers there is hope for improvement of symptoms for people with all three stages of diabetes: the pre-diabetes stage (also known as metabolic syndrome); the Type 2 stage (known as insulin resistance); and the ultimate stage similar to Type 1 diabetes (where the body no longer produces viable insulin).

Pre-diabetes, Type 2 diabetes and resveratrol.

Your body contains trillions of cells. Many of these contain mitochondria, which are the ‘motors’ your cells use to generate energy for the body to function. That energy is what maintains our body temperature, keeps our heart pumping and enables us to walk around.

The main fuels those mitochondria burn are glucose (which is delivered to the cells by insulin) and oxygen. But just like a car pumps out carbon monoxide as a waste product of burning petrol and oxygen, your mitochondria also produce a waste product … which is called free radicals.

To get technical, free radicals are atoms with an unpaired electron ... and those atoms then crash around your cells looking for a free electron to get themselves back in balance. While those free radicals are spinning around looking for an electron, they can cause damage to cells and DNA.

How this relates to diabetes is that people without diabetes have enough ‘antioxidant enzymes’ (1) to clear up dangerous free radicals, but people with diabetes are less able to produce those endogenous antioxidant enzymes. Scientists call this condition ‘oxidative stress’. The result of oxidative stress for diabetics is twofold:

First, the build-up of free radicals in the pancreas slowly disables the pancreas from creating insulin-producing Beta-cells (remember: insulin is what carries glucose around the body). The inability to produce Beta-cells is a root cause and symptom of diabetes.

The build-up of free radicals throughout the body can also damage the insulin-receptors on your body's cells so they no longer accept the glucose that any insulin is carrying around and trying to deliver.

Second, this leads to excess glucose in the blood because the body loses the ability to metabolise or ‘burn’ the sugar into energy (which is why diabetics often feel tired). This excess blood sugar then acts as a toxin which leads to more free radicals than the antioxidant enzymes can cope with, so the adult diabetes progresses and becomes more severe. This steady deterioration eventually leads to the complications associated with diabetes. There is more information on those potential complications below.

In short, the bad news is that excess glucose leads to excess free radicals. So the body becomes less able to deal with the cause of the problem. For diabetics and pre-diabetics, oxidative stress and dealing with sugar has always been a downward spiral.

(1) http://www.news-medical.net/health/Antioxidant-Enzyme-Systems.aspx

Muscadines could be a natural part of your diabetes strategy.

If you are concerned about pre-diabetes and Type 2 adult diabetes, your physician will tell you that key ways to the condition are to:

• Lose weight and try to achieve your optimal BMI.

• Do exercise or maybe yoga, depending on your physical abilities.

• Cut down on sugars and carbs, in order to reduce the free radicals caused by insulin resistance.

Nature's way of dealing with free radicals is antioxidants. Antioxidants are mainly fruit-based molecules, like the vitamin C you get in oranges. These antioxidants 'mop up' free radicals so they can be excreted from your body before they do any damage.

But not all antioxidants are created equal. Some antioxidants and related phyto-nutrient molecules can not only clear free radicals, but also play a part in repairing some of the damage which free radicals have caused.

The muscadine grape has two particular molecules which might be of interest to people are overweight and worried about diabetes, have been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome pre-diabetes, or type 2 adult diabetes.

1. Muscadine grape seeds contain pro-anthocyanadines which promote the production of antioxidant enzymes. This leads to a reduction in oxidative stress, leading to a state where Beta-cells in the pancreas can produce more insulin and so maintain a healthier blood sugar level. Pro-anthocyanadines can also protect blood fats from oxidation, protecting the heart and arteries from complications of diabetes.

2. Muscadine grape skin contain Resveratrol, which can help the body mimic the effects of weight loss. The muscadine is America’s strongest source of grape resveratrol. Muscadine grapes are known to have the highest oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC) at 6,800, which further strengthen its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, compared to other berries, fruits and nuts.

Our Muscadinex MX1 supplement is made only with muscadine seeds and skin. The sugary flesh and juice of the fruit - which is used for wines and jams - is not used in our supplement. We also add 5mg of BioPerine® pepper extract to each capsule, which can significantly increase the bio-availability of resveratrol up to 1544%.

Because we’ve removed the water and made a powder, you’re getting concentrated health benefits.

• The sugary flesh is removed. So you get the ‘red wine’ resveratrol benefits of the skin, but without any alcohol.

• Because the powder is fine, it is more easily digested, so you get maximum value for money.

• Plus our powdered product means you can enjoy muscadine health benefits all year round!

Importantly, you get the healthy anti-oxidant and polyphenol molecules in their natural proportions (muscadines are also a rich source of the polyphenols ellagic acid and quercetin). At Muscadinex we say that Mother Nature is in charge of product development. We don’t add anything … or take anything away from the healthy ingredients.

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Next up. Read 'The Ten Health Benefits of Muscadine Grapes'. You'll be amazed at what muscadines offer.