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Improve Insulin Health and Prevent Diabetes
By: Charles Poliquin
 
 
Improve insulin health and prevent diabetes by strength training and increasing your physical activity level. A new study in the journal Nature found a new hormone that is produced during muscle contractions that elevates fat burning and turns white fat into brown fat. Higher levels of this new hormone—called irisin—also promote insulin sensitivity and improve glucose tolerance, even when on a high fat diet, making exercise essential for speeding up your metabolism and keeping you energized.
 
 
You’re probably wondering why turning your white fat into brown fat would be a good thing. White fat makes up subcutaneous fat that is right below the skin, and visceral abdominal fat that is deep inside the body and surrounds the organs. Subcutaneous fat is inert and just sits around making you look fat, whereas visceral fat is metabolically active, producing substances called adipokines that increase blood pressure, create more fat, and decrease insulin sensitivity. Visceral fat is bad, bad, bad.  In contrast, brown fat is not so bad because it is metabolically active in that it requires energy and burns calories. Its purpose is to generate heat and keep us warm and is found in larger proportions in children and babies.
 
The new study found that during exercise—any time you perform muscle contractions—the body produces a substance called PGC1, which in turn produces a protein called FNDC that breaks apart into pieces. One of those pieces is the hormone irisin, and it goes straight to white fat cells and turns them into brown fat.
 
The brown fat then contributes to faster metabolism and glucose tolerance, which can lead to more fat burning.
 
 
For example, in the study, researchers fed mice a high-fat diet and gave them injections of the FNDC protein that breaks into irisin. This improved the animals’ insulin health and glucose tolerance, and the mice didn’t develop diabetes despite being on a diet that would normally produce the disorder. It’s likely scientists will turn the FNDC protein into a medication and use it to fight diabetes and obesity, but you can get the “irisin” advantage simply by increasing your activity level and performing strength training. 
  
A follow-up experiment by the same research group found that humans who performed an aerobic exercise program had much higher levels of irisin at the end of the study than at baseline when they had been sedentary. That’s good news, but researchers ask the question why aerobic exercise rarely produces significant fat loss since based on what they learned about irisin, it does increase metabolism and fat burning. 
  
I suggest the answer is obvious. Although physical activity and aerobic exercise shift white fat to brown and support insulin health, this type of activity doesn’t build muscle, nor does it produce the volume or intensity of muscle contractions characterized in strength training programs. With training, you intensely and repeatedly contract the muscles, producing extreme force, thereby producing even more irisin, burning more fat, building muscle, and elevating protein synthesis. This in turn has a much greater effect on insulin health and overall metabolism. This theory hasn’t been tested yet by researchers, but it will undoubtedly be clarified in future research.
For best results with fat burning and insulin health, perform a periodized strength training program so that you make continual progress and force the body to adapt. Regular physical activity throughout the day, such as a vigorous walk outside or housecleaning, will also help because even though this more moderate form of activity won’t have a dramatic fat loss effect, it will support insulin health throughout the day, while increasing your irisin levels. Avoid being sedentary as much as possible because lack of movement, even if just for a few hours, has the opposite effect, lowering your metabolism, glucose tolerance, and fat burning.