Glucagon
Glucagon is also a potent hormone, and its actions are opposite to insulin. Glucagon stimulates various mechanisms to raise the blood glucose level when it sinks too low. If you don’t have enough circulating glucose, your cells cannot function. The brain, in particular, is dependent on glucose as its chief form of energy.
Glucagon increases your ability to burn fat as a fuel source. However, if insulin is present in high amounts, fat burning cannot take place effectively. If you are overweight, chances are that you have an imbalance between insulin and glucagon. Insulin dominance is common in most Westerners who get more than enough to eat.
Insulin dominance leads to obesity as well as a host of other problems such as high cholesterol, atherosclerosis and heart disease, high blood pressure, and even the growth of cancer cells. The human race has stayed alive throughout the thousands of years of food scarcity and famine due to the effects of insulin. In primitive man, insulin and glucagon formed a tightly regulated equilibrium to keep blood sugar and metabolic processes in balance.
However, we now have an abundance of food in most English-speaking countries. Our primitive instincts to eat everything in sight to store for a rainy day are now a hindrance, not a help to survival. We can’t alter our biological make-up but we are smart enough to alter our behavior! Understanding our biology is the first step to making positive changes in our lifestyle in order to lose weight and regain health.