Fat deposits in our body work exactly like a battery: whenever there is a surplus of food in our bloodstream, insulin hormone is released which diverts this food into storage. This happens within specialized cells which are able to turn carbohydrates and proteins into a molecule which is the perfect battery pack: incredibly light and chemically stable, fat can be deposited anywhere and everywhere in our body.
Energy storage is something all organisms do. It is essential for survival. In fact there are even species who depend 100% on their one and only, non-rechargeable battery pack for the entirety of their lifetime. They have no mouth or digestive tract to ingest food and convert it into energy. Some moths and other insects belong in this category: they are born with a single-use battery pack which is enough to last just a few days for them to mature, mate and complete their lifecycle. Other animals yet have such long-lasting and efficient batteries that allow them to survive without food for a whole season, or even a year. Crocodiles, bears and many more fall into this category.
An average human has at least 2-3 weeks’ worth of fat reserves on their body, at any given point in time. We are biologically designed to stay pretty much starved most of the time, bar the occasional lucky encounter with a food source. Although there is a new theory almost every week about how our metabolic system is meant to work, one fact is certain: it was never meant to stay switched on, continuously loaded with food, as it is today. Like any machine, our metabolism will break if it is constantly in use, and this is how diabetes develops. Allowing plenty of time in-between meals is essential for our body to rest, enzymes to fall back down to normal levels, and essential repair work to take place in the body. This quiet period, also called our “fasted” state, is actually not quiet at all. A lot happens, as the body can take the opportunity in between our meals to focus on taking stock of basic housekeeping. Our fasted state is when we actually get stuff done. It is when we have the most energy, the most clarity of thought and creativity, and get the most work done. A constant surplus of food on the other hand, makes us constantly dumb and lethargic as our metabolic system burns out. By keeping our metabolism always on, always busy, it eventually breaks. The excess fats and sugars from the surplus food lead to permanent damage to the machine, as it becomes unable to handle all the volume.
One of the dysfunctional ways in which our body reacts, is to go into denial: it stops listening to insulin altogether, which is one of the most important molecules in our body. Insulin regulates our metabolism, telling it when to stop or start. When under stress from its overconsumption of food, our body decides to shoot the messenger, insulin, and this is when diabetes begins. Diabetes patients either produce no insulin, or have developed resistance to it, or both. Their metabolic system is completely dysregulated.
Diabetes is a metabolic disease which exists only in humans. It is a disease of overconsumption, just like capitalism, a system of dysfunctional overconsumption of resources, permanent growth, and the conversion of these resources into fat deposits of currency. The global obesity epidemic is a direct result of the permanent fed state that our hungry and destructive economic system is in, filling us with needs, foods and desires beyond what our bodies, and our minds, can handle. This greed and addiction to growth have led to hyperglycemia in both our economies and our bodies. We live in a condemned civilisation that could have a stroke at any point, and it is no wonder that our own health is reflecting this. In order to cater to its addiction to profit, capitalism has created the perfect consumers: always hungry for products, depressed, insecure, unsatisfied, searching for the latest fashion. Their appetite is voracious, and they are all killing themselves.
There is little difference between economic and biological diabetes. At the molecular level, as more food comes in through the bloodstream, our cells become desensitized to it and unable to regulate their appetite, much like a rich person becomes desensitized and addicted to money: no amount is ever enough.
When our body’s voice of reason, insulin, is effectively decomissioned by diabetes, strange things happen which resembles what is happening to our planet under capitalism. As the distribution of sugar and fat becomes dysregulated, within the same individual you can have arteries being clogged with our body’s currency, glucose, and cells who are starving – much like on our dysfunctional Earth, where money accumulates in invisible bank deposits around the world, while other areas of the planet are starved of funding. If fat and sugar are the energy storage currencies in our bodies, then the trillions of unused cash sitting in banks across the world is the fat of our late-stage diabetic economic system.
Just like most forms of diabetes, capitalism was preventable. It could have been prevented by resisting the urge to eat absolutely every resource on the planet. Rather than pacing ourselves, we have converted Earth into a food conveyor belt system that serves just one, fat species. Our circumference has become the equivalent of an extinction black hole. Multiple species that we ate into extinction have been converted over the ages exclusively into human fat. As half of humanity goes into hyperglycemic sleep, and the other half into hypoglycemic convulsions, the planet suffers from the toxic by-products of its ailing metabolism. CO2, the poison which profit produces, is the excess sugar in the planet’s sick metabolic system. It is a life-giving molecule which, under normal circumstances, is food for the plants of the planet. Just as we are suffocating our bodies with excess sugar and fat, we are suffocating the planet with an oversupply of CO2 it cannot metabolize. Just like our excess sugar, it has nowhere to go. It just sits there, wreaking havoc on the climate system.
Just as our profit-driven food industry has deliberately sent millions of people to their early graves by exposing them to addictive foods, our fossil fuel industry has condemned this planet to its demise by addicting us to transportation, energy, plastic, and just about everything our consumeristic society uses or buys. We are servicing the fossil fuel industry with almost every action we take in our daily life. We need to get the sugar out of our system. This house that we made out of candy, our civilization, is starting to melt in the heat of its own by-products. The only solution is to close down the candy factory and start over.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Tsakraklides is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist, and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter, @99blackbaloons, and enjoy his books, A New Earth: The Apocalypse Locus, The Unhappiness Machine and Other Stories about Systemic Collapse,
Beyond The Petri Dish: Human Consciousness in the Time of Collapse, Apathy, and Algorithms, and others.
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