Drinking and Type 1 Diabetes. A long discussion, with some good 'splainin

I won’t gloat.

But this guy is all over the place.

He says some things right:

I bet your endo never told you, but, glucagon does not work when you are drunk.

But some of the stuff he is saying is irrelevant, and missing some pertinent information. Like this :arrow_down:

But the liver only does one thing at a time. Everyone and everything else just has to take a number and stand in line until it’s finished the job at hand. And on that list of 500 jobs is “remove excess insulin.” Unless, of course, alcohol is in line first. Then the insulin just builds up in your blood while your liver is dealing with the alcohol.

Clearing of insulin for diabetics happens after it has bound with the Tyrosine Kinase Receptor and triggered its action. It is then degraded by the insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE - insulysin or insulin protease). After it is no longer functional it is cleared from the body as a waste-product by the liver and kidneys.

But all of that is completely irrelevant to the discussion. What he is saying - that the liver clears insulin from the body - is missing an important point. It is cleared after it is used.

A drunk liver or sober liver is not going to remove insulin until it has opened up the cell’s doors for glucose uptake and been used. So it doesn’t have any affect on the drinking issue being discussed. Once the insulin has been used, having it floating around in the blood stream doesn’t do anything.

The idea that for diabetics a drunk liver lets insulin “build up” in the blood instead of removing it like a sober liver would, that is not relevant to the issue, and is missing an extremely important point.

If he is talking about the liver “removing excess insulin” by releasing glycogen, a) it isn’t really removing it, it is counter-acting it, and b) that hormonal response to lows is generally blunted in Type 1’s anyway, so it still a somewhat irrelevant point.

Read this:
biochemistry-what-does-insulin-actually-do

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