Allie Beatty has been presenting a very thought provoking topic on her video blog (alliesvoice.com) which condemns the removal of C-peptide from the insulin provided to diabetics as a threat to the actual health of the insulin user. Is anyone else knowledgeable about this? It sounds like removing all the vitamins and fiber when wheat flour is processed and not adding any back in, which we now know is a health hazard.
I haven’t seen Allie Beatty’s video blog, but I was talking about this to a friend of mine in MD/PhD school recently. What I more or less got from our conversation is that in the body insulin starts out as an insulin/C-peptide combo. Then the body splits the insulin and C-peptide apart. That means that there’s a constant ratio between how much insulin your body produces and how much C-peptide. This makes me think that it wouldn’t be that difficult to add C-peptide to our daily regimen. The dosing would correlate to our insulin doses. I think this will be the next big breakthrough in type 1 diabetes care. Heart attacks are the biggest killer in type 1 diabetes, and C-peptide plays a role in keeping our arteries flexible.
So what is the difficulty in adding the C-peptide back in? If it’s a known beneficial substance, and it is automatically ‘created’ in the insulin purification process, therefore readily available, what’s the hold up in supplying it to type 1’s who become increasingly deficient in it?
From what I understand from Alliesvoice (mind you my connection is slow so I haven’t watched it “well”) the c-peptide is removed because type 2’s already have too much. This makes it usable for both types. They would/should make insulin for type 1 and insulin for type 2.
hmm that’s interesting, I thought C-Peptide was just a by product of insulin production ( its present in pro insulin to ensure correct protein folding and then removed once correct structure is obtained) I haven’t heard anything about artery benefits for C-Peptide ( although I haven’t really done any research into the matter) but it couldnt be too hard to add this into our insulin. The only thing would be a necessity to double our doses, as 1 unit would now only be half as potent, and this might lead to some problems with infusion sites etc. because of the larger injections.
What Michelle Curtis said makes sense. Also, they only discovered C-Peptide pretty recently. Developing drug therapies takes years.