Type 2 Diabetes Quotes

Coffee, even the decaffeinated version, appears to protect against type 2 diabetes. In a 2009 review, each additional daily cup of coffee lowered the risk of diabetes by 7 percent, even up to six cups per day.23

Because. Cupcakes make everything a little better. Except for type 2 diabetes, I guess.

The key to the proper treatment of type 2 diabetes is to get rid of the excess sugar, not just move it around the body. The problem is both too much glucose and too much insulin.

fasting is the simplest and surest method to force your body to burn sugar.

If the situation is getting worse, then the only logical explanation is that our understanding and treatment of type 2 diabetes is fundamentally flawed.

The root cause of the hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes is high insulin resistance.

The simplest way to look at all these associations, between obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and Alzheimer's (not to mention the other the conditions that also associate with obesity and diabetes, such as gout, asthma, and fatty liver disease), is that what makes us fat - the quality and quantity of carbohydrates we consume - also makes us sick.

Associated with this weight gain are increased risks in adulthood for joint problems, angina, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, type 2 diabetes and, ultimately, premature death. Outside of the human costs, health experts estimate that treating adult obesity-related ailments will cost the American economy nearly $150 billion in 2009.

Metabolic syndrome, of which obesity and type 2 diabetes are a key part, are ultimately caused by—you guessed it—too much sugar.

If you don’t drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.12, 13 Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they’re a no-brainer. An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed. Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks. The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a “coffee headache” if you go too long without a cup. Luckily, coffee is one of the most abundant beverages on earth, so you rarely have to worry about being without it. Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.

I believe that human beings are designed to be physically active and that not doing so creates energy imbalances within the body that ultimately contribute to obesity and other health problems. As evidence, over 500,000 people die each year from diseases linked to physical inactivity and obesity. Furthermore, rates of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer have all tripled over the past 30 years corresponding to decreasing levels of daily physical activity and increasing rates of obesity.

I should have titled it "Diet Like Your Life Depended On It!" because it's about so much more than just beating Diabetes.

failure of insulin to lower blood glucose is called insulin resistance. The

All the conditions we thought were problems—obesity, insulin resistance, and beta cell dysfunction—are actually the body’s solutions to a single root cause—too much sugar.

1.Stop putting sugar in (low-carbohydrate diets, intermittent fasting). 2.Burn remaining sugar off (intermittent fasting).

Ironically, the ancestors of those who today are most at risk for type 2 diabetes were, during prehistory, not the sick and dying, but the survivors. If

Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered. Nearly all the money flows to treatment rather than prevention—and when I say “prevention,” I mean prevention of human suffering.

Your waist size is such an important predictor of health because the type of fat that is stored around your waistline—called “visceral fat” or “belly fat”—is related to the release of proteins and hormones that cause inflammation, which can in turn damage your arteries and affect how you metabolize sugars and fats. For this reason, visceral fat is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic diseases. Seeing your waist size come down is a great indicator of improving health.

Scientists generally agree that the more HDL you have, the lower your risk for heart disease. As you might have imagined, people with Metabolic Syndrome and type 2 diabetes also typically have low levels of beneficial HDL. Exercise is one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective ways to raise HDL. Consuming saturated fat is another!

the odds are overwhelming that you will die as a result of one of the chronic diseases of aging that I call the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction. To achieve longevity—to live longer and live better for longer—we must understand and confront these causes of slow death.

Eat carbohydrates and blood sugar rises. Every first-year medical student knows this, every nurse or diabetes educator knows this, every person with diabetes who performs finger-stick blood sugars before and after meals knows this. Eat any food with more than just a few grams of carbohydrates and blood sugar will rise; the more carbohydrates you eat, the higher blood sugar will rise. Everyone also knows that foods like butter do not raise blood sugar, nor will a fatty cut of meat, olives, green bell peppers, broccoli, or chicken liver. And since the 1980s, when the sharp upward climb in type 2 diabetes (and obesity) began, the only component of diet that has increased is carbohydrates, not fat or proteins.4

Living a healthy, joyful life is a gift you give yourself.

To change our eating habits, we must learn to eat mindfully, being more aware of chewing and tasting what we eat so that the brain can register the incoming nutrients.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE TYPE 2 DIABETES is currently the leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, amputations, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. But it doesn’t have to be our future. The pages of The Obesity Code and The Diabetes Code contain the knowledge to reverse type 2 diabetes. This is not the end, but only the beginning. A new hope arises. A new dawn breaks.

Fatty liver is a completely reversible process. Emptying the liver of its surplus glucose and dropping insulin levels returns the liver to normal. Hyperinsulinemia drives DNL, which is the primary determinant of fatty liver disease. Normalizing insulin levels reverses the fatty liver. Refined carbohydrates, which cause large increases in insulin, are far more sinister than dietary fat. High carbohydrate intake can increase DNL tenfold, whereas high fat consumption, with correspondingly low carbohydrate intake, does not change hepatic fat production

type 2 diabetes doubles or triples your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, about the same as having one copy of the APOE e4 gene. On a purely mechanistic level, chronically elevated blood glucose, as seen in type 2 diabetes and prediabetes/insulin resistance, can directly damage the vasculature of the brain. But insulin resistance alone is enough to elevate one’s risk.

Type 2 diabetics drinking two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar diluted in water at bedtime reduced their fasting morning blood sugars.32 Higher doses of vinegar also seem to increase satiety, resulting in slightly lower caloric intake through the rest of the day (approximately 200 to 275 calories less). This effect was also noted for peanut products. Interestingly, peanuts also resulted in a reduction of glycemic response by 55 per cent.

When the American Dietetic Association (ADA) surveyed all the studies on food and health, they concluded not just that a vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy as one that includes meat, but that “vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.

In 1979, researchers at the University of Kentucky studied 20 men with type 2 diabetes, all of whom had been taking an average of 26 units of insulin per day. The experimental diet included plenty of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans, so it was high in fiber and carbohydrate. The diet was nearly vegetarian, with very little animal fat—in fact, very little fat of any kind. After just 16 days on the program, more than half of the men were able to stop taking insulin entirely, and their blood sugar levels were lower than before.4

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, old age was defined as sixty-five years, yet estimated life expectancy in the United States at the time was sixty-one years for males and sixty-four years for females.62 A senior citizen today, however, can expect to live eighteen to twenty years longer. The downside is that he or she also should expect to die more slowly. The two most common causes of death in 1935 America were respiratory diseases (pneumonia and influenza) and infectious diarrhea, both of which kill rapidly. In contrast, the two most common causes of death in 2007 America were heart disease and cancer (each accounted for about 25 percent of total deaths). Some heart attack victims die within minutes or hours, but most elderly people with heart disease survive for years while coping with complications such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, general weakness, and peripheral vascular disease. Many cancer patients also remain alive for several years following their diagnosis because of chemo-therapy, radiation, surgery, and other treatments. In addition, many of the other leading causes of death today are chronic illnesses such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease, and there has been an upsurge in the occurrence of nonfatal but chronic illnesses such as osteoarthritis, gout, dementia, and hearing loss.63 Altogether, the growing prevalence of chronic illness among middle-aged and elderly individuals is contributing to a health-care crisis because the children born during the post–World War II baby boom are now entering old age, and an unprecedented percentage of them are suffering from lingering, disabling, and costly diseases. The term epidemiologists coined for this phenomenon is the “extension of morbidity.

Yes, changing your lifestyle may seem impractical. It may seem impractical to give up meat and high-fat foods, but I wonder how practical it is to be 350 pounds and have Type 2 diabetes at the age of fifteen, like the girl mentioned at the start of this chapter. I wonder how practical it is to have a lifelong condition that can’t be cured by drugs or surgery; a condition that often leads to heart disease, stroke, blindness or amputation; a condition that might require you to inject insulin into your body every day for the rest of your life. Radically changing our diets may be “impractical,” but it might also be worth it.

Beyond being a promising anticancer agent,1 sulforaphane may also help protect your brain2 and your eyesight,3 reduce nasal allergy inflammation,4 manage type 2 diabetes,5 and was recently found to successfully help treat autism. A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial of boys with autism found that about two to three cruciferous vegetable servings’ worth6 of sulforaphane a day improves social interaction, abnormal behavior, and verbal communication within a matter of weeks. The researchers, primarily from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, suggest that the effect might be due to sulforaphane’s role as a “detoxicant.”7

I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff. What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.

The fact is our bodies aren’t meant to ingest meat and dairy and eggs and fish. That’s right, our bodies aren’t meant to eat animals; they’re made for whole grains, vegetarian proteins like beans and legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. We may be omnivores in that our bodies are capable of living on just about anything—flesh included—in times of scarcity. But unless you are living in sub-Saharan Africa or some isolated part of the North Pole, scarcity is, fortunately, not a problem. In fact we are blessed with abundance. Our modern problem is obesity and all the degenerative diseases that are linked to obesity, like cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

So why are we unable to acknowledge the truth? Dr. Fung’s answer is simple: we doctors lie to ourselves. If type 2 diabetes is a curable disease but all our patients are getting worse on the treatments we prescribe, then we must be bad doctors. And since we did not study for so long at such great cost to become bad doctors, this failure cannot be our fault. Instead, we must believe we are doing the best for our patients, who must unfortunately be suffering from a chronically progressive and incurable disease. It is not a deliberate lie, Dr. Fung concludes, but one of cognitive dissonance—the inability to accept a blatant truth because accepting it would be too emotionally devastating.

Experts on dietetics (the study of diet and its health effects) are finally recognising that balanced vegan diets are healthy. The British Dietary Association has stated well planned vegan diets can support healthy living in people of all ages, and other similar professional bodies all over the world agree. On the other side, the World Health Organization has classified processed meat as carcinogenic, and there is increasing evidence that eating lots of meat and dairy increases blood pressure and blood cholesterol, which leads to heart disease, and that cutting them out can significantly reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, a disease which is affecting an increasing number of people in developed nations.

In a world of forty thousand choices, the old advice of 'everything in moderation' no longer cuts it. The signs are that many people have understandably had enough of this free-for-all of supersizing and hidden sugars, of type 2 diabetes and food waste. In the past five years, millions of eaters have rejected huge swaths of mainstream food and created their own rules to eat by. Such reactions offer a sliver of hope that eating -- for some populations anyway -- is finally moving in a healthier direction, with a new thoughtfulness about food and a return to vegetables. On the other hand, some of the new diet rules we have invented for ourselves are as extreme and unbalanced as the food system they seek to replace.

The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat. In addition, your body becomes unable to manage those calories effectively, especially the concentrations of sugar in your blood. In these two ways, sleeping less than seven or eight hours a night will increase your probability of gaining weight, being overweight, or being obese, and significantly increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. The global health cost of diabetes is $375 billion a year. That of obesity is more than $2 trillion. Yet for the under-slept individual, the cost to health, quality of life, and a hastened arrival of death are more meaningful. Precisely how a lack of sleep sets you on a path toward diabetes and leads to obesity is now well understood and incontrovertible.

If we want to be healthy, we need to eat and move about a little more like our ancient ancestors did. That doesn’t mean we have to eat tubers and hunt wildebeest. It means we should consume a lot less processed and sugary foods and get more exercise. Failure to do that, however, is what is giving us the disorders like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are killing us in great numbers. Indeed, as Lieberman notes, medical care is actually making things worse by treating the symptoms of mismatch diseases so effectively that we “unwittingly perpetuate their causes.” As Lieberman puts it with chilling bluntness, “You are most likely going to die from a mismatch disease.” Even more chillingly, he believes that 70 percent of the diseases that kill us could easily be preventable if we would just live more sensibly.

As devasting as it is, cirrhosis is not the only end point I’m worried about here. I care about NAFLD and NASH — and you should too — because they represent the tip of the iceberg of a global epidemic of metabolic disorders, ranging from insulin resistance to type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is technically a distinct disease, defined very clearly by glucose metrics, but I view it as simply the last stop on a railway line passing through several other stations, including hyperinsulinemia, prediabetes, and NAFLD/NASH. If you find yourself anywhere on this train line, even in the early stages of NAFLD, you are likely also en route to one or more of the three Horsemen diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease). As we will see in the next few chapters, metabolic dysfunction vastly increases your risks for all of these.

You should maintain a moderate, not high, intake of protein. When it is digested, dietary protein, such as meat, breaks down into amino acids. Adequate protein is required for good health, but excess amino acids cannot be stored in the body and so the liver converts them into glucose. Therefore, eating too much protein adds sugar to the body. So you should avoid highly processed, concentrated protein sources such as protein shakes, protein bars, and protein powders.

Since 2005, researchers have been finding correlations between diabetes and risk for Alzheimer’s disease, especially when the diabetes is not controlled and a person suffers from chronic high blood sugar.7 Some have gone so far as to refer to Alzheimer’s disease as “type 3 diabetes,” because the disease often involves a disrupted relationship with insulin, the metabolic hormone involved in both types 1 and 2 diabetes. Insulin is the hormone needed to deliver sugar (glucose) into cells for use.

One of our greatest epidemics today is obesity. It is estimated that more than 500 million people suffer from obesity worldwide today, and that it kills more than three million people each year. In comparison, about 55,000 people are killed in war each year, which of course in no way suggests that we are overestimating the horror and seriousness of war – how could we? – but the little attention we give to obesity in comparison does suggest, however, that we are not taking the “war” we should be waging against obesity seriously. It seems that we overlook what a merciless killer and cause of pain that obesity and the overeating that leads to it really is: it increases the risk of heart disease (the most common cause of death worldwide), many kinds of cancer, type 2 diabetes, degenerative joint disease and mental problems such as depression and low self-esteem.[27] Fortunately, a lot seems to imply that we have a powerful and peaceful weapon at our hands that can help us overcome obesity: a vegan diet.

Human evolution is not over, but the chances of natural selection adapting our species in dramatic, major ways to common non-infectious mismatch diseases are remote unless conditions change dramatically. One reason is that many of these diseases have little to no effect on fertility. Type 2 diabetes, for example, generally develops after people have reproduced, and even then, it is highly manageable for many years.8 Another consideration is that natural selection can act only on variations that affect reproductive success and that are also genetically passed from parent to offspring. Some obesity-related illnesses can hinder reproductive function, but these problems have strong environmental causes.9 Finally, although culture sometimes spurs selection, it is also a powerful buffer. Every year new products and therapies are being developed that allow people with common mismatch diseases to cope better with their symptoms. Whatever selection is operating is probably occurring at a pace too slow to measure in our lifetimes.

Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents.70 They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections, diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, or from violence and accidents.71 Health surveys also indicate that most of the noninfectious diseases that kill or disable older people in developed nations are rare or unknown among middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers.72 These admittedly limited studies have found that hunter-gatherers rarely if ever get type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, breast cancer, asthma, and liver disease. They also don’t appear to suffer much from gout, myopia, cavities, hearing loss, collapsed arches, and other common ailments. To be sure, hunter-gatherers don’t live in perpetually perfect health, especially since tobacco and alcohol have become increasingly available to them, but the evidence suggests that they are healthy compared to many older Americans today despite never having received any medical care. In short, if you were to compare contemporary health data from people around the world with equivalent data from hunter-gatherers, you would not conclude that rising rates of common mismatch diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes are straightforward, inevitable by-products of economic progress and increased longevity. Moreover,

REPROGRAMMING MY BIOCHEMISTRY A common attitude is that taking substances other than food, such as supplements and medications, should be a last resort, something one takes only to address overt problems. Terry and I believe strongly that this is a bad strategy, particularly as one approaches middle age and beyond. Our philosophy is to embrace the unique opportunity we have at this time and place to expand our longevity and human potential. In keeping with this health philosophy, I am very active in reprogramming my biochemistry. Overall, I am quite satisfied with the dozens of blood levels I routinely test. My biochemical profile has steadily improved during the years that I have done this. For boosting antioxidant levels and for general health, I take a comprehensive vitamin-and-mineral combination, alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grapeseed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin (milk thistle), conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, l-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and echinacea. I also take Chinese herbs prescribed by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld. For reducing insulin resistance and overcoming my type 2 diabetes, I take chromium, metformin (a powerful anti-aging medication that decreases insulin resistance and which we recommend everyone over 50 consider taking), and gymnema sylvestra. To improve LDL and HDL cholesterol levels, I take policosanol, gugulipid, plant sterols, niacin, oat bran, grapefruit powder, psyllium, lecithin, and Lipitor. To improve blood vessel health, I take arginine, trimethylglycine, and choline. To decrease blood viscosity, I take a daily baby aspirin and lumbrokinase, a natural anti-fibrinolytic agent. Although my CRP (the screening test for inflammation in the body) is very low, I reduce inflammation by taking EPA/DHA (omega-3 essential fatty acids) and curcumin. I have dramatically reduced my homocysteine level by taking folic acid, B6, and trimethylglycine (TMG), and intrinsic factor to improve methylation. I have a B12 shot once a week and take a daily B12 sublingual. Several of my intravenous therapies improve my body’s detoxification: weekly EDTA (for chelating heavy metals, a major source of aging) and monthly DMPS (to chelate mercury). I also take n-acetyl-l-carnitine orally. I take weekly intravenous vitamins and alpha lipoic acid to boost antioxidants. I do a weekly glutathione IV to boost liver health. Perhaps the most important intravenous therapy I do is a weekly phosphatidylcholine (PtC) IV, which rejuvenates all of the body’s tissues by restoring youthful cell membranes. I also take PtC orally each day, and I supplement my hormone levels with DHEA and testosterone. I take I-3-C (indole-3-carbinol), chrysin, nettle, ginger, and herbs to reduce conversion of testosterone into estrogen. I take a saw palmetto complex for prostate health. For stress management, I take l-theonine (the calming substance in green tea), beta sitosterol, phosphatidylserine, and green tea supplements, in addition to drinking 8 to 10 cups of green tea itself. At bedtime, to aid with sleep, I take GABA (a gentle, calming neuro-transmitter) and sublingual melatonin. For brain health, I take acetyl-l-carnitine, vinpocetine, phosphatidylserine, ginkgo biloba, glycerylphosphorylcholine, nextrutine, and quercetin. For eye health, I take lutein and bilberry extract. For skin health, I use an antioxidant skin cream on my face, neck, and hands each day. For digestive health, I take betaine HCL, pepsin, gentian root, peppermint, acidophilus bifodobacter, fructooligosaccharides, fish proteins, l-glutamine, and n-acetyl-d-glucosamine. To inhibit the creation of advanced glycosylated end products (AGEs), a key aging process, I take n-acetyl-carnitine, carnosine, alpha lipoic acid, and quercetin. MAINTAINING A POSITIVE “HEALTH SLOPE” Most important,

In May 2003, the nation’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, published the results of two large studies comparing low-carbohydrate diets with low-fat diets. Both studies showed that low carbohydrate diets did not raise blood cholesterol levels, even when subjects ate all the fat and cholesterol they wanted. Those diets actually improved the balance between good and bad cholesterol, the most accurate measure of heart disease risk. These studies relieved any remaining

Prospective data indicates that the CRP is a better predictor of cardiovascular risk than a low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the standby predictor of cardiovascular disease. The CRP advantage is that “inflammation,” (but not the elevated LDL) is associated with the components of the metabolic syndrome. CRP levels are not only demonstrated with “inflammation” of cardiovascular disease, but also with triglycerides, obesity, elevated blood pressure, and elevated fasting blood glucose. In addition, CRP also correlates with endothelial dysfunction, impaired fibrinolysis, and most importantly, insulin resistance, which is hyperinsulinemia, type 2 diabetes. I ask you, the reader, to please note that the clinical conditions associated with CRP, especially its application for cardiovascular disease, is the pathology of insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, type 2 diabetes. Please see Chapter 14, Pathology of Type 2 Diabetes.

a woman with a BMI of 35 has 93 times the risk of developing type 2 diabetes[27] (a different study for men concluded that the risk was very similar[28]). A BMI of 35 would be an average height woman (5'4") weighing 14 stone 7 lbs (203lb) – that's not breathtakingly high. Sometimes we may think that it is vain to worry about our weight – it's not vain – it's life preserving.

Without proper sleep, you are doing yourself a disservice. For instance, lack of sleep has not only been linked to poor performance and alertness 11, but also to weight gain, Type 2 Diabetes, and memory problems 12.

4. Half of a group of 99 adults with type 2 diabetes ate a plant-based diet for 22 weeks. During this time, the other half followed the American Diabetes Association diet. The plant-based diet group lost more—almost 16 pounds in 12 weeks—despite the fact that the two groups rated their diets as equally acceptable and ate about the same number of calories. Those on the plant-based diet did not have to limit portion sizes artificially.   The consistent results keep rolling in from Europe.   1. An English study of more than 5,000 adults found that those who did not eat meat were substantially less likely to be obese, and this difference persisted over time, despite the fact that those who avoided meat ate about the same number of calories each day as the meat eaters.

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that we are getting fatter and fatter every year despite all the information sold to us about how to stay slim and trim. You’d also be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know about our soaring rates of type 2 diabetes. Or the fact that heart disease is our number one killer, trailed closely by cancer.

I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work.” ~Thomas A. Edison

When it comes to cooking now, my motto is "out with the whites!

Ayurveda is useful in any chronic illness. Coronary artery disease, rheumatoid arthritis or other inflammations. Bronchial asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes. Because these are all linked to lifestyle”. 

Postprandial hypoglycemia joins obesity as an indicator for the identification or exclusion of hyperinsulinemia, type 2 diabetes by oral glucose tolerance with insulin assay.

Essential hypertension, i.e. high blood pressure without known cause, is hyperinsulin, type 2 diabetes until proven otherwise by oral glucose tolerance with insulin assays.

As a pathologist, I considered it quite apropos and logical to designate the hyperinsulinemia, type 2 diabetes with the normal glucose tolerance, “diabetes mellitus in-situ (occult diabetes).” Laboratory Medicine 6, no. 2 (February 1975).

Those with cardiovascular disease not identified with diabetes are simply undiagnosed. Dr. Stout in 1977 identified the origin of the pathology of type 2 diabetes as vascular (arterial), directly related to hyperinsulinemia and not to hypergly-cemia.

leptin may play a role in controlling insulin sensitivity.10 Insulin sensitivity itself leads to type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Knowledge (remember) You know enough to be able to recite knowledge by rote (e.g. you can recite the 15 causes of clubbing) Comprehension (understand) You understand the knowledge, so can explain it to others (e.g. you can explain what clubbing is) Application (apply) You can use the knowledge you have to solve problems (you use your knowledge of clubbing to try and work out why the patient in front of you has clubbed fingers) Analysis (analyse) You can use the knowledge you have to compare and contrast with other knowledge and see how it fits in with other people's assumptions and/or hypotheses (e.g. compare and contrast type 1 and type 2 diabetes; compare and contrast the electron as a particle and the electron as an electromagnetic wave) Synthesis (create) You can use knowledge, integrated with other knowledge, to produce new hypotheses (e.g. you know glucose crosses the placenta and that insulin does not; you know that in diabetes glucose tends to run high, so you hypothesise that the baby of a woman with diabetes will produce high levels of insulin itself and so will be at risk of going ‘hypo’ after birth) Evaluation (evaluate) You use your knowledge to assess, critique or judge others

The good news: Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes.

Fructose Some researchers have found that diets that are high in fructose can impair an individuals' learning abilities and memories over time, this was discovered in a UCLA 2012 study and published in the journal of physiology. In addition to the effects of fructose on the brain, it is also common knowledge (with researchers) that a diet that is high in fructose can cause insulin resistance over time, which may lead to diabetes (type-2) and some extra gain in body fat. Diets that are high in fructose can also affect the blood's triglyceride levels negatively and the small LDL particles in the body that could cause some plaque build-up in the arteries. Hence, high fructose consumption can amount to some impairment of your learning ability and memory, and could also increase your risk of getting diabetes, heart disease and some extra fat. On the average, individuals usually consume a high amount of fructose from processed foods, soft drinks (which is typically made from high-fructose-containing corn syrups), orange juice, juice drinks (sweetened), processed foods like candies and cakes, and the HFCS that may have been added to some store-bought breads, salad dressings and even ketchup.

Diabetes mellitus is characterized by chronically elevated levels of sugar in your blood. This is because either your pancreas gland isn’t making enough insulin (the hormone that keeps your blood sugar in check) or because your body becomes resistant to insulin’s effects. The insulin-deficiency disease is called type 1 diabetes, and the insulin-resistance disease is called type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes has been called the “Black Death of the twenty-first century” in terms of its exponential spread around the world and its devastating health impacts. Instead of the bubonic plague, though, the pathological agents in obesity and type 2 diabetes are identified as “high-fat and high-calorie diets,” and instead of fleas and rodents, the causes are “advertisements and inducements to poor lifestyle.”1 More than twenty million Americans are currently diagnosed with diabetes, a tripling of cases since 1990.2 At this rate, the CDC predicts that one in three Americans will be diabetic by midcentury.3 Currently in the United States, diabetes causes about 50,000 cases of kidney failure, 75,000 lower extremity amputations, 650,000 cases of vision loss,4 and about 75,000 deaths every year.

Type 2 diabetes, previously known as adult-onset diabetes, accounts for 90–95 percent of diabetes cases.8 In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas can make insulin, but it doesn’t work as well. The accumulation of fat inside the cells of your muscles and liver interferes with the action of insulin.9 If insulin is the key that unlocks the doors to your cells, saturated fat is what appears to gum up the locks. With glucose denied entry into your muscles, the primary consumer of such fuel, sugar levels can rise to damaging levels in your blood. The fat inside these muscle cells can come from the fat you eat or the fat you wear (i.e., your body fat). The prevention, treatment, and reversal of type 2 diabetes therefore depends on diet and lifestyle.

The good news: Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes. Like other leading killers—especially heart disease and high blood pressure—type 2 diabetes is an unfortunate consequence of your dietary choices.

Alfalfa juice concentrate • Alfalfa leaf • Aloe concentrate • Barley grass • Beta-carotene • Bilberry leaf • Black walnut lea • Blueberry leaf • Boldo leaf • Broccoli • Cabbage • Celery • Cornsilk • Couch grass • Dandelion leaf • Echinacea • Goldenseal

Professor Taylor’s research suggests that it is the buildup of fat inside the liver and pancreas that causes all the trouble. These two organs are responsible for controlling our insulin and blood sugar levels. As they get clogged up with fat they stop communicating with each other. Eventually your body stops producing insulin and you become a type 2 diabetic.

People with major metabolic problems, like severe insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, may benefit from long-term carbohydrate restriction— to 25 percent of daily calories as in Phase 1 or sometimes even lower. Preliminary studies report that some individuals experience remarkable improvements in health by eliminating virtually all carbohydrates on a ketogenic diet.4

The goal of Look Ahead was to reduce heart disease, a common complication of diabetes. The study, conducted in sixteen clinical centers in the United States, assigned about five thousand adults with type 2 diabetes to either a low-fat diet with intensive lifestyle modification or to usual care. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013,33 was terminated prematurely for “futility.” Analysis by independent statisticians found no reduction of heart disease among participants assigned to the intensive low-fat diet, and no prospect of ever seeing such a benefit emerge.

WHEN IT COMES TO THE CAUSE of chronic disease, as we discussed earlier, the carbohydrate hypothesis rests upon two simple propositions. First, if our likelihood of contracting a particular disease increases once we already have Type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome, then it’s a reasonable assumption that high blood sugar and/or insulin is involved in the disease process. Second, if blood sugar and insulin are involved, then we have to accept the possibility that refined and easily digestible carbohydrates are as well.

DESPITE NEARLY A CENTURY’S WORTH OF therapeutic innovations, the likelihood of a diabetic’s contracting coronary artery disease is no less today than it was in 1921, when insulin was first discovered. Type 2 diabetics can still expect to die five to ten years prematurely, with much of this difference due to atherosclerosis and what Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus has called an “extraordinarily high incidence” of coronary disease.

Other regions that have been influenced by the Neanderthal genome are implicated in human diseases, such as lupus, Crohn’s disease, and type 2 diabetes, and even in behavior, such as addiction to cigarettes.

with pre-diabetes are at a greater risk of developing heart disease.

85% of all of the diabetes type two complications can be prevented.

The GTT he administered showed severe reactive hypoglycemia (RHG). At that time, one of the many criticisms of Dr. Atkins was that he diagnosed many with RHG. For this he was called a “quack”. After seeing the lab results, I immediately began the Induction phase of his diet and soon felt better, just as his patients did. As long as I ate correctly and didn’t skip meals I rarely experienced my prior symptoms. That remains true to this day. This was my first lesson in the power of practical nutrition (albeit outside of mainstream medical opinion). I am convinced that if I hadn’t followed Dr. Atkins advice I would have had type 2 diabetes long ago. I can thank him for many things but most especially for that.

Research has shown that people with Metabolic Syndrome or type 2 diabetes all have elevated levels of both triglycerides and these small, dense LDL particles. Of course, these same people have substantially increased risks for heart disease and stroke.

Now fast forward to the present. The United States is currently re-assessing a 3-decade, uncontrolled experiment in which carbohydrates were lauded and fats demonized. Concurrently we have become one of the most obese countries in the world. And across the globe, tragically, indigenous peoples with historically low carbohydrate intakes now have extremely high prevalence rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes (e.g., the Gulf States in the Middle East, Pacific Islanders, First Nations in Canada, and Australian Aborigines).

Insulin is the primary hormone that tells your body whether to store energy or burn it. When you eat—particularly when you eat the typical high-carb, heavily processed foods that most Americans eat at all hours of the day—your blood glucose levels become elevated to unhealthy ranges. Your body then increases your insulin in an effort to lower those glucose levels. Sadly this results in an enormously foolish medical strategy that many physicians use to treat tens of millions of diabetics—they frequently put type 2 diabetics on insulin in an effort to lower their blood sugar. What they fail to realize is that higher insulin levels, and secondary insulin resistance, are a far more serious issue than elevated glucose. The way to lower insulin and glucose and to treat insulin resistance is to lower your carbohydrate intake and become metabolically flexible, as co-author of The Complete Guide to Fasting and a nephrologist (kidney specialist) in Canada, so eloquently demonstrated in his 2018 case report published in the British Medical Journal. In this report, Dr. Fung was able to use intermittent fasting to reverse insulin resistance and resolve type 2 diabetes for three patients who had their diabetes for 10 to 25 years. All were taking insulin.1 One result of insulin resistance is that you gain weight because higher levels of insulin signal your body to store energy as fat. Another result is that the receptors for insulin in your cells begin to get desensitized, so you need to release more and more insulin in order to move the glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells. As a result of the insulin resistance, your body is in constant fat-storing mode.

SUGAR Because of the term “blood sugar,” many believe that sugar is the enemy. It is, but not the only one. All carbohydrates are composed of sugar. Starches—potatoes, bread, cereal, and the like—are simply a lot of sugar molecules strung together. Digestion quickly converts them to glucose. Starches raise your blood sugar as much as any sugar. Doubt it? The journal Diabetes Care states that whole-wheat bread will raise your blood sugar more rapidly than an equivalent quantity of table sugar. Yikes.

common for diet plans to make allowances for “cheating.” And the ads on television give testament to all the ways people try to fool themselves into thinking that there is some “healthy” way to continue their addiction, from sugar-loaded “fiber bars” to sugar-loaded “fruit” punch with a few added vitamins. You cannot afford this. Every time your blood sugar goes above 120 mg/dL (6.7 mmol/L) your body sustains irreversible damage, and that damage adds up. Every time you fall for this nonsense, you will move a little closer to disastrous consequences.

vitamin or mineral yet identified that is not available from low-carbohydrate sources—and many grain foods only appear to have a good nutritional profile because they’ve been enriched at the factory. Enrichment was instituted when it became clear that people whose diets depended on milled grains were developing nutritional deficiency diseases. It is likely that your nutritional profile will improve. That said, we do recommend taking a well-formulated, iron-free multivitamin daily. WHAT ABOUT “GOOD CARBS”? No doubt you’ve heard that there are “good carbs.” It may come as a shock, then, to learn that once they are digested and absorbed there is chemically no difference between one source of sugar and another. A molecule of glucose derived from brown rice is identical to a molecule of glucose derived from a convenience store slushy. The brown rice brings a few vitamins along with

to exercise, great. But we’re not going to push you. Until you shift over to a fat- and ketone-burning metabolism and get access to the tank, you’re likely to be tired. You should feel your energy level rise as your body adjusts. If you find yourself wanting to go for a walk, go dancing, take a yoga class, or lift weights—we’re all for it. But don’t make yourself miserable.

He would sweet-talk her until she had Type 2 diabetes if he had to, but he couldn’t let her back out. More silence.

With just 30 minutes of physical activity a day you can: Reduce health risks (high blood pressure, stroke, osteoporosis, coronary disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers) Keep off excess weight Ward of viral illnesses Help keep your arteries clear Strengthen your heart

Therefore, eating too much protein adds sugar to the body. So you should avoid highly processed, concentrated protein sources such as protein shakes, protein bars, and protein powders.

In medical jargon, this longer period of illness prior to death is termed the extension of morbidity. Among westernized populations, many people become sick for a long time before they die from heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and chronic respiratory disease; many also suffer from osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and a growing list of autoimmune diseases.56 At least one in five Americans over the age of sixty-five is in fair or poor health. Despite this high morbidity, we nonetheless live much longer than our farmer ancestors, and a little longer than hunter-gatherers. The average American in 2018 lives to be seventy-eight years old, almost twice as long as one a hundred years ago.57 This shift, in which more of us live longer but die from chronic rather than infectious diseases, thus extending morbidity, is known as the epidemiological transition and widely hailed as medical progress. By not dying rapidly from smallpox in our youth, aren’t we fortunate to die slowly from heart disease at an older age? This thinking is mistaken.

Aging is inexorable, but senescence, the deterioration of function associated with advancing years, correlates much less strongly with age. Instead, senescence is also influenced strongly by environmental factors like diet, physical activity, or radiation, and thus can be slowed, sometimes prevented, and even partly reversed. The distinction between aging and senescence may seem obvious, but the two processes are frequently confused. Many conditions occur more commonly with advancing age, but only some are actually caused by age. Menopause, for example, is a normal consequence of aging that happens when a woman’s ovaries run out of eggs. In contrast, type 2 diabetes occurs among some older people for reasons not intrinsic to the aging process itself but instead from factors like obesity and physical inactivity whose damaging effects accumulate with age.

Having type 2 diabetes raises a person’s risk of dying, in some cases to a small degree, in other cases substantially, but it is treatable using drugs, diet, and exercise. Although drugs help, they aren’t always necessary. Diet and exercise can sometimes allow the body to heal itself. In one dramatic test of this concept, ten overweight Australian aborigines with type 2 diabetes reversed their disease after just seven weeks of returning to an active hunting and gathering lifestyle.20 The mechanisms by which physical activity helps prevent and treat type 2 diabetes are well studied. Most basically, exercise (in conjunction with diet) can ameliorate every characteristic of metabolic syndrome including excess organ fat, high blood pressure, and high levels of blood sugar, fat, and cholesterol. In addition, exercise lowers inflammation and counteracts many of the damaging effects of stress. And most remarkably, exercise can reverse insulin resistance by restoring blocked insulin receptors and causing muscle cells to produce more of the transporter molecules that shuttle sugar out of the bloodstream.21 The effect is akin to unclogging a drain and flushing out the pipes. Altogether, by simultaneously improving the delivery, transport, and use of blood sugar, exercise can resuscitate a once resistant muscle cell to suck up as much as fiftyfold more molecules of blood sugar. No drug is so potent.

In one compelling study, Danish researchers randomized patients with type 2 diabetes into two groups: both were given advice on how to eat a healthy diet, but one group also labored through five or six 30- to 60-minute-long sessions of aerobic exercise a week plus two or three weight sessions per week. After a year, half of those who exercised were able to eliminate their diabetes medications, and another 20 percent were able to reduce their medication levels. Further, the more they exercised, the more they recovered normal function. In contrast, just one-quarter of the dieters were able to reduce their medication, and 40 percent had to increase their medication levels despite receiving excellent, standard health care.24 As we have repeatedly seen, some exercise is better than none, and more is better.

In fact, it’s now thought that lipotoxicity may be a central cause of insulin resistance in our tissues. It’s been known for a long time that people who have inflammatory conditions, like rheumatoid arthritis, are more prone to type 2 diabetes, as inflammation promotes insulin resistance. As such, it really must be addressed first and foremost in any plan to reverse PCOS symptoms.

If you have recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, you probably haven’t exercised in years, and the idea of doing so might seem intimidating. Don’t worry—as long as you start slowly, exercise is not only perfectly safe, but highly recommended.

The body heeds the myokines’ advice, and as a precaution it releases pro-inflammatory cytokines to protect itself while exercising. As soon as it stops exercising, the body sends in an (anti-inflammatory) cleanup crew to clear away the inflamed mess.40 This cleanup crew is so thorough that they clear up all the inflammation brought on by exercise and then some. With consistent training, practice makes the cleanup crew perfect, and the body becomes less inflamed. A less-inflamed body is not only good for the minds of heart patients, but also for anyone suffering from a chronic inflammatory condition, including patients with type 2 diabetes,41 rheumatoid arthritis,42 even cancer43 — all of whom are also at elevated risk of depression.

One can of soda a day increases a woman’s risk of type 2 diabetes by 80 percent.

Even though we know that artificial sweeteners actually cause type 2 diabetes22 and weight gain, slow metabolism, increase hunger,23 and alter gut flora or bacteria to promote obesity and type 2 diabetes,24 they are still recommended by the ADA, diabetes doctors, and registered dietitians. That’s right. Artificial sweeteners make you fat and diabetic!

And reducing caloric intake proved useless. In a fascinating 1993 study, high-dose insulin allowed virtual normalization of blood sugars in a group of type 2 diabetic patients.8 Starting from zero, the dose was increased to an average of 100 units per day over a period of six months. At the same time, patients decreased their caloric intake by more than 300 calories per day. The patients’ blood sugar levels were great. But what happened to their weight? It increased by an average of 19 pounds (8.7 kilograms)! Despite eating less than ever, patients gained weight like crazy. It wasn’t calories that drove their weight gain. It was insulin.

Sulfonylureas and metformin Several pills are available for the drug treatment of type 2 diabetes. The sulfonylurea class work by stimulating the pancreas to produce more insulin to lower blood sugars. All drugs in this class are well known to cause weight gain.

-2 inhibitors The newest class of medication for type 2 diabetes is the SGLT-2 (sodium-glucose linked transporter) inhibitors. These drugs block the reabsorption of glucose by the kidney, so that it spills out in the urine. This lowers blood sugars, resulting in less insulin production. SGLT-2 inhibitors can lower glucose and insulin levels after a meal by as much as 35 per cent and 43 per cent respectively.21 But what effect do SGLT-2 inhibitors have on weight? Studies consistently show a sustained and significant weight loss in patients taking these drugs.22 Unlike virtually all dietary studies that show an initial weight loss followed by weight regain, this study found that the weight loss experienced by patients on SGLT-2 inhibitors continued for one year and longer.

EXCESSIVELY HIGH INSULIN resistance is the disease known as type 2 diabetes. High insulin resistance leads to elevated blood sugars, which are a symptom of this disease. In practical terms, this means that not only does insulin causes obesity, but also that insulin causes type 2 diabetes.