Do You Want to Cure Your Type 2 Diabetes?
Metabolic Syndrome
In his new book, Outlive, The Science & Art of Longevity, Dr. Peter Attia writes about the importance of staying away from metabolic syndrome (insulin resistance) to live a longer, healthier life.
The most frequent accumulation sequence of metabolic syndrome starts with abdominal obesity, followed by low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, high LDL cholesterol, elevated blood pressure readings, prediabetes, gestational diabetes, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
That’s quite a list.
But wait, there is more.
Dr. Attia goes on to say that if you find yourself on this “train,” you are also enroute to one or more of the other “three Horsemen” diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.
If you meet three of the five criteria listed below, you will be considered to have “metabolic syndrome.”
· High blood pressure (>130/85)
· High triglycerides (>150 mg/dL)
· Low HDL cholesterol (<40 mg/dL in men; <50 mg/dL in women)
· Central adiposity (large waist: >40 inches in men: >35 in women)
· Elevated fasting glucose (>110 mg/dL)
According to a 2020 article in JAMA, about 90 percent of the US population can check at least one of the above boxes. If you are able to check one (or more) of those boxes, you can totally heal yourself by changing your diet.
Dr. Neal Barnard
Now I’m going to switch from Dr. Attia’s book to Dr. Neal Barnard’s interview at the 2022 Blood Sugar Revolution conference.
Dr. Barnard, author of the book, Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes without Drugs, says “type 2 diabetes starts with insulin resistance. The insulin resistance comes not from bread or sugar. It comes from fat in animal products and even vegetable fats.”
He continues, “Imagine if your cells are jammed with fat and they can’t accept sugar anymore. The problem is the fat. But now, anything that you eat that has sugar in it, is going to make your blood sugar rise because it can’t go into the cells where it’s supposed to go… but, the sugar didn’t cause it.”
Dr. Barnard told about Dr. Michael Roden’s team at Yale. They brought in young, healthy people who were not overweight. They then gave them one dose of palm oil, a fairly heavily saturated fat, and they gave them a pretty good bit, but they could show that based on one meal, they can cause insulin resistance.
And then they did the thing that disappointed the entire world, which is they used a healthy fat: canola oil, which is miles healthier. But even with the healthy fats, they found that insulin sensitivity got worse.
In 2003, the NIH gave Dr. Barnard and his research team a grant just to see if he could find a way to reverse the insulin resistance. People who had type 2 diabetes were brought in and randomly assigned either a conventional diet or a completely plant-based diet (a vegan diet, no animal products and very low oil).
What they found was that people’s blood sugars started to fall within a matter of a day in the group eating a plant-based diet.
Dr. John McDougall
Dr. John McDougall was another speaker at the conference. He cited studies from the 1920s by Dr. Shirley Sweeney at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Sweeney prepped his medical students for two days by giving them a high sugar diet of candy, table sugar, syrup and all kinds of simple sugar foods and then gave them the glucose tolerance test. Not one of the students tested diabetic.
Then a couple of weeks later he prepped the same students with a high oil diet, olive oil, pig fat, etc. and he did that for two days. And then he did a glucose tolerance test on them, and they all tested diabetic. Their blood sugars were in the 200-250 range!
In the 1940s, Dr. Himsworth put his medical students at the University of Illinois Medical School on a diet of sugar for two days and then a high fat diet for two days. Just as previous tests have shown, the students on the high sugar diet tested negative for diabetes, but the students on the high fat diet tested diabetic.
As a young doctor, Dr. McDougall was taught to manage diabetes. He said, he no longer does that because the diabetics he works with in his practice are cured.
The cure involves changing your diet. According to Dr. McDougall, don’t eat food poisons like meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, fake meats and cheeses and oils.
Do eat starches like corn, rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, pastas, and fruits and vegetables.
Type 1, Type 1.5 and Type 2
According to Dr. McDougall, all type 2s can be cured. Type 1s are never cured, because they have to take insulin, and type 1.5 (a spectrum between 1 and 2) diabetics do have to be managed. He has found it pretty effective to give them one shot of insulin each evening.
If someone is diagnosed as a Type 2 diabetic, but they are insulin dependent, then they are Type 1.5.
A true type 2 diabetic, by definition is 100% curable, because they make as much insulin, sometimes twice as much insulin, as somebody without diabetes.
A Type 1.5 will still need insulin even if they are on a plant-based, low-fat diet, because they can’t get their blood sugar down to normal if they don’t take medicine.
One of the more frequent things Dr. McDougall runs into with type 1.5 is too much weight loss, because they don’t make a sufficient amount of insulin.
These type 1.5s can usually get off the insulin, if they are happy with their blood sugar of 140, 150, and they don’t have any symptoms, i.e., they’re not frequently urinating or having excessive thirst or losing large amounts of weight.
There is no reason to treat them. Instead, he manages their problems.
If they start needing to urinate all the time, he gives them a little shot of Lantus, a long acting insulin, and they stop doing that. If his patient starts to get so thin that their friends and neighbors think they have cancer or AIDS, he gives them a shot of Lantus to help them keep the weight on.
Dr. McDougall says that just telling people that they can cure their Type 2 diabetes by eating potatoes, rice and corn seems to be too unbelievable for them.
If their goal is to be cured, then they will follow his prescription to eat a very low-fat, plant based diet which includes plenty of starches like potatoes, beans, rice and pasta and adding in vegetables and fruits.
If patients are only looking for a low blood sugar reading at one testing, they can eat pork chops and eggs, but that won’t cure them.
When you eat potatoes and beans, your glucose does up, because it’s supposed to. It just goes up a little bit. Besides that, in time it comes down. You didn’t get yourself in trouble in one meal, you’ve been working at this for decades. Give this new way of eating at least a week.
Some people go to his office taking 140, 150 units of insulin. By the way, the total insulin requirement of the body is only 40 units a day, so what are they doing with that extra 110 units of insulin they’re shooting themselves with? Insulin resistance.
Once you get the idea that 90% of the food on your plate should be starch, all of a sudden you’re satisfied. People love starches and they are always available.
Dr. Michael Klapper
Think about who the winners of the Boston Marathon usually are - Ethiopians and Kenyans. What’s their diet? 80% starch.
A third speaker at the conference was Dr. Michael Klaper, former medical director at True North Health Center located in Santa Rosa, CA. It is the largest facility in the world that specializes in medically supervised water-only fasting to lose weight and to cure disease.
Dr. Klaper said that we need a little fat in our diet. Some vitamins like vitamin A, D, and K are absorbed better with a little fat. So, he has no problem with throwing a few walnuts on his salad, or adding a quarter of an avocado once or twice a week, very modest amounts. He also puts some ground flax seeds and chia seeds on his oatmeal in the morning. This is the way he gets his fats.
Insulin resistance is a matter of too much fat, not too much sugar.
Don’t eat fat because fat increases the insulin resistance.
Someone said “walking briskly two miles is roughly the equivalent of taking 8 to 10 units of insulin.
So, move, drink water and change your diet!
Additional Information
For additional information about diabetes, listen/watch Rich Roll’s podcast interview with Drew Harrisberg, a Type 1 diabetic. This podcast is two hours long, but very interesting, so you may have to watch it in an episodic way. Let me know what you think of it.
