What You Must Know About Diabetes in Order to Successfully Treat it
First and foremost, you must understand that diabetes is NOT a blood sugar disease like your doctor may have led you to believe.
Type 2 diabetes is a disease caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling, both of which are regulated through your diet.
Until that concept becomes well-known in both the medical community and by the public at large, the misconception about what diabetes is and the appropriate way to treat it will continue to be promoted and people will continue dying prematurely.
Conventional treatment, which is focused on fixing the symptom of elevated blood sugar rather than addressing the underlying disease, is doomed to fail in most cases.
Why?
Because most treatments for type 2 diabetes utilize drugs that either raise insulin, or lower blood sugar. Avandia, for example, lowers your blood sugar levels by increasing the sensitivity of liver, fat and muscle cells to insulin.
As I will explain below, this in no way addresses your underlying problem, which is metabolic miscommunication.
Let me assure you, the cure for type 2 diabetes has NOTHING to do with giving insulin. Giving someone with type 2 diabetes insulin is one of the WORST things that can be done. Any physician doing this simply does not understand insulin physiology.
Leptin is a Major Key to Successful Treatment of Diabetes
The hormone leptin is largely responsible for the accuracy of insulin signaling and whether you become insulin resistant or not.
Leptin, a relatively recently discovered hormone produced by fat, tells your body and brain how much energy it has, whether it needs more (saying "be hungry"), whether it should get rid of some (and stop being hungry) and importantly what to do with the energy it has (reproduce, upregulate cellular repair, or not).
In fact, the two most important organs that may determine whether you become (type 2, insulin resistant) diabetic or not are your liver and your brain, and it is their ability to listen to leptin that will determine this.
When your blood sugar becomes elevated it is a signal for insulin to be released to direct the extra energy into storage. A small amount is stored as a starch called glycogen in your body, but the majority is stored as your main energy supply -- fat. Thus, in this regard insulin's major role is not to lower sugar, but to take the extra energy and store it for future times of need.
Insulin lowers your blood sugar as a side effect of directing the extra energy into storage.
This is why treatments that concentrate merely on lowering blood sugar for diabetes while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication.
Taking insulin is one of the WORST things you can do, as it will actually make your insulin and leptin resistance worse over time. And taking diabetic drugs like Avandia may send you into an early grave from a heart attack or heart failure.
Fortunately, the safest treatment alternatives are also the most successful!
Fructose – One of the Major Culprits for Both Diabetes and Obesity
Before I delve into the other treatment strategies, I want to emphasize the importance of avoiding fructose if you want to successfully address your diabetes, or avoid it in the first place.
It’s important to understand that your body metabolizes fructose differently from glucose (regular table sugar is a disaccharide and 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose), and these differences lead to serious health consequences.
For example, fructose does not stimulate a rise in leptin, so your satiety signals are diminished. It also reduces the amount of leptin crossing your blood-brain barrier by raising triglycerides. And whereas glucose suppresses ghrelin (the hunger hormone, which makes you want more food), fructose does not.
Fructose also increases your insulin levels, interfering with the communication between leptin and your hypothalamus, so your pleasure signals aren’t extinguished. Your brain senses starvation and prompts you to eat more.
All of this also sets the stage for over indulgence and hence overweight, and puts you on the path toward both obesity and diabetes.
I strongly advise keeping your fructose consumption below 25 grams per day.
However, it would be wise for most people to limit fruit fructose to 15 grams or less as it is virtually guaranteed that you will be getting “hidden” sources of fructose from just about any processed food you eat.
This includes fruits, which also need to be carefully measured to make certain that you’re not inadvertently consuming too much fructose.
Keep in mind that most processed food is loaded with fructose and is best avoided entirely. For instance, there are about 40 grams of HFCS per can of soda.
Clearly, eliminating excess fructose from your diet is FAR safer and MORE effective than taking a drug like Avandia if you have diabetes. However, virtually no doctor will inform you of this, as there aren’t billions of dollars worth of drug company marketing muscles behind this sort of recommendation.
Most Diabetes Cases Can Be Cured Without Drugs!
Please understand that nearly 100 percent of type 2 diabetics can be successfully treated -- meaning you will no longer have the symptoms of diabetes, or the high risk of developing health complications -- if you are willing to implement a few healthy lifestyle changes.
Diabetes runs in my family. About fifteen years ago, I diagnosed my father with it and gave him these guidelines to follow. He's 81 years old and does two hours of exercise every single morning. Recently he's added strength training. He's been able to keep his diabetes under control without taking a single drug by following these principles.
If you follow the recommendations listed below, your likelihood of successfully going off of drugs and having normal blood sugars is close to 100 percent, as treating type 2 diabetes is simply a matter of implementing some basic strategies to improve your insulin and leptin resistance:
1. Exercise
Exercise is an absolutely essential factor, without which you’re highly unlikely to get this devastating disease under control. It is clearly one of the most potent ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance.
Typically, you’ll need large amounts of exercise, until you get your blood sugar levels under control. You may need up to an hour or two a day. Naturally, you’ll want to gradually work your way up to that amount, based on your current level of fitness.
If you’re unsure of how to get started, I recommend you view this comprehensive exercise program video for tips and guidelines.
2. Eliminate Grains and Sugars
For the last 50 years, many people have been following the nutritional recommendations dictated by conventional health agencies, which advise a high complex carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet. The end result has been a 700 percent increase in diabetes in the same time frame, and many have come to view diabetes as an incurable chronic disease…
This is clearly not true, but the inevitable result of seriously flawed dietary recommendations. Instead, you’ll want to eliminate foods that your body will react to by creating insulin, which includes ALL types of sugars and grains -- even “healthy” grains such as whole, organic grains. This means avoiding all breads, pasta, cereals, rice, potatoes, and corn (which is in fact a grain). You may even need to avoid fruits until your blood sugar is under control.
3. Eat Right for Your Nutritional Type
Exercising and avoiding grains and sugars might not be enough unless you balance your protein, carb and fat ratios for your unique and specific genetic biochemistry. You can read more about nutritional typing here.
4. Monitor Your Fasting Insulin Level
This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You’ll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 to 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin receptor sensitivity is.
The recommendations mentioned above are the key steps you need to achieve this reduction.
5. Optimize Your Vitamin D Level
Interestingly, optimizing your vitamin D levels can not only help improve type 2 diabetes if you have it, but can likely eliminate the risk of type 1 diabetes in your children if you are pregnant. It’s also vital for infants to receive the appropriate amounts of vitamin D in their early years for these same reasons.
Ideally, you’ll want to do this by exposing a large amount of your skin to appropriate amounts of sunshine (or a safe tanning bed) on a regular basis, year-round. Your body can safely create up to 20,000 units of vitamin D a day this way.
However, if neither of these options are available, you may want to use an oral vitamin D3 supplement. But remember, if you choose to take an oral supplement it’s essential that you get your levels tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure you’re not reaching toxic levels, and are within the therapeutic range. Maintaining your vitamin D levels around 60-80 ng/ml can significantly help control your blood sugar.
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Type 2 diabetes is a disease caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling, both of which are regulated through your diet.
Until that concept becomes well-known in both the medical community and by the public at large, the misconception about what diabetes is and the appropriate way to treat it will continue to be promoted and people will continue dying prematurely.
Conventional treatment, which is focused on fixing the symptom of elevated blood sugar rather than addressing the underlying disease, is doomed to fail in most cases.
Why?
Because most treatments for type 2 diabetes utilize drugs that either raise insulin, or lower blood sugar. Avandia, for example, lowers your blood sugar levels by increasing the sensitivity of liver, fat and muscle cells to insulin.
As I will explain below, this in no way addresses your underlying problem, which is metabolic miscommunication.
Let me assure you, the cure for type 2 diabetes has NOTHING to do with giving insulin. Giving someone with type 2 diabetes insulin is one of the WORST things that can be done. Any physician doing this simply does not understand insulin physiology.
Leptin is a Major Key to Successful Treatment of Diabetes
The hormone leptin is largely responsible for the accuracy of insulin signaling and whether you become insulin resistant or not.
Leptin, a relatively recently discovered hormone produced by fat, tells your body and brain how much energy it has, whether it needs more (saying "be hungry"), whether it should get rid of some (and stop being hungry) and importantly what to do with the energy it has (reproduce, upregulate cellular repair, or not).
In fact, the two most important organs that may determine whether you become (type 2, insulin resistant) diabetic or not are your liver and your brain, and it is their ability to listen to leptin that will determine this.
When your blood sugar becomes elevated it is a signal for insulin to be released to direct the extra energy into storage. A small amount is stored as a starch called glycogen in your body, but the majority is stored as your main energy supply -- fat. Thus, in this regard insulin's major role is not to lower sugar, but to take the extra energy and store it for future times of need.
Insulin lowers your blood sugar as a side effect of directing the extra energy into storage.
This is why treatments that concentrate merely on lowering blood sugar for diabetes while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication.
Taking insulin is one of the WORST things you can do, as it will actually make your insulin and leptin resistance worse over time. And taking diabetic drugs like Avandia may send you into an early grave from a heart attack or heart failure.
Fortunately, the safest treatment alternatives are also the most successful!
Fructose – One of the Major Culprits for Both Diabetes and Obesity
Before I delve into the other treatment strategies, I want to emphasize the importance of avoiding fructose if you want to successfully address your diabetes, or avoid it in the first place.
It’s important to understand that your body metabolizes fructose differently from glucose (regular table sugar is a disaccharide and 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose), and these differences lead to serious health consequences.
For example, fructose does not stimulate a rise in leptin, so your satiety signals are diminished. It also reduces the amount of leptin crossing your blood-brain barrier by raising triglycerides. And whereas glucose suppresses ghrelin (the hunger hormone, which makes you want more food), fructose does not.
Fructose also increases your insulin levels, interfering with the communication between leptin and your hypothalamus, so your pleasure signals aren’t extinguished. Your brain senses starvation and prompts you to eat more.
All of this also sets the stage for over indulgence and hence overweight, and puts you on the path toward both obesity and diabetes.
I strongly advise keeping your fructose consumption below 25 grams per day.
However, it would be wise for most people to limit fruit fructose to 15 grams or less as it is virtually guaranteed that you will be getting “hidden” sources of fructose from just about any processed food you eat.
This includes fruits, which also need to be carefully measured to make certain that you’re not inadvertently consuming too much fructose.
Keep in mind that most processed food is loaded with fructose and is best avoided entirely. For instance, there are about 40 grams of HFCS per can of soda.
Clearly, eliminating excess fructose from your diet is FAR safer and MORE effective than taking a drug like Avandia if you have diabetes. However, virtually no doctor will inform you of this, as there aren’t billions of dollars worth of drug company marketing muscles behind this sort of recommendation.
Most Diabetes Cases Can Be Cured Without Drugs!
Please understand that nearly 100 percent of type 2 diabetics can be successfully treated -- meaning you will no longer have the symptoms of diabetes, or the high risk of developing health complications -- if you are willing to implement a few healthy lifestyle changes.
Diabetes runs in my family. About fifteen years ago, I diagnosed my father with it and gave him these guidelines to follow. He's 81 years old and does two hours of exercise every single morning. Recently he's added strength training. He's been able to keep his diabetes under control without taking a single drug by following these principles.
If you follow the recommendations listed below, your likelihood of successfully going off of drugs and having normal blood sugars is close to 100 percent, as treating type 2 diabetes is simply a matter of implementing some basic strategies to improve your insulin and leptin resistance:
1. Exercise
Exercise is an absolutely essential factor, without which you’re highly unlikely to get this devastating disease under control. It is clearly one of the most potent ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance.
Typically, you’ll need large amounts of exercise, until you get your blood sugar levels under control. You may need up to an hour or two a day. Naturally, you’ll want to gradually work your way up to that amount, based on your current level of fitness.
If you’re unsure of how to get started, I recommend you view this comprehensive exercise program video for tips and guidelines.
2. Eliminate Grains and Sugars
For the last 50 years, many people have been following the nutritional recommendations dictated by conventional health agencies, which advise a high complex carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet. The end result has been a 700 percent increase in diabetes in the same time frame, and many have come to view diabetes as an incurable chronic disease…
This is clearly not true, but the inevitable result of seriously flawed dietary recommendations. Instead, you’ll want to eliminate foods that your body will react to by creating insulin, which includes ALL types of sugars and grains -- even “healthy” grains such as whole, organic grains. This means avoiding all breads, pasta, cereals, rice, potatoes, and corn (which is in fact a grain). You may even need to avoid fruits until your blood sugar is under control.
3. Eat Right for Your Nutritional Type
Exercising and avoiding grains and sugars might not be enough unless you balance your protein, carb and fat ratios for your unique and specific genetic biochemistry. You can read more about nutritional typing here.
4. Monitor Your Fasting Insulin Level
This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You’ll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 to 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin receptor sensitivity is.
The recommendations mentioned above are the key steps you need to achieve this reduction.
5. Optimize Your Vitamin D Level
Interestingly, optimizing your vitamin D levels can not only help improve type 2 diabetes if you have it, but can likely eliminate the risk of type 1 diabetes in your children if you are pregnant. It’s also vital for infants to receive the appropriate amounts of vitamin D in their early years for these same reasons.
Ideally, you’ll want to do this by exposing a large amount of your skin to appropriate amounts of sunshine (or a safe tanning bed) on a regular basis, year-round. Your body can safely create up to 20,000 units of vitamin D a day this way.
However, if neither of these options are available, you may want to use an oral vitamin D3 supplement. But remember, if you choose to take an oral supplement it’s essential that you get your levels tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure you’re not reaching toxic levels, and are within the therapeutic range. Maintaining your vitamin D levels around 60-80 ng/ml can significantly help control your blood sugar.
The Hazards of Sugar
Scientists have proved for the first time that fructose, a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks, can damage human metabolism and is fueling the obesity crisis.
Fructose, a sweetener usually derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.
Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a controlled diet including high levels of fructose produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
This study takes its place in a growing lineup of scientific studies demonstrating that consuming high-fructose corn syrup is the fastest way to trash your health. It is now known without a doubt that sugar in your food, in all it’s myriad of forms, is taking a devastating toll.
And fructose in any form -- including high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and crystalline fructose -- is the worst of the worst!
Fructose is a major contributor to:
* Insulin resistance and obesity
* Elevated blood pressure
* Elevated triglycerides and elevated LDL
* Depletion of vitamins and minerals
* Cardiovascular disease, liver disease, cancer, arthritis and even gout
A Calorie is Not a Calorie
Glucose is the form of energy you were designed to run on. Every cell in your body, every bacterium -- and in fact, every living thing on the Earth--uses glucose for energy.
If you received your fructose only from vegetables and fruits (where it originates) as most people did a century ago, you’d consume about 15 grams per day -- a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical adolescent gets from sweetened drinks. In vegetables and fruits, it’s mixed in with fiber, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and beneficial phytonutrients, all which moderate any negative metabolic effects.
It isn’t that fructose itself is bad -- it is the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.
There are two reasons fructose is so damaging:
1. Your body metabolizes fructose in a much different way than glucose. The entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver.
2. People are consuming fructose in enormous quantities, which has made the negative effects much more profound.
Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used in food and beverage manufacturing are made from corn, and the number one source of calories in America is soda, in the form of HFCS.
Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only far cheaper to make, it’s about 20% sweeter than table sugar.
HFCS is either 42% or 55% fructose, and sucrose is 50% fructose, so it's really a wash in terms of sweetness. Still, this switch drastically altered the average American diet.
By USDA estimates, about one-quarter of the calories consumed by the average American is in the form of added sugars, and most of that is HFCS. The average Westerner consumes a staggering 142 pounds a year of sugar! And the very products most people rely on to lose weight -- the low-fat diet foods -- are often the ones highest in fructose.
Making matters worse, all of the fiber has been removed from these processed foods, so there is essentially no nutritive value at all.
Fructose Metabolism Basics
Without getting into the very complex biochemistry of carbohydrate metabolism, it is important to understand some differences about how your body handles glucose versus fructose. I will be publishing a major article about this in the next couple of months, which will get much more into the details, but for our purpose here, I will just summarize the main points.
Dr. Robert Lustig[i] Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, has been a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism. His work has highlighted some major differences in how different sugars are broken down and used:
* After eating fructose, 100 percent of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. But with glucose, your liver has to break down only 20 percent.
* Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is “burned up” immediately after you consume it. By contrast, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat.
* The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.
* Fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate. In other words, fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn FFAs into triglycerides. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this.
* When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat!
* The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.
* Glucose suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain’s communication with leptin, resulting in overeating.
If anyone tries to tell you “sugar is sugar,” they are way behind the times. As you can see, there are major differences in how your body processes each one.
The bottom line is: fructose leads to increased belly fat, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome -- not to mention the long list of chronic diseases that directly result.
Panic in the Corn Fields
As the truth comes out about HFCS, the Corn Refiners Association is scrambling to convince you that their product is equal to table sugar, that it is “natural” and safe.
Of course, many things are “natural” -- cocaine is natural, but you wouldn’t want to use 142 pounds of it each year.
The food and beverage industry doesn’t want you to realize how truly pervasive HFCS is in your diet -- not just from soft drinks and juices, but also in salad dressings and condiments and virtually every processed food. The introduction of HFCS into the Western diet in 1975 has been a multi-billion dollar boon for the corn industry.
The FDA classifies fructose as GRAS: Generally Regarded As Safe. Which pretty much means nothing and is based on nothing.
There is plenty of data showing that fructose is not safe -- but the effects on the nation’s health have not been immediate. That is why we are just now realizing the effects of the last three decades of nutritional misinformation.
As if the negative metabolic effects are not enough, there are other issues with fructose that disprove its safety:
* More than one study has detected unsafe mercury levels in HFCS[ii].
* Crystalline fructose (a super-potent form of fructose the food and beverage industry is now using) may contain arsenic, lead, chloride and heavy metals.
* Nearly all corn syrup is made from genetically modified corn, which comes with its own set of risks.
The FDA isn’t going to touch sugar, so it’s up to you to be proactive about your own dietary choices.
What’s a Sugarholic to Do?
Ideally, I recommend that you avoid as much sugar as possible. This is especially important if you are overweight or have diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.
I also realize we don’t live in a perfect world, and following rigid dietary guidelines is not always practical or even possible.
If you want to use a sweetener occasionally, this is what I recommend:
1. Use the herb stevia.
2. Use organic cane sugar in moderation.
3. Use organic raw honey in moderation.
4. Avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than fructose.
5. Avoid agave syrup since it is a highly processed sap that is almost all fructose. Your blood sugar will spike just as it would if you were consuming regular sugar or HFCS. Agave’s meteoric rise in popularity is due to a great marketing campaign, but any health benefits present in the original agave plant are processed out.
6. Avoid so-called energy drinks and sports drinks because they are loaded with sugar, sodium and chemical additives. Rehydrating with pure, fresh water is a better choice.
If you or your child is involved in athletics, I recommend you read my article Energy Rules for some great tips on how to optimize your child’s energy levels and physical performance through good nutrition.
Vitamin D and Diabetes - Can We Prevent it?
First Aired: 2/25/2009
48 minutes
Can vitamin D help prevent certain cancers and other diseases such as type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain autoimmune and chronic diseases? To answer these questions and more, UCSD School of Medicine and GrassrootsHealth bring you this innovative series on vitamin D deficiency. Join nationally recognized experts as they discuss the latest research and its implications. In this program, Frank Garland, PhD, discusses vitamin D and the opportunity for prevention of diabetes.
48 minutes
Can vitamin D help prevent certain cancers and other diseases such as type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain autoimmune and chronic diseases? To answer these questions and more, UCSD School of Medicine and GrassrootsHealth bring you this innovative series on vitamin D deficiency. Join nationally recognized experts as they discuss the latest research and its implications. In this program, Frank Garland, PhD, discusses vitamin D and the opportunity for prevention of diabetes.
