From the DietDoctor.com website — Dr Andreas Eenfeldt interviews Dr Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who treats obese and diabetic patients. In addition to LCHF, Dr Fung often recommends fasting as an effective part of the intervention.
CategoryDiabetes
Dr Robert Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco, and has become well known for his 2009 YouTube video, Sugar: The Bitter Truth. This video has over 7 million views as of April 2017.
Here he is interviewed by CrossFit’s Rory McKernan to explain sugar’s toxicity, and how processed food—often loaded with refined carbohydrates and added sugar—is a huge part of the obesity and diabetes problem.
Gary Taubes is an award-winning science journalist and the author of several books on nutrition, including Why We Get Fat (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007). Why We Get Fat was the first one I read and it taught me so much, including how we have been misled for so long about how certain foods affect metabolism and health.
Mr Taubes has just published The Case Against Sugar, where he demonstrates how sugar alters hormones and metabolism, and is the major contributor to the current epidemic of obesity and diabetes, among other metabolic disorders.
Aeon magazine has published a chapter online from The Case Against Sugar and it is a good read. A few excerpts from this below.
As it turns out, virtually all hormones work to mobilize fatty acids from fat cells so that they can then be used for fuel. The one dominant exception to this fuel-mobilization signaling is insulin, which partitions how we use the fuels we consume: in particular, it directs fat cells to store fat, while facilitating the uptake and oxidation of glucose (blood sugar) by muscle and organ cells. In other words, when insulin is secreted – primarily in response to the carbohydrates in our diet – it directs our cells to burn carbohydrate as fuel and store fat.
Yalow and Berson themselves described insulin as a ‘lipogenic’, or fat-forming hormone. This lipogenic signal must be turned off, or at least muted significantly, for the fat cells to release their stored fat and for the body to metabolize it for energy. […] The more we consume carbohydrates, though, and particularly sugar, the higher our insulin levels will be.
Insulin is secreted in response to rising blood sugar, and rising blood sugar is a response to a carbohydrate-rich meal. Sugar is implicated, in particular, because its chemical structure includes a large proportion of the carbohydrate fructose, and fructose is preferentially metabolized in the liver. As such, it is a prime suspect for the fat accumulation in liver cells that is hypothesized to be the trigger of insulin resistance itself.
Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.
Dr Robert Szabo, Melbourne GP and founding partner of The Low Carb Clinic, tweeted the results of one of his diabetic patients who went low carb in April — blood tests in November showed him to no longer be diabetic.
The circled values on the right show a HbA1c (Haemoglobin A1c) value of 12.3 in March of this year (6.5 or higher is diabetic). By July it was 6.8, and on November 2 it was 5.9.
No more diabetes, no medications, only a change in diet.
If you are considering a LCHF / keto approach, a good resource to start with is “A Ketogenic Diet for Beginners” on the DietDoctor.com website.
Introduction to keto, benefits, what to eat, ketosis, side effects, and much more are there for you to become acquainted with a lifestyle that is transforming the health of many people.
Scroll down the linked page and read up on the benefits of Ketosis: weight loss, improved mental focus, T2 diabetes reversal, increased physical endurance, and improved metabolic syndrome.
Great article at the New York Times by Dr Sarah Hallberg and Osama Hamdy.
Rather than cutting on perfectly healthy organs to deal with weight loss, why not use a dietary approach on a dietary problem: cut out the foods that contribute to obesity.
Excerpt from the article:
It is nonsensical that we’re expected to prescribe these techniques to our patients while the medical guidelines don’t include another better, safer and far cheaper method: a diet low in carbohydrates.
Once a fad diet, the safety and efficacy of the low-carb diet have now been verified in more than 40 clinical trials on thousands of subjects. Given that the government projects that one in three Americans (and one in two of those of Hispanic origin) will be given a diagnosis of diabetes by 2050, it’s time to give this diet a closer look.
When someone has diabetes, he can no longer produce sufficient insulin to process glucose (sugar) in the blood. To lower glucose levels, diabetics need to increase insulin, either by taking medication that increases their own endogenous production or by injecting insulin directly. A patient with diabetes can be on four or five different medications to control blood glucose, with an annual price tag of thousands of dollars.
Yet there’s another, more effective way to lower glucose levels: Eat less of it.
This two-minute clip from Dr Ted Naiman’s presentation is a brief explanation of the obesity epidemic. It is about the activity of insulin in the body. For most people, this is resolved through diet — not pharmaceuticals or exercise (although exercise is important).
Click the image below to view the video clip on DietDoctor.com. For the full video presentation, and a lot more great information, you can become a member of the Diet Doctor website for $9 per month. I am not affiliated with the site in any way, but I am a paying member and it is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to understand more about how a low carb approach can transform health. Highly recommended.
We need more young docs like Dr Priyanka Wali.
She saw that diabetic patients were not getting better with the conventional pharmaceutical approach that she had been taught. She started doing her own research and learned that a low carb ketogenic diet might be a better intervention, so she tried the diet on herself first and found that she felt much better, and knew that she could prescribe it as a therapy for her diabetic and insulin resistant patients. She now uses it in her practice and it is working.
The interview below was done at the Low Carb USA Conference in San Diego. Interviewer is the great Ivor Cummins.
A FEW QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW
I started treating patients with diabetes and the first thing I noticed was that the guidelines weren’t working. My patients weren’t getting better.
I started to look for answers that were outside what we had been taught in medical school, which was not very much about nutrition.
Physicians don’t understand what are the macronutrients that affect insulin levels. This is not common knowledge among the medical community.
[Our current prescription-driven model of medicine] is the result of business being a greater priority than human lives.
We are incentivized to prescribe medication.
I lived the [dietary] guidelines and I started to see that something wasn’t right.
Just look around you. Insulin resistance is rampant.
The first thing is changing the guidelines.
There are many personal anecdotes like this one. Diabetics who have been told that their condition is chronic and progressive — meaning a future of more meds and no hope of reversal.
Then they go on a LCHF diet and their diabetes is either dramatically improved or completely reversed. See the tweet below from Dale. Diabetic for ten years, increasing his insulin treatment for three years (presumably his doctor didn’t know any better), and then switched to LCHF. Three weeks later, no more insulin required.
The American Diabetes Association will not tell you this.
I had T2 #diabetes for 10 years, 3 years on increasing insulin but #LCHF eating stopped insulin after 3 weeks… https://t.co/wcm15W7CcS
— Dale LCHF Japan (@BantInJapanDale) August 6, 2016
The traditional “balanced diet” may be way out of whack. To fight obesity and diabetes, doctors and nutritionists are embracing diets that were once called fads.
“PEOPLE have told me what I do is dangerous. They have walked away from me at meetings,” says David Unwin, a doctor practicing in Southport, UK. Unwin suggests to his patients with type 2 diabetes or who want to lose weight that they do the opposite of what official health advice recommends. He advises them to stop counting calories, eat high-fat foods – including saturated fats – and avoid carbohydrates, namely sugar and starch. Telling people to avoid sugar is uncontroversial; the rest is medical heresy.
But crazy as it sounds, Unwin has found that most of his diabetes patients who follow this advice are getting their blood sugar back under control, and that some are coming off medication they have relied on for years. Those who are overweight are slimming down.
This might seem like just another controversial fad diet, but a growing number of researchers, doctors and nutritionists around the world are backing it, and reporting their findings in peer-reviewed medical journals. Last month, the National Obesity Forum, a UK body for health professionals involved in weight management, made headlines when it overhauled its advice, telling people to ditch calorie-counting, low-fat foods and carbs in favor of fats.
Source: New Scientist
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