The Diabetes Code. Dr. Jason Fung
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disease. Your liver rots, and you get fatty liver disease and cirrhosis. Your legs rot, and you get diabetic foot ulcers. Your nerves rot, and you get diabetic neuropathy. No part of your body is spared.
Standard medications do not prevent the progression of organ failure because they do not help excrete the toxic sugar load. No less than seven multinational, multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled trials have proved that standard medications that lower blood glucose do not reduce heart disease, the major killer of diabetic patients. We have pretended that these glucose-lowering medications make people healthier, but it’s been a lie. We have overlooked a singular truth: you can’t use drugs to cure a dietary disease.
FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES IS REVERSIBLE AND PREVENTABLE WITHOUT MEDICATIONS
ONCE WE UNDERSTAND that type 2 diabetes is simply too much sugar in the body, the solution becomes obvious. Get rid of the sugar. Don’t hide it away. Get rid of it. There are really only two ways to accomplish this.
1.Put less sugar in.
2.Burn off remaining sugar.
That’s it. That’s all we need to do. The best part? It’s all natural and completely free. No drugs. No surgery. No cost.
Step 1: Put less sugar in
THE FIRST STEP is to eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates from your diet. Added sugars have no nutritional value and you can safely withhold them. Complex carbohydrates, which are simply long chains of sugars, and highly refined carbohydrates, such as flour, are quickly digested into glucose. The optimum strategy is to limit or eliminate breads and pastas made from white flour, as well as white rice and potatoes.
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.
What about dietary fat? Natural fats, such as those found in avocados, nuts, and olive oil—major components of the Mediterranean diet—have a minimal effect on blood glucose or insulin and are well known to have healthy effects on both heart disease and diabetes. Eggs and butter are also excellent sources of natural fats. Dietary cholesterol, which is often associated with these foods, has been shown to have no harmful effect on the human body. Eating dietary fat does not lead to type 2 diabetes or heart disease. In fact, it is beneficial because it helps you feel full without adding sugar to the body.
To put less sugar into your body, stick to whole, natural, unprocessed foods. Eat a diet low in refined carbohydrates, moderate in protein, and high in natural fats.
Step 2: Burn off remaining sugar
EXERCISE—BOTH RESISTANCE AND aerobic training—can have a beneficial effect on type 2 diabetes, but it is far less powerful at reversing the disease than dietary interventions. And fasting is the simplest and surest method to force your body to burn sugar.
Fasting is merely the flip side of eating: if you are not eating, you are fasting. When you eat, your body stores food energy; when you fast, your body burns food energy. And glucose is the most easily accessible source of food energy. Therefore, if you lengthen your periods of fasting, you can burn off the stored sugar.
While it may sound severe, fasting is literally the oldest dietary therapy known and has been practiced throughout human history without problems. If you are taking prescription medications, you should seek the advice of a physician. But the bottom line is this:
If you don’t eat, will your blood glucose come down? Of course.
If you don’t eat, will you lose weight? Of course.
So, what’s the problem? None that I can see.
To burn off sugar, a popular strategy is to fast for 24 hours, two to three times per week. Another popular approach is to fast for 16 hours, five to six times per week.
The secret to reversing type 2 diabetes now lies within our grasp. All it requires is having an open mind to accept a new paradigm and the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. You know the basics and are ready to get started. But to really understand why type 2 diabetes is an epidemic and what you can do to effectively manage your own health, read on. Good luck.
HOW TYPE 2 DIABETES BECAME AN EPIDEMIC
THE WORLD HEALTH Organization released its first global report on diabetes in 2016 and the news was not good. Diabetes was an unrelenting disaster. Since 1980—a single generation—the number of people around the world afflicted with diabetes has quadrupled. How did this ancient disease suddenly become the twenty-first-century plague?
A SHORT HISTORY OF DIABETES
THE DISEASE OF diabetes mellitus (DM) has been recognized for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptian medical text, Ebers Papyrus, written around 1550 BC, first described this condition of “passing too much urine.”1 Around the same time, ancient Hindu writings discussed the disease of madhumeha, which loosely translated means “honey urine.”2 Afflicted patients, often children, were mysteriously, inexorably losing weight. Attempts to stop the wasting were unsuccessful despite continual feeding, and the disease was almost uniformly fatal. Curiously, ants were attracted to the urine, which was inexplicably sweet.
By 250 BC, the Greek physician Apollonius of Memphis had termed the condition diabetes, which by itself connotes only excessive urination. Thomas Willis added the term mellitus, meaning “from honey” in 1675. This descriptor distinguishes diabetes mellitus from a different, uncommon disease known as diabetes insipidus. Most commonly caused by traumatic brain injury, diabetes insipidus is also characterized by excessive urination, but the urine is not sweet. Fittingly, insipidus means “bland.”
Colloquially, the non-specific term diabetes refers to diabetes mellitus since it is far, far more common than diabetes insipidus. In this book, the term diabetes only refers to diabetes mellitus, and there will be no further discussion of diabetes insipidus.
In the first century AD, the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote the classic description of type 1 diabetes as a “melting down of flesh and limbs into urine.” This summary captures the essential feature of this disease in its untreated form: excessive urine production is accompanied by almost complete wasting away of all tissues. Patients cannot gain weight no matter what they eat. Aretaeus further commented that “life (with diabetes) is short, disgusting and painful” as there was no effective treatment. Once affected, patients followed a predestined, fatal course.
Tasting the urine of the stricken patient for sweetness was the classic diagnostic test for diabetes (ewww. . .). In 1776, the English physician Matthew Dobson (1732–1784) identified sugar as the substance causing this characteristic sweet taste. The sweetness was found not only in the urine, but also in the blood. Slowly, an understanding of diabetes was unfolding, but a solution was still out of reach.
In 1797, the Scottish military surgeon John Rollo became the first physician to formulate a treatment that carried any reasonable expectation of success. He had observed substantial improvement in a diabetic patient eating an all-meat diet. Given the uniformly grim prognosis of diabetes, this approach was a breakthrough. This extremely low carbohydrate diet was the first diabetic treatment of its kind.
By contrast, French physician Pierre Piorry (1794–1879)