The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally

by Jason Fung

FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES IS FULLY REVERSIBLE AND PREVENTABLE

Suppose you have a friend who is diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, meaning the level of glucose in his blood is continuously above normal levels. He works hard to lose 50 pounds, which enables him to stop taking his glucose-lowering medications because the levels in his blood are now normal. What would you say to him? Probably something like “Great job. You’re really taking care of yourself. Keep it up!” What you wouldn’t say is something like “You’re such a filthy liar. My doctor says this is a chronic and progressive disease so you must be lying.”

My diabetic patients would often say, “Doctor, you’ve always said weight loss is the key to reversing diabetes. Yet you prescribed me a drug that made me gain 25 pounds. How is that good?”

drugs won’t cure a dietary disease.

AT ITS VERY core, type 2 diabetes can be understood as a disease caused by too much insulin, which our bodies secrete when we eat too much sugar.

The same situation exists in your body. When you eat sugar, your body secretes the hormone insulin to help move the sugar into your cells, where it’s used for energy.

primary problem is that the cells are overflowing with glucose. The high blood glucose is only part of the issue.

Type 2 diabetes is simply an overflow phenomenon that occurs when there is too much glucose in the entire body.

In response to excess glucose in the blood, the body secretes even more insulin to overcome this resistance. This forces more glucose into the overflowing cells to keep blood levels normal. This works, but the effect is only temporary because it has not addressed the problem of excess sugar; it has only moved the excess from the blood to the cells, making insulin resistance worse. At some point, even with more insulin, the body cannot force any more glucose into the cells.

What happens in the body if we do not remove the excess glucose? First, the body keeps increasing the amount of insulin it produces to try to force more glucose into the cells. But this only creates more insulin resistance, in what then becomes a vicious cycle.

Your doctor may prescribe a medication such as insulin injections, or perhaps a drug called metformin, to lower blood glucose, but these drugs do not rid the body of excess glucose. Instead, they simply continue to take the glucose out of the blood and ram it back into the body.

And here’s the thing: if you are taking more and more medications to keep your blood glucose at the same level, your diabetes is actually getting worse.

No amount of medication prevents the heart attacks, congestive heart failure, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and blindness that result when diabetes is getting worse. “Oh well,” the doctor says, “it’s a chronic, progressive disease.”

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN excessive glucose piles up in the body over ten or twenty years? Every cell in the body starts to rot, which is precisely why type 2 diabetes, unlike virtually any other disease, affects every single organ. Your eyes rot, and you go blind. Your kidneys rot, and you need dialysis. Your heart rots, and you get heart attacks and heart failure. Your brain rots, and you get Alzheimer’s disease.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Diabetes and obesity are truly one and the same disease.

Indeed, the Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1990 allowed that some weight gain after the age of thirty-five was consistent with good health. That same year, Dr. Willett challenged the conventional thinking, reporting that weight gain after age eighteen was the major determinant of type 2 diabetes.1 A weight gain of 20–35 kg (44–77 pounds) increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 11,300 percent. Gaining more than 35 kg (77 pounds) increased the risk by 17,300 percent!

Body mass index = Weight (kg)/Height2 (m2)

By 1995, building on this new realization, researchers had determined that a weight gain of only 5.0–7.9 kg (11–17.5 pounds) increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 90 percent, and a weight gain of 8.0–10.9 kg (17.5–24 pounds) increased the risk by 270 percent.3 By contrast, weight loss decreased risk by more than 50 percent.

In 2001, Dr. Willett5 showed that, once again, the single most important risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes was obesity.

THE NURSES’ HEALTH Study II revealed that other lifestyle variables were also important. Maintaining a normal weight, getting regular physical exercise, not smoking, and eating a healthy diet could prevent a stunning 91 percent of type 2 diabetes.

But the million-dollar question is: What is a “healthy” diet? Dr. Willett’s healthy diet was defined as high in cereal fiber, high in polyunsaturated fats, low in trans fat, and low in glycemic load.

Dr. Willett’s healthy diet was high in dietary fat and protein. His diet was about reducing sugar and refined carbohydrates, not reducing dietary fat.

Today, we understand clearly that obesity is the main underlying issue behind type 2 diabetes. But the problem isn’t simply obesity. Rather, it is abdominal obesity.

However, body mass index is not the best indicator of type 2 diabetes risk. The waist circumference, a measure of body fat distribution around the trunk, is a far superior predictor of type 2 diabetes.

This pattern of obesity, where most of the fat is carried around the abdomen, is also known as central obesity, or central adiposity. In contrast, subcutaneous fat is the fat deposited directly under the skin. The different health risks associated with the different fat distributions explain how roughly 30 percent of obese adults are metabolically normal.9

On the other hand, some normal-weight people show the same metabolic abnormalities as in obesity10 because of excessive visceral fat.

The key clinical indicator is clearly not total body fat as measured by body mass index. Rather, it’s visceral or intra-organic fat.12

Independent of total weight, central obesity is highly correlated to metabolic abnormalities,14 increased cardiac risk,15 and progression to type 2 diabetes.16

Fat found inside the organs, such as within the liver and pancreas, is called intra-organic fat and is distinctly more dangerous than fat found around the organs, called omental fat. Intra-organic fat increases the risk for the metabolic complications of obesity, including type 2 diabetes, NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or fatty liver disease), and cardiovascular disease.21

Fat within the liver, called intrahepatic fat, plays a crucial role in the development of insulin resistance.

CALORIE CONFUSION: NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIABETES AND CALORIES

The truth is that the body can adjust its basal metabolic rate (BMR)—the energy required to keep the heart pumping, lungs breathing, kidneys and liver detoxifying, brain thinking, body generating heat, and so on—up or down by 40 percent. When you eat fewer calories, your body slows down so it uses fewer calories, which means you don’t lose weight.

The idea that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak—that people have the dream but not the drive—is as absurd as expecting a drowning man to laugh. Was the entire obesity epidemic simply a sudden, simultaneous, coordinated, worldwide lack of willpower?

When the final results were tallied in 1997, there was only crushing disappointment. Despite good compliance, more than seven years of calorie counting had led to virtually no weight loss.

The conventional weight-loss advice to eat fewer calories carries an estimated failure rate of 99.4 percent. For morbid obesity, the failure rate is 99.9 percent.

The Calories-In, Calories-Out theory gained widespread acceptance based on its seemingly intuitive truth.

The most important error is believing that basal metabolic rate, or Calories Out, always remains stable. But a 40-percent reduction in calorie intake is quickly met with a 40-percent decrease in basal metabolic rate. The net result is no weight loss.

The other major false assumption is that weight is consciously regulated.

HORMONES CONTROL HUNGER, telling our body when to eat and when to stop. Ghrelin is a powerful hormone that causes hunger,

Calorie consumption is under tight hormonal regulation.

Fat accumulation is truly not a problem of energy excess. It’s a problem of energy distribution. Too much energy is diverted to producing fat as opposed to, say, increasing body heat or forming new bone tissue.

Obesity is a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one. The hormonal problem in undesired weight gain is mainly excessive insulin. Thus, type 2 diabetes, too, is a disease about insulin imbalance rather than caloric imbalance.

WHEN WE EAT, foods are broken down in the stomach and small intestine for easier absorption. All foods are composed of three main constituents, called macronutrients. These are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and they are all handled differently by the digestive system.

Sibyl, 69, had a ten-year history of type 2 diabetes as well as high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and triple bypass surgery.