The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally

by Jason Fung

They have, instead, essentially given up on finding a cure, pronouncing type 2 diabetes1 a chronic, progressive

disease that promises a life of slow, painful decline and early death.

These techniques for managing diabetes are expensive, invasive, and do nothing to reverse diabetes—because, as Dr. Jason Fung explains in The Diabetes Code, “you can’t use drugs [or devices] to cure a dietary disease.”

The groundbreaking idea Dr. Fung presents in these pages is that diabetes is caused by our bodies’ insulin response to chronic overconsumption of carbohydrates and that the best and most natural way to reverse the disease is to reduce consumption of those carbohydrates. A low-carbohydrate diet for treating obesity is not only being practiced now by hundreds of doctors around the world but is

developed it into a comprehensive intellectual framework for the “carbohydrate-insulin” hypothesis, in his seminal 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories. And

In other words, these patients successfully reversed their diabetes simply by restricting carbohydrates—findings

that ought to be compared to the official standard of care for diabetics, which states with 100 percent certainty that the condition is “irreversible.”

Dr. Fung explains the relationship between glucose and

insulin and how these together drive not only obesity and diabetes but also, quite likely, a host of other related chronic diseases as well.

For this is the unvarnished truth: the success of carbohydrate restriction directly implies that the last several decades of low-fat, high-carbohydrate nutrition advice has almost certainly fueled the very obesity and diabetes epidemics it was intended to prevent. This is a devastating conclusion to half a century of public health efforts, but if we are to have any hope of reversing these epidemics, we must accept this possibility, begin to explore the alternative science contained in this book, and start on a new path forward—for the sake of truth, science, and better health.

FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES IS FULLY REVERSIBLE AND PREVENTABLE

Recognizing the fallacy of this belief is the crucial first step in reversing the disease.

But only diet and lifestyle changes—not medications—will reverse this disease, simply because type 2 diabetes is largely a dietary disease.

The most important determinant, of course, is weight loss. Most of the medications used to treat type 2 diabetes do not cause weight loss. Quite the contrary. Insulin, for example, is notorious for causing weight gain. Once patients start on insulin injections for type 2 diabetes, they often sense they are heading down the wrong path.

The key to treating diabetes properly was weight loss. Logically, because it caused weight gain, insulin was not making things better; it was actually making the disease worse.

The problem is not the disease; the problem is the way we treat the disease.

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are closely related, and generally, increased weight increases the risk

of disease. The correlation is not perfect but, nevertheless, maintaining an ideal weight is a first step to prevention.

FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES IS CAUSED BY TOO MUCH SUGAR

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.

Framing the problem this way is incredibly powerful because the solution

becomes immediately obvious. We must lower our insulin levels by reducing our dietary intake of sugar and refined...

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. If you don’t burn off that sugar sufficiently, then over decades your cells become completely filled and cannot handle any more. The next time you eat sugar, insulin cannot force any more of it into your overflowing cells, so it spills out

into the blood. Sugar travels in your blood in a form called glucose, and having too much of it—known as high blood glucose—is a primary symptom of type 2 diabetes.

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 w...

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. When the insulin levels can no longer keep pace with rising resistance, blood glucose spikes. That’s when your doctor is likely to diagnose type 2 diabetes.

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. It then gets shipped out to other organs, such as the kidneys, the nerves, the eyes, and the hear...

Insulin has simply moved the glucose from the blood, where you could see it, into the body, where you cannot.

The more glucose you force your body to accept, the more insulin your body needs to overcome the resistance to it. But this insulin only creates more resistance as the cells become more and more distended. Once you’ve exceeded what your body can produce naturally, medications can take over. At first, you need only a single medication, but eventually it becomes two and then three, and the doses become larger. 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.

Conventional diabetes treatments: How to make th...

THE BLOOD GLUCOSE got better with insulin, but the diabetes got worse. The medications only hid the blood glucose by cramming it into the already engorged cells. The d...

Doctors may congratulate themselves on the illusion of a job well done, even as patients get sicker. No amount of medication prevents the heart attacks, congestive heart failure, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and blindness that result when diabetes is getting w...

But the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes follows the same flawed logic of hiding the glucose instead of eliminating it.

If we understand that too much

glucose in the blood is toxic, why can’t we understand that too much glucose in...

FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES AFFECTS EVERY ORG...

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.

Step 1: Put less sugar in

THE FIRST STEP is to eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates from your diet.

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.

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 ...