The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally

by Jason Fung

than dietary interventions. And fasting is the simplest and surest method to force...

Therefore, if you lengthen your periods of fasting, you can burn off the stored sugar.

If you don’t eat, will your blood glucose come down? Of course.

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.

Insulin’s discovery overshadowed the dietary treatments of the previous century, essentially throwing them into general disrepute. Unfortunately, the story of diabetes did not end there.

THE ROOTS OF THE EPIDEMIC

Similarly, the link between natural, saturated fat and heart disease has been proven false.12 While artificially saturated fats, such as trans fats, are universally accepted as toxic, the same does not hold true for naturally occurring fats found in meat and dairy products, such as butter, cream, and cheese—foods that have been part of the human diet for time beyond memory.

As it turns out, the consequences of this newfangled, unproven, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet were unintended: the rate of obesity soon turned upwards and has never looked back.

The 1980 Dietary G...

Without any scientific evidence, the formerly “fattening” carbohy...

healthy whole grain. The foods that formed the base of the pyramid—foods we were told to eat every single day—included breads, pastas, and potatoes. These were the precise foods we had previously avoided in order to stay thin. They are also the precise...

The International Diabetes Federation estimates that the worldwide rate of diabetes will reach 1 in every 10 adults by the year 2040.19

In the U.S., 14.3 percent of adults have type 2 diabetes and 38 percent of the population has prediabetes, totaling 52.3 percent. This means that, for the first time in

history, more people have the disease than not.

Prediabetes and diabetes is the new normal. Worse, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes has increased only in the last forty years, making it clear that this is not some genetic disease or par...

The combination of prohibitive economic and social costs, increasing prevalence, and younger age of onset make obesity and type 2 diabetes the defining epidemics of this century.

Although insulin and other modern medicines can treat blood glucose efficiently, lowering blood glucose alone does not prevent the complications of diabetes, including heart disease, stroke, and cancer—leading causes of death.

The answer is that we have fundamentally misunderstood the disease called type 2 diabetes. To design rational treatments that have a chance of success, we must begin again. We must understand the root causes of the disease, or in medical terms, the aetiology. What is the aetiology of type 2 diabetes? Once we understand that, we can begin. Let us begin.

The most typical symptoms seen in diabetes therefore include •increased thirst, •frequent urination, •rapid, unexplained weight loss, •increased hunger despite weight loss, and •fatigue.

DIAGNOSING DIABETES

Over the average three-month lifespan of a red blood cell, glucose molecules attach to the hemoglobin in proportion to the prevailing blood glucose levels. The amount of glucose attached to the hemoglobin can be measured with a simple blood test called the hemoglobin A1C. The A1C

thus reflects the body’s average level of blood glucose over three months.

In North America, the A1C is given as a percentage, while in the U.K. and Australia, the units are expressed as mmol/mol. The American Diabetes Association defines an A1C level of 5.7 percent or less to be normal. A leve...

Table 2.2. Classification of diabetes and prediabetes according to A1...

A1C Classification < 5.7% Normal 5.7%–6.4% Prediabete...

Blood glucose

THE SECOND TEST to diagnose diabetes is the blood glucose test, which is also known as the blood sugar or plasma glucose test. It is measured using either a fasting blood sugar test or an oral glucose tolerance test (OGT).

For the fasting blood glucose test, a patient is asked to have no caloric intake for at least eight hours. A blood sample is then taken and the amount of glu...

7.0 mmol/L (or 126 mg/dL) is conside...

Table 2.3 Diagnostic criteria for diabetes Fasting blood glucose > 7.0 mmol/L (126 mg/dL) 2 hour blood glucose > 11.1 mmol/L (200 mg/dL) during OGT A1C > 6.5% (48 mmol/mol) Symptoms of hyperglycemia and random blood glucose > 11.1 mmol/L (200 mg/dL)

Insulin allows the glucose to enter the cells as fuel for energy. The body stores any excess glucose in the liver for future use, which keeps our blood glucose from rising out of its normal range.

TYPE 1 DIABETES: THE FACTS

TYPE 2 DIABETES: THE FACTS

The failure of insulin to lower blood glucose is called insulin resistance.

The body overcomes this resistance by increasing insulin secretion to maintain normal blood glucose levels. The price to be paid is high insulin levels. However, this compensation has a limit. When insulin secretion fails to keep pace with increasing resistance, blood glucose rises, leading to a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.

DIFFERENT CAUSES REQUIRE DIFF...

Both primarily target blood glucose, with the goal of lowering it by increasing insulin, even though the high level of blood glucose is only the symptom of the disease and not the disease itself.

However, the underlying core problem of type 2 diabetes is insulin

resistance and it remains virtually untreated because there is no clear consensus upon its cause. Without this understanding, we don’t have a hope of reversing it. That is our challenge. It may appear formidable, but its rewards are equally enticing: a cure for type 2 diabetes.

MICROVASCULAR COMPLICATIONS

Retinopathy

Approximately 10,000 new cases of blindness in the United States are caused by diabetic retinopathy each year.2 Whether retinopathy develops depends on how long a person has had diabetes as well as how severe the disease is.

Nephropathy

Diabetic kidney disease (nephropathy) is the leading cause of end stage renal disease (ESRD) in the United States, accounting for 44 percent of all new cases in 2005.

Diabetic kidney disease often takes fifteen to twenty-five years to develop, but, like retinopathy, it may occasionally be diagnosed before type 2 diabetes, itself. Approximately 2 percent of type 2 diabetic patients develop kidney disease each year.

Ten years after diagnosis, 25

percent of patients will have evidence of ...

Once established, diabetic nephropathy tends to progress, leading to more and more kidney impairment until eventually the patient ...

Neuro...

DIABETIC NERVE DAMAGE (neuropathy) affects approximately 60–70 percent of patients with diabetes.7 Once again, the longer the duration and severity of di...