More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There is no emphasis on better nutrition.
There is also the stark reality that most medical associations today are significantly funded by pharmaceutical and device companies, which have no interest in a dietary solution to disease.
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.
But only diet and lifestyle changes—not medications—will reverse this disease, simply because type 2 diabetes is largely a dietary disease.
drugs won’t cure a dietary disease.
The problem is not the disease; the problem is the way we treat the 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.
Type 2 diabetes is simply an overflow phenomenon that occurs when there is too much glucose in the entire body.
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 heart, where it can eventually create other problems.
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 diabetes looks better but actually it is worse.
But the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes follows the same flawed logic of hiding the glucose instead of eliminating it.
Standard medications do not prevent the progression of organ failure because they do not help excrete the toxic sugar load.
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.
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.
unprocessed foods.
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.
Another popular approach is to fast for 16 hours, five to six times per week.
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.
The key clinical indicator is clearly not total body fat as measured by body mass index. Rather, it’s visceral or intra-organic fat.
When you eat fewer calories, your body slows down so it uses fewer calories, which means you don’t lose weight.
Only two possibilities can explain how obesity could spread so rapidly in the face of our shiny new advice to reduce fat and calories: first, perhaps this advice is good but people are simply not following it; second, perhaps the advice is simply wrong.
Reducing calories did not lead to weight loss.
The conventional weight-loss advice to eat fewer calories carries an estimated failure rate of 99.4 percent.
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.
Calorie consumption is under tight hormonal regulation.
It’s a problem of energy distribution.
If we eat fewer calories, our body simply compensates by decreasing its metabolic rate.
Obesity is a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one.
Thus, type 2 diabetes, too, is a disease about insulin imbalance rather than caloric imbalance.
We eat, insulin goes up, and we store energy as glycogen and fat. We fast, insulin goes down, and we use our stored glycogen and fat. As long as feeding (insulin high) is balanced with fasting (insulin low), no overall fat is gained.
Currently, metformin is the most widely prescribed medication worldwide for type 2 diabetes. Rather than increasing insulin, it blocks the liver’s production of glucose (gluconeogenesis) and therefore reduces blood glucose. It successfully treats type 2 diabetes without increasing insulin and, therefore, does not lead to weight gain.
Increasing insulin causes weight gain. Decreasing insulin causes weight loss.
Remember, obesity is a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one.
Highly refined, processed carbohydrates—sugars, flour, bread, pasta, muffins, donuts, rice, and potatoes—are well known to raise blood glucose and insulin production. If these highly refined carbohydrates were the main cause of hyperinsulinemia, they would also be the prime cause of weight gain. This theory of obesity is known as the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis.
Insulin causes insulin resistance.
Reversing the high insulin levels also reverses insulin resistance.
Removing the stimulus removes the resistance.
Homeostasis is so fundamental to survival that biological systems always find a way to compensate. Exposure creates resistance. And what does this tell us about insulin resistance? Insulin causes insulin resistance.
For resistance to develop, two essential factors are required: high hormonal levels and constant stimulus. Normally, insulin is released in bursts, preventing insulin resistance from developing. But when the body is constantly bombarded with insulin, resistance develops.
The molecular structure of both insulin and the insulin receptor is completely normal in type 2 diabetes. Therefore, something must be gumming up the lock-and-key mechanism. But what? Despite decades of intensive research, no plausible culprit has been positively identified.
So what if the glucose cannot enter the cell because it is already overflowing? The paradigm of insulin resistance as an overflow phenomenon resolves the central paradox.
In other words, too much sugar causes fatty liver, the key problem of insulin resistance,
Carbohydrate-heavy diets cause fatty muscle. It’s no secret in cattle, and it works just as well in humans.
Your body simply cannot use both fuels simultaneously. You either burn sugar or fat, but not both.
Simply put, type 2 diabetes is a disease entirely caused by too much sugar.
The United States, by the way, is the undisputed heavyweight champion of HFCS, with a per capita consumption of almost 55 pounds.4 The dose makes the poison.
Yet fructose is particularly malevolent to human health compared to glucose due to the unique way the body metabolizes it.