Diabetes Unpacked Quotes

“Insulin creates insulin resistance. But insulin resistance also causes high insulin – a classic vicious, or self-reinforcing, cycle. Insulin drives up insulin resistance. This, in turn drives up insulin levels. The cycle keeps going around and around, one element reinforcing the other, until insulin is driven up to extremes.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Ultimately, it becomes obvious that diabetes is controlled (or even reversed) one meal at a time.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“I have seen that those who eat low carbohydrate meals are able to control the change in their glucose levels far easier; that is the rise from the pre-meal reading to the post-meal reading. The lower the rise the better the control and this leads to better long term results.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“when it comes to exactly how many grams of carbs, protein and fat you should eat. LCHF has a wide spectrum, and your specifics will depend on your own unique set of circumstances and goals.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Why do we advise people with diabetes to eat mostly carbohydrate foods, the very nutrient that they can’t easily tolerate?”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Carbohydrates are as powerfully psychoactive as nicotine, alcohol and opioids, and are as rapidly addictive. Unless you are a performance athlete, most Type 2 diabetics are simply people who over time have transitioned away from eating for the nutritional value of food toward eating primarily for the endorphin release and emotional management effect of a powerful psychoactive drug called sugar.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Humans typically require 1-3 nutritional events per day. More frequent consumptive events are for the mind not the body.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Cognitive behavioural therapy for carbohydrate addicts begins with abstinence (see definition below) and removal of the drug from a patient’s local environment.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Remission requires application of physiologic as well as addiction principles. Physiologically, reducing the frequency and quantity of total carbohydrate consumption below the threshold of maximum insulin production allows the hepato-pancreatic glucagon-insulin feedback pathway to recover its control of carbohydrate metabolism thus preventing T2DM and putting it into remission where the blood glucose level is not causing harm. If we were rats in a cage and our access to carbohydrates was tightly controlled, such reduction in carbohydrate consumption could work.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“In order to set remission as a goal for our diabetic patients, we need to partner with them in the treatment process. Practitioner and patient should each clearly understand their roles. Effective treatment to the point of remission of any carbohydrate-induced CNCDs including T2DM requires a bimodal approach. Treat the cause and treat the disease.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“As a society, we are spending billions of dollars on medications that ineffectively clear sugar from the bloodstream when the simplest, most effective way to prevent the disease or put it into remission is by preventing sugar from ever getting into the bloodstream by not putting it into our faces in the first place!”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Obesity is associated with, but does not cause T2DM. Both diseases are the consequence of prolonged over-consumption of the same drug – carbohydrates. T2DM manifests as damage to end-organs that result from a series of progressive microvascular injuries due to the toxic effects of chronically elevated blood sugar.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“According to glycemic index principles, it would be fine for an alcoholic to drink beer, but not whisky since beer raises your blood alcohol level more slowly, making beer healthy, but whisky not. If abstinence is curative, what value is there in the science of less? Asking a diabetic to count their carbohydrates is no different than asking an alcoholic to count their drinks.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“data reveals that the average Type 2 diabetic consumes between 75%-90% of all their daily calories as carbohydrates.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Carbohydrates, however, are not essential nutrients but powerful endorphin-activating drugs that are not controlled by the genetic hunger-satiety feedback system.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Most certainly carbohydrates are not necessary for human survival because blood glucose levels are very effectively maintained by gluconeogenesis and glucagon. Carbohydrates are an endorphin releasing drug, not a hunger satisfying food.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“T2DM is simply the result of chronic excessive carbohydrate consumption beyond the genetically predetermined maximum carbohydrate handling capacity of the insulin-glucagon hormonal system.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Fasting is the simplest and surest method to force your body to burn sugar. Blood glucose is the most easily accessible source of energy. 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. If you simply lengthen out your periods of fasting, you can burn off the stored sugar.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“We pretended that using medications to lower blood sugar makes people healthier. But it’s only been a lie. All because we’ve overlooked a singular truth. You can’t use drugs to cure a dietary disease.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Medications and insulin do nothing to slow down the progression of this organ damage, because they do not eliminate the toxic sugar load. We’ve known this rather inconvenient fact since 2008.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“This is precisely why T2DM, unlike virtually any other disease, affects every single part of the body. Every organ suffers the long-term effects of the excessive sugar load. Your eyes rot – and you go blind. Your kidneys rot – and you need dialysis. You heart rots – and you get heart attacks and heart failure. Your brain rots – and you get Alzheimer’s 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.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“If we understand that too much sugar in the blood is toxic, why can’t we understand that too much sugar in the body is also toxic?”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Over a period of years, you move from pre-diabetes, to diabetes taking a single medication, then two then three and then finally large doses of insulin. Here’s the thing. If you are taking more and more medications to keep your blood sugars at the same level, your diabetes is getting worse!”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“At its very core, T2DM can be understood as too much glucose and too much insulin. The solution becomes immediately obvious. We must lower the insulin and lower the glucose. The sugar is not just in the blood. That’s only part of the problem. There’s too much sugar in our entire body.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“But the primary problem is the excessive insulin, not the insulin resistance. The tissues (heart, nerves, kidney, eyes) are all increasing their resistance to protect themselves from insulin’s toxic delivery. The disease is not insulin resistance. The disease is hyperinsulinemia.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“it is clear that there are stages before frank Type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, where serious damage is already being done. Various researchers have found that those with the metabolic syndrome have nearly the same risk of CVD as people with diabetes.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“In the US, the total cost of treatment has been put at two hundred and forty-five billion dollars every year. Equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Israel. Many people fear that the medical management of diabetes could bankrupt every single healthcare system in the future.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“If current trends continue, over 700 million adults across the planet will be living with diabetes by 2025.13”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 86 million people were at risk in the United States in 2014.2 That’s an astounding one in three people.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating

“Diabetes is a global health epidemic. In a 2014 study, one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from Imperial College London reported that 422 million people worldwide were living with diabetes.1 That’s four times as many as in 1980, when 108 million people were living with the disease. That bears reiteration – the number of diabetics has quadrupled across the globe in just over 35 years.”
― Tim Noakes, Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating