Cheap and effective diabetes treatment

Within minutes of eating food containing sugars or starch—which convert to glucose—your pancreas secretes insulin. If all is working properly, insulin prompts tissues to take up the glucose from the blood and either use it for energy or, if not needed immediately, to store it in your liver or muscles.  A steady diet of highly refined carbohydrates may lead to insulin resistance, a condition in which cells get tired of the whole business and fail to respond to insulin. If the cells fail to respond to insulin, they fail to take up the glucose. If the cells don’t take up glucose, it remains in the blood, a condition that leads to diabetes.

Two physicians who specialize in obesity and diabetes recently wrote an article in The New York Times touting a low carb diet for treating diabetes (it’s the old fashioned way). The idea here is to reduce the glucose in the blood by eating less of it. Seems like a no brainer, but most doctors, and even the diabetes association don’t recommend low carb diets. They’re afraid that patients will see their blood sugar fall too low. Instead, to lower glucose levels doctors either prescribe insulin injections or medications that increases their patients’ own production of insulin. “A patient with diabetes can be on four or five different medications to control blood glucose, with an annual price tag of thousands of dollars” the authors say.

These two doctors have succeeded in getting hundreds of patients off their medications as the result of low carb diets. For example, one man had been told by his doctor that he’d need to be on insulin for the rest of his life, but the drugs cost him hundreds of dollars a month—even with insurance. They put him on a low carb diet. “Within five months, his blood-sugar levels had normalized…and he no longer needs to take insulin.”  They also refer to dozens clinical trials showing the effectiveness of low carb diets in treating diabetes.

The doctors who wrote the article attended the annual diabetes association convention this summer and found not “a single prominent reference to low-carb treatment among the hundreds of lectures and posters publicizing cutting-edge research… Instead, we saw scores of presentations on expensive medications for blood sugar problems.” They also reported that recently 45 international medical and scientific societies, including the American Diabetes Association, called for bariatric surgery as a standard diabetes treatment. Bariatric surgery involves stapling, binding, or removing part of the stomach to help people shed weight. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Because my husband’s father had diabetes, we have been on a low carb regimen for about 25 years. So far, so good!

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