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Great blog Joel.. Glaucoma sucks especially the side effects from the tablets

thanks for your info

Good post. Informative and interest.

These blogs have turned into a mess, but I try to put these constructive threads up once in a while in the hopes that I can help promote the idea of wellness and stimulate healthful thinking in people.  I know we all know what diabetes is and have some idea about how prevalent it is in society, but I wanted to give my take on it as someone who is medically trained and looks at things differently from my fellow colleagues.  

So, you're a healthy man and you go into your primary care physician at age 50 for a routine physical examination.  And let me stress that if you're in this demographic of being over 50, it is very much in your best interests to see a doctor on an annual basis as so many pathologic conditions we experience later in life are preventable with the technology and screenings we have today, so don't miss out on seeing your doctor regularly.  Anyways, back to our scenario.  You have had your fasting blood labs done ahead of time and in reviewing the results, your primary tells you your fasting blood sugars are suddenly high and that your A1C, the long term measure of how glycosylated your hemoglobin in by elevated blood sugars, is starting to creep up as well.  He suggests you begin a diabetic diet and writes you a prescription for metformin.  He hands you an educational brochure and tells you to start checking your blood sugars and keep a notebook of the results.

Ok stop right there - this is my problem with medicine as it exists today.  What's wrong with this approach?  Well for one thing it suggests that high sugar consumption causes diabetes and that is just not true, at least not directly.  You could spend your life drinking coca colas and putting tons of sugar in your coffee, but the spike in glucose causes your liver to enter glycogenesis and store as much of that energy as glycogen as it can.  The muscles in the body absorb and burn off what they need in your daily activities, and whatever is left over is converted to fat in a process called lipogenesis.  You could go on a high sugar diet and many people do, but as long as the energy expended equals the energy consumed, they don't necessarily get diabetes.  So i reject the notion that sugar consumption causes the disease.  So what does cause it then?

Fat and cholesterol.

Theres no question about it.  Remember, the body converts sugar to fats in the liver.  These fat and cholesterol molecules circulate in the blood stream and overtime glom on to the inner surfaces of our arterioles, especially in the very small blood vessels in our kidneys, retina, brain, and extremities, such as our fingers and toes, and choke off the healthy function of the underlying vessel endothelia, which are tasked with the uptake of sugars and other nutrients.  This is why we become insulin resistant in type II diabetes - the pancreas makes the insulin we need but the cells are too choked off by plaque to be able to utilize it.  So fat and cholesterol are what go you into this situation, but your physician didn't mention that and the therapeutic plan he put you on didn't even consider it.  Rather than try and arrest the problem, his or her approach is to manage the consequences of it.  Hmm...

Ok so diabetes, right?  The number one cause of kidney failure and dialysis.  The number one cause of blindness.  The number one cause of stroke.  The number one cause of limb amputations.  The number one leading cause of heart attack.  Pretty bad stuff and in the face of all this your doctor is leading you down a path where you delay the onset of these complications but do nothing to stop them.  Right Joel but theres nothing I can do to change the fact that I have diabetes, right?

Wrong.  Once you are diagnosed with diabetes, you do NOT have it for life if you take the necessary steps.  You can "fix" your diabetes.  How?

It used to be that doctors told patients to try and diet and exercise to minimize the disease, but research circa the early 2000's showed that recommending this to patients was a waste of time because nobody did it. Doctors still recommend it, but the emphasis instead is on management rather than disease cessation.  I strongly disagree with this.  Lets break it down into the components that cause it, namely fat and cholesterol.

Did you know that people that are diabetic and undergo gastric bypass surgery wake up from general anesthesia and are no longer diabetic in the operating room?  Wow, no shit wow.  Why?  We nobody really understands the phenomena very well, but I believe it has to do with the fact that you're now absorbing far less fat and calories and the body is no longer in a state of constant lipogenesis to store excess energy in the form of fat.  Its true, so if you're overweight and diabetic and have been considering doing the gastric band or gastric bypass, you must consider the implications to what it will do to your diabetes when you come to a decision.  If it were me, that would be reason enough to get the surgery.  I wanted people to know this fact, most people know this.  If weight loss didn't work, we wouldn't see such dramatic results from this surgery.  It does in fact work and strongly suggests that if you incorporate exercise for weight loss, you WILL arrest your diabetes.

Also, did you know that ALL of the cholesterol in your blood circulation comes from eating animal based products?  Take a look at plant based foods (fruits, vegetables, nuts, tubers, legumes) these contain ZERO cholesterol.  Think about that for a second.  If you were to go exclusively on a plant based diet, you would be consuming absolutely no cholesterol whatsoever, even if you added fats such as oils in your salad dressing.  So Joel, if that were the case then why doesn't my blood cholesterol levels appreciatively drop?  Well it turns out they do AND FAST!  A cohort of people with diabetes and elevated cholesterol levels who were on statin drugs for the management of their hyperlipidemia were placed on a vegan diet and had their blood cholesterol checked.  After a month and a half, ALL OF THEM were in the normal to low level and could stop taking their simvastatin and lipitor medications.  Ok Joel, but I'm OK as i am because i take lipitor - right?

Wrong.  I strongly recommend against this thinking.  The research coming out right now shows that the survival benefit of taking statins isn't as huge as once thought.  If it were, we would have seen a dramatic drop in the incidence of diabetes, stroke, and heart attack and we have not.  In fact, these things are out of control world wide.  This perplexed doctors and researchers, who decided to go back and dig deeper into the date.  What they found was poor correlation between the numeric levels of LDL, HDL, and disease, and instead a higher correlation with cholesterol particle size, which statins do control somewhat but much less than previously thought.  They also found that statin medications actually CAUSE a spike in blood sugars that for people with existing diabetes, makes things even worse.

Ok ok ok so what am i advocating?  Stop thinking about diabetes as a disease you chronically manage and start thinking about it as a disease process you need to arrest the progression of or rid from your body altogether.  Consider serious options for weight loss, including but not limited to weight loss, and exercise, and consider changing over to a whole plant based diet.  Diet and exercise DOES work for diabetes and in fact its the ONLY way to effectively manage the disease.

Finally, I'll leave you with an anecdote.  A researcher in california took a group of people in or around the year 2000 who were at the end of life.  They all had severe coronary artery disease, had had heart attacks, had ejection fractions in the low teens, had diabetes that was far out of control and with each of these patients, they had been told by their primary care provider that it was unlikely they would live for more than six months.  These people were desperate as you would imagine.  They were all placed on a whole plant based diet and followed to see if there were a benefit to this approach.  Not all survived, but almost all of them saw resolution of their diabetes after only a month and a half and an arresting or in some cases reversal of their coronary artery disease.  These people, who were all told they had less than 6 months to live, many of them are still alive today.  Go figure.

Thank you for sticking with me on this and i hope it helps someone.  I love you all, Ajoel xoxo <3