A Diet for Type Two Diabetes

Type Two Diabetes killed Dr Noakes's father. Type Two Diabetes, it takes 20+ years to develop, and corrective action could be taken years before the problem presents as a disease. But we don't look for insulin resistance and fatty liver early enough.

If a person is diagnosed with type two diabetes, SIMPLE dietary action everyone can do, can resolve the problem. Every newly diagnosed patient should be told that reversal of type two diabetes by diet alone, is a lifestyle option. One needs to eat a different diet. That's a choice. If you choose wisely your life can be normal and probably medication free. (Sadly in 2023 in New Zealand, that still doesn't happen.)

Doctors follow the protocol.

Diabetes Dietary Confusion

Around the world there are both doctors and dietitians who have been placed under restriction or have lost their practicing certificate for disregarding the protocol for treating diabetes patients. That's why the wrong treatment is entrenched, and people are still being given the wrong advice.

Very slowly there is greater recognition that something is wrong, aided greatly by the Internet. People can read for themselves how local-navigation Richard K Bernstein managed his type one diabetes, and can talk to him online if they wish.

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Anyone can go to YouTube and hear local-navigation Dr Jason Fung deliver more than nine hours of lectures about the causes of obesity and diabetes.

The "Cooking from the Heart" web-site says that: "At least 80% of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancers can be prevented by adopting a healthier lifestyle, which include making healthier food choices." Comments which Dr Noakes would entirely agree with.

Then they give the totally discredited advice and information in this slide. If you have diabetes, the only sensible diet is a low-carbohydrate diet. Dr Noakes recommends less than 50gm of carbohydrate a day. Dr Richard K Bernstein recommends 13gm of carbohydrate in each of three meals.

Exercise is always desirable, but it's not relevant to reducing the excess insulin in the blood stream caused by a faulty diet.

If the dietary principles are understood and followed there will be no need for any medication for most type two diabetics, and type one diabetics will minimise the amount of insulin they need to use.

Disabled by a Cheap Food Diet

The most disabling diseases in medical practice today are disseminated arterial diseases. The are all caused by our faulty diet over a long time. The bodies we have were designed for an uncertain food supply. Feast and famine. Getting fat sometimes using our glucose metabolism, and but then reverting to our lipid metabolism, when the season or our circumstances changed. Food supply may be uncertain for a month or so, and we may become leaner. That kept our system adaptive and healthy.

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Today because of relatively greater wealth and supermarkets, we can feast almost every day. If we are short of money we can buy very cheap food. We need never be hungry. The very cheap food is always carbohydrate, bread, potatoes, rice, wheat, soy, and other grains. That's a problem for our bodies. In the short term we will cope, but long term we need nutrition of better quality. Otherwise we get sick, as many of us are.

This table shows the nutriment density of quality foods like chicken liver, sardines and eggs, compared with he poor quality nutrition of common grains, like yellow corn and brown rice.

We've been told that so long as we eat enough calories to maintain an energy balance that we can be healthy and well. People have always believed that we need food so we are not hungry. Something to fill the stomach. A loaf of bread, or a plate of porridge, looks good. We fuss more about he quality of the food we feed our animals than we do about the quality of our own food. local-navigation Elmer McCollum in 1912-17 found farmers wanted to know how to best feed their cattle. Today for refugees worldwide, for people who live on government handouts in several places in the world, the food supplied is supposed to be an approved "balanced diet," usually 2200kcal a day; but 70% is the cheapest carbohydrates, 20% protein, and 10% vegetable oil. It's a starvation diet. After 20 years of that, people who were slim if not stunted, become sick and get obese. The diet was the same, and the body rebelled against the lack of proper nutrition.

The theory of calorie balance has no credibility. You are not a mechanical system, your system is biological, controlled by the brain and by hormones. The body is regulated by homeostasis. If you are healthy, the system can both conserve energy, and if required waste energy, to preserve homeostasis. If your system is damaged, your hormones don't respond as they should, and problems begin to accumulate. A poor diet can dysregulate the system.

Prevalence of Diabetes Since 1976

This page is largely based on video 26 ( 27 min)

The strong increase in diabetes diagnosis in the USA

There seems to be a rule, that it takes 20 years on a bad diet, for type two diabetes to develop. You can see it in the graph above.

A high carbohydrate diet eventually triggers a hormonal response that is toxic to the body. It's the bodies way of trying to protect itself from a bad diet. The homeostatic process has been out of order for a long time.

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"My father was told to eat a normal diet and correct his blood sugars with insulin. His diabetes got progressively worse and eventually killed him, because this is exactly to wrong treatment. The correct target is the insulin level. You can easily reduce the level of insulin if you severely restrict carbohydrates. In some cases it may be necessary to control protein intake too. A low-carbohydrate diet doesn't stimulate the production of insulin."

We've known since the 1980's that carbohydrate restriction works really well. Why don't we do that? We might call it the "Semmelweis Effect," the purposeful rejection of a process that works, because we it contradicts some norm, or belief, or paradigm, we are trying to protect.

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(From Wikipedia) Described as the "savior of mothers", Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal, with mortality at 10%–35%. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands.

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" www-navigation Effects of a low-carbohydrate diet on glycemic control in outpatients with severe type 2 diabetes" - Japan, 2009

The study group had previously restricted carbohydrate for diabetes patients to 45% of the diet, about 225gm of carbohydrate a day with success in reducing the HbA1c level.

In this study they took patients with severe diabetes, and restricted them to about 140gm of carbohydrate a day. They describe this as a "low-carbohydrate diet," using similar terminology to that of Stellenbosch University. This is technically correct, but local-navigation Dr Jeff Volek's lab has shown, that better results are obtained when carbohydrate in the diet is less than 130gm a day. On the Banting Diet we recommend less than 50gm of carbohydrate a day, a very low-carbohydrate diet.

"This study demonstrated that good glycemic control with a tapering off of sulfonylureas and improvement of the serum cholesterol profile can be achieved with a 30%-carbohydrate diet among outpatients with severe T2DM at an outpatient clinic. The mean HbA1c level decreased by 1.0% per month during the first 3 months."

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The iceberg of common metabolic (lifestyle) diseases. Above the waterline we see the features of metabolic syndrome, as identified by local-navigation Gerald Reaven. Questions are asked about other common problems that may have a connection to this same pathology. Cancers and dementia in particular.

Below the waterline we see the underlying problems that are causing metabolic syndrome. Chief among these is insulin resistance. Not mentioned in this slide is fatty liver disease, the importance of which has only recently been established.

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Holding the orthodox line on diabetes, is a way of not thinking about the problem. The recommended protocol makes type two diabetics sicker, it does not cure them. A very low-carbohydrate diet, removes all symptoms of type two diabetes, and in most case all need for any medication. There are no symptoms and no need for medication. That is an effective cure, so long as the diet is maintained.

For type one diabetics, like local-navigation Richard K Bernstein, a low-carbohydrate diet gives much easier control of the need to use insulin. Keeping insulin use to a minimum, is the key to a long happy life, even with type one diabetes.

From Video 19 (End)

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Noakes continues. In the last month, (September 2016) I believe that we've demonstrated how excess insulin causes the body to store fat both in and around the liver. local-navigation Fatty liver is a painless, undiagnosed problem that too many people have, that will in future make them very ill.

If there are excessive carbohydrates in your diet, that drives the body to produce extra insulin. Eventually carbohydrate intolerance or insulin resistance develops, and that increases the insulin in the vascular system. Inflammation develops and at a later stage "diseases" are identified as a group, are called local-navigation metabolic syndrome.

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" www-navigation Nutrition Revolution—The End of the High Carbohydrates Era for Diabetes Prevention and Management" by Osama Hamdy (2014)

In this short article Dr Hamdy, clearly makes the point that it's time for a change in diabetes treatment and management. Carbohydrate restriction was successfully used by Elliot P Joslin and Fredrick Allen, to treat diabetics before a way to manufacture insulin was discovered. It's time to return to those principles.

A Diet for Type Two Diabetes

Prevalence of Diabetes Since 1976

This page is largely based on video 26 ( 27 min)

Noakes Trial Evidence Homepage (Desktop)