First and foremost, you must understand that diabetes is NOT a blood sugar disease like your doctor may have led you to believe.
Type 2 diabetes is a disease caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling, both of which are regulated through your diet.
Until that concept becomes well-known in both the medical community and by the public at large, the misconception about what diabetes is and the appropriate way to treat it will continue to be promoted and people will continue dying prematurely.
Conventional treatment, which is focused on fixing the symptom of elevated blood sugar rather than addressing the underlying disease, is doomed to fail in most cases.
Why?
Because most treatments for type 2 diabetes utilize drugs that either raise insulin, or lower blood sugar. Avandia, for example, lowers your blood sugar levels by increasing the sensitivity of liver, fat and muscle cells to insulin.
As I will explain below, this in no way addresses your underlying problem, which is metabolic miscommunication.
Let me assure you, the cure for type 2 diabetes has NOTHING to do with giving insulin. Giving someone with type 2 diabetes insulin is one of the WORST things that can be done. Any physician doing this simply does not understand insulin physiology.
Leptin is a Major Key to Successful Treatment of Diabetes
The hormone leptin is largely responsible for the accuracy of insulin signaling and whether you become insulin resistant or not.
Leptin, a relatively recently discovered hormone produced by fat, tells your body and brain how much energy it has, whether it needs more (saying "be hungry"), whether it should get rid of some (and stop being hungry) and importantly what to do with the energy it has (reproduce, upregulate cellular repair, or not).
In fact, the two most important organs that may determine whether you become (type 2, insulin resistant) diabetic or not are your liver and your brain, and it is their ability to listen to leptin that will determine this.
When your blood sugar becomes elevated it is a signal for insulin to be released to direct the extra energy into storage. A small amount is stored as a starch called glycogen in your body, but the majority is stored as your main energy supply -- fat. Thus, in this regard insulin's major role is not to lower sugar, but to take the extra energy and store it for future times of need.
Insulin lowers your blood sugar as a side effect of directing the extra energy into storage.
This is why treatments that concentrate merely on lowering blood sugar for diabetes while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication.
Taking insulin is one of the WORST things you can do, as it will actually make your insulin and leptin resistance worse over time. And taking diabetic drugs like Avandia may send you into an early grave from a heart attack or heart failure.
Fortunately, the safest treatment alternatives are also the most successful!
Fructose – One of the Major Culprits for Both Diabetes and Obesity
Before I delve into the other treatment strategies, I want to emphasize the importance of avoiding fructose if you want to successfully address your diabetes, or avoid it in the first place.
It’s important to understand that your body metabolizes fructose differently from glucose (regular table sugar is a disaccharide and 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose), and these differences lead to serious health consequences.
For example, fructose does not stimulate a rise in leptin, so your satiety signals are diminished. It also reduces the amount of leptin crossing your blood-brain barrier by raising triglycerides. And whereas glucose suppresses ghrelin (the hunger hormone, which makes you want more food), fructose does not.
Fructose also increases your insulin levels, interfering with the communication between leptin and your hypothalamus, so your pleasure signals aren’t extinguished. Your brain senses starvation and prompts you to eat more.
All of this also sets the stage for over indulgence and hence overweight, and puts you on the path toward both obesity and diabetes.
I strongly advise keeping your fructose consumption below 25 grams per day.
However, it would be wise for most people to limit fruit fructose to 15 grams or less as it is virtually guaranteed that you will be getting “hidden” sources of fructose from just about any processed food you eat.
This includes fruits, which also need to be carefully measured to make certain that you’re not inadvertently consuming too much fructose.
Keep in mind that most processed food is loaded with fructose and is best avoided entirely. For instance, there are about 40 grams of HFCS per can of soda.
Clearly, eliminating excess fructose from your diet is FAR safer and MORE effective than taking a drug like Avandia if you have diabetes. However, virtually no doctor will inform you of this, as there aren’t billions of dollars worth of drug company marketing muscles behind this sort of recommendation.
Most Diabetes Cases Can Be Cured Without Drugs! Please understand that nearly 100 percent of type 2 diabetics can be successfully treated -- meaning you will no longer have the symptoms of diabetes, or the high risk of developing health complications -- if you are willing to implement a few healthy lifestyle changes.
Diabetes runs in my family. About fifteen years ago, I diagnosed my father with it and gave him these guidelines to follow. He's 81 years old and does two hours of exercise every single morning. Recently he's added strength training. He's been able to keep his diabetes under control without taking a single drug by following these principles.
If you follow the recommendations listed below, your likelihood of successfully going off of drugs and having normal blood sugars is close to 100 percent, as treating type 2 diabetes is simply a matter of implementing some basic strategies to improve your insulin and leptin resistance:
1. Exercise
Exercise is an absolutely essential factor, without which you’re highly unlikely to get this devastating disease under control. It is clearly one of the most potent ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance.
Typically, you’ll need large amounts of exercise, until you get your blood sugar levels under control. You may need up to an hour or two a day. Naturally, you’ll want to gradually work your way up to that amount, based on your current level of fitness.
If you’re unsure of how to get started, I recommend you view this comprehensive exercise program video for tips and guidelines.
2. Eliminate Grains and Sugars
For the last 50 years, many people have been following the nutritional recommendations dictated by conventional health agencies, which advise a high complex carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet. The end result has been a 700 percent increase in diabetes in the same time frame, and many have come to view diabetes as an incurable chronic disease…
This is clearly not true, but the inevitable result of seriously flawed dietary recommendations. Instead, you’ll want to eliminate foods that your body will react to by creating insulin, which includes ALL types of sugars and grains -- even “healthy” grains such as whole, organic grains. This means avoiding all breads, pasta, cereals, rice, potatoes, and corn (which is in fact a grain). You may even need to avoid fruits until your blood sugar is under control.
3. Eat Right for Your Nutritional Type
Exercising and avoiding grains and sugars might not be enough unless you balance your protein, carb and fat ratios for your unique and specific genetic biochemistry. You can read more about nutritional typing here.
4. Monitor Your Fasting Insulin Level
This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You’ll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 to 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin receptor sensitivity is.
The recommendations mentioned above are the key steps you need to achieve this reduction.
5. Optimize Your Vitamin D Level
Interestingly, optimizing your vitamin D levels can not only help improve type 2 diabetes if you have it, but can likely eliminate the risk of type 1 diabetes in your children if you are pregnant. It’s also vital for infants to receive the appropriate amounts of vitamin D in their early years for these same reasons.
Ideally, you’ll want to do this by exposing a large amount of your skin to appropriate amounts of sunshine (or a safe tanning bed) on a regular basis, year-round. Your body can safely create up to 20,000 units of vitamin D a day this way.
However, if neither of these options are available, you may want to use an oral vitamin D3 supplement. But remember, if you choose to take an oral supplement it’s essential that you get your levels tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure you’re not reaching toxic levels, and are within the therapeutic range. Maintaining your vitamin D levels around 60-80 ng/ml can significantly help control your blood sugar.
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