Diabetes Wars

Type 2 diabetes has reached tsunami levels, with no slowdown in sight. All in just the last forty years or so. What changed? What's different now?

We need to look at this.

Type 2 diabetes comes when your body can't, for some reason, use the insulin it produces, and blood sugar roars out of control. The problem lies squarely on the shoulders of the ineffective insulin, not the sugar. We'd handle the sugar just fine if the insulin did its thing.

It's called insulin resistance. We have the insulin we need, but it doesn't work.

Doctors tell us it comes from metabolic syndrome, which includes excess weight, high triglyceride levels and high blood pressure.

Well, looky here! Guess what appeared on the horizon forty years or so ago that just happens to cause excess weight, high triglyceride levels and high blood pressure?. High fructose corn syrup. Suspicious, eh?

Especially since a recent study gave one group of rats a diet that included sugar, and gave a second group of rats the exact same diet, except for replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup. The sugar rats stayed healthy and slim. The high fructose corn syrup rats got sick and fat as blimps.

Now, these sound like clues to me. And getting rid of high fructose corn syrup sounds wise.

But that's not all. The medical approach to treating Type 2 diabetes isn't all it could be. They don't even try to fix the problem, just treat the symptoms. What's that about?

If you have diabetes, you need to do two things. You need to understand your illness and your options. And you need to find a doctor who will work with you, not just issue orders. Success requires both a good patient and a good doctor.

Overcoming diabetes isn't all about lowering blood sugar. Sugar's not the problem. And we're learning that lowering sugar isn't all it's cracked up to be. Our bodies need sugar to do a lot of things-which all go haywire when sugar isn't available.

What we need to do is get our bodies to use the insulin we produce.

Many alternative doctors say that can be done in fairly short order.

But not on the diet created by diabetes poobahs.

First, the status-quo poobahs recommend a load of grains, but most people, especially those with endocrine problems-which diabetes is-can't tolerate grains. Grains ain't what they used to be. Ditch 'em.

Then they recommend limiting protein. Huh? Health requires protein. Our bodies do all their work via the enzymes they create. And the raw material for those enzymes? Protein.

Following that, they recommend a carb level guaranteed to put things into a tizzy. When your insulin's in a world of hurt, don't beat up on it by shoveling in carbs.

And then they say to avoid saturated fat. Yikes! Our bodies need saturated fat. Our thyroid gland gets the blues without saturated fat, and a sad thyroid complicates diabetes big time. In fact, a down-in-the-dumps thyroid can cause diabetes.

But food isn't the whole nutrition story.