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Do you have type 2 diabetes? If so, you’ve probably been told three “facts”:
Before we get into whether these facts are in fact true, let me pose a more general question: how is this theory of diabetes working out for us?
Are we taking diabetics and improving their health outcomes? Or is the progression of diabetes an all but inevitable decline into worse and worse symptoms, more and more medication, and greater and greater impairment leading to an early death?
The problem is the hidden assumption that the only place it exists is in your body.
That’s like saying you have a disease that causes frequent nosebleeds when what’s happening is you’ve joined a boxing gym. Your “disease” in that case is simply the body’s natural response to a trauma to the blood vessels inside your nose.
And type 2 diabetes is the body’s natural response to a very unnatural diet.
If you’re so committed to this unnatural and unhealthy diet that you are unwilling to change it, then yes, you have a disease.
But be aware that this is a disease that would never have developed in a hunter-gatherer or horticultural society.
Think of diabetes as an adaptation: the body’s way of dealing with the slow-motion trauma of an unnaturally rich diet.
If you were a bear preparing for hibernation, you’d want to fatten up, right? So you could make it through the long, cold winter.
But when your body reached the appropriate level of fat, you wouldn’t want to keep gaining weight. So your fat-laden cells would now interfere with insulin, the hormone that shuttles calories from the bloodstream into the cells.
That’s why obesity is one of the top risk factors for type 2 diabetes – the fat inside our cells makes those cells resistant to insulin, which prevents the sugars in our blood from leaving the bloodstream.
And that’s why high blood sugar(hyperglycemia) is the traditional way to diagnose diabetes. (The scientific name, diabetes mellitus, means “sweetness passing through,” since sugary urine was one of the first signs.)
But Western medicine, as it often does, focuses treatment on this symptom rather than the cause.
Which brings us to…
Myth #2: You need medications to control your blood sugar levels
Persistent high blood sugar is harmful over the long term. It stresses the heart, damages the eyes and kidneys, and contributes to high blood pressure. Based on those facts, it would seem obvious that lowering blood sugar through medication is the way to do.
But this is a bad idea, for three reasons.
First, as we’ve seen, high blood sugar is a result of, not a cause, of diabetes. So artificially lowering blood sugar with drugs does nothing to address the root cause: the fact that the body’s cells are so gunked up that they cannot let insulin do its job.
When you treat a symptom and ignore the underlying condition, here’s what happens: the underlying condition continues to progress and worsen. That’s why diabetics – even heavily medicated diabetics – die so much earlier than those without diabetes.
Second, our bodies adapt to medications over time, so we need increasingly higher and higher doses and stronger and stronger meds as the disease progresses. When we get to the stage where we need to inject insulin because the pancreas, overworked for decades, has given out, the cells are still insulin resistant. So we’ll need ever increasing doses to get the same results.
Third, studies have shown that management of blood sugar in diabetics is harmful. Diabetics who monitor their blood glucose and keep levels low through meds die younger than those who do not.
Here’s one reason why. As we’ve seen, hyperglycemia (elevated blood sugar) is dangerous over the long term. But hypoglycemia (blood sugar that’s too low) is life-threatening in the moment.
Our brains cannot function without glucose any more than the can without oxygen. Lowering blood glucose too much or too rapidly is like being strangled. We can go into coma and die from hypoglycemia.
According to , an evidence-based medicine summary website, tight glycemic control of diabetes (keeping A1C levels between 6.5-7, the protocol recommended by the American Diabetes Association (ADA)) harms far more people than it helps.
Here’s a screen shot of the benefit/harm outcomes, based on multiple studies:
Even if you get your doctor on board, it’s crucial to educate yourself if you have type 2 diabetes. Otherwise, you’ll always be at the mercy of misguided health professionals and professional marketers.
Plus, nobody can eat their way out of your diabetes except you. Nobody can exercise their way to glycemic control except you. So you’re the one who has to learn the skills and science that gives you control over your own health destiny.
Starting on January 19, 2016, I’m offering in partnership with Wholistic Health Studio, a 3-part class on diabetes. For three consecutive Tuesdays, from -pm, we’ll explore the science and skills that will empower you to reverse type 2 diabetes.
We’ll cover, in-depth, some of the science shared in this article:
Plus, we’ll get hands-on to give you important skills:
To find out more and register, go here: .
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