Diabetes Type 2: A World Problem, Your Problem?
by Clara P. Triane, M.D. and Sol Ta Triane
Diabetes Type 2—Out of Control
Diabetes type 2 is a rampant world problem. It never used to be. Many millions of people have full-blown diabetes. Even more have early diabetes, often called “pre-diabetes.” The negative consequences of diabetes are manifold.
Diabetes can adversely affect all the organs of the body. Patients with diabetes can lose their teeth, their eyesight, even their limbs to amputation. Diabetics are more prone to heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, peripheral vascular disease, fatty liver, neuropathy, severe infections and more.
If you are a type 2 diabetic, your doctor will probably put you on oral medications and/or insulin. These medicines may slow down the immense damage done to your body, but you will likely continue to decline in the above-mentioned areas unless you address the cause.
If you are earlier along in your diabetic damage, a “pre-diabetic,” many doctors may not understand the danger and often will be unfamiliar with effective dietary intervention. Even with early or pre-diabetes, however, harm may be occurring to your organs. Don’t play with fire; pre-diabetes will soon progress to full-fledged diabetes. It is critical to take action to reverse diabetes as quickly as possible.
Many physicians still think that diabetes type 2 is a permanent condition, one that may be “managed” but from which there is no escape. Misinformed doctors say that the only thing you can do is to delay the inevitable adverse outcomes. By eating a proper human diet, however, diabetes can indeed be reversed.
How to Turn Things Around with Keto or Carnivore
Diabetes type 2 is a condition in which the level of glucose in the blood has been too high, mainly caused by an incorrect diet high in carbohydrate. The known way to reverse type 2 diabetes is to eat a ketogenic or carnivore diet. Commonly, people eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrates every day. When you eat this much carbohydrate, the pancreas produces insulin in order to keep your blood glucose at a normal level. If you continually eat quantities of starch or sugar, your pancreas cranks out more and more insulin in an effort to maintain a normal blood glucose level. Eventually the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin to keep up with the amount of carbohydrates you are ingesting, and your blood sugar starts to rise. At that point, abnormalities in certain lab tests will become evident, such as an elevation in blood glucose and hemoglobin A1c.
It is a travesty that people with diabetes are often advised to eat high carbohydrate foods—the very worst thing they could be doing. By drastically decreasing the amount of carbohydrates you consume, and replacing them with animal protein and fat, your insulin level, blood glucose and hemoglobin A1c all can normalize. Many patients with diabetes can decrease the amount of medications they need to take or even discontinue them entirely if they adopt a low carbohydrate diet. You need a knowledgeable doctor to help you make these corrections.
A low carbohydrate diet is really a normal carbohydrate diet. Our ancestors did not eat large amounts of carbohydrates as people typically do today. They mainly ate meat with its associated fat. Occasionally they might eat some plants if they were not able to get enough meat, or a little fruit when in season but never year-round. Humans are meat-based, and returning to the ancestral diet is often the return to health.
By eating an animal-based diet with plenty of fatty meat, and simultaneously decreasing their intake of carbohydrates significantly, most people will receive the proper nutrition, very possibly for the first time in their life. Even someone who is overweight or obese may be malnourished because for years they have been consuming low-nutrient, high carbohydrate foods, never giving their body the nourishment that it needs.
Diabetes is not only a problem of those who are overweight. Many slender people also have early diabetes or full-blown diabetes.
On a high carbohydrate diet, people are physiologically addicted to sweets, pastries, desserts, sodas, fruit, grains including pasta, rice, cereal, crackers, bread. From an anthropological perspective, carbohydrates are emergency food used only in lieu of animal food. Consequently, when you eat carbs, your body interprets that as a threat of starvation. Its physiological response is to make you very hungry so that you will eat as much of the emergency food as possible in order to survive during a meatless time. You can subsist on carbohydrates for a period of time, but you will never thrive. The body doesn’t know you could go and get all the high-nutrient food you want (meat) because you are continually ingesting carbohydrates. The more carbs you eat, the more you crave.
When people finally experience adequate nourishment, a lot of their unhealthy cravings diminish or disappear. By eating plenty of fatty meat they finally feel satisfied. The desire for low-nutrient foods fades.
Your body requires the high quality fats and proteins that are found only in animal foods. Fat and protein are the two essential macronutrients, the basis of human nutrition. Carbohydrates are not essential. “Essential” means that something must be ingested. Carbohydrates are not essential because the human body will automatically manufacture all the glucose it needs (gluconeogenesis). Nutritionally, we obtain everything we need on an animal-based diet without having to ingest so much as a bite of plant matter.
Overcoming Obstacles to Keto and Carnivore
There are plenty of obstacles that one may encounter when embarking on a low carbohydrate/high fat diet. For decades we have been brainwashed to think that a high carbohydrate, low fat diet is the best for human health. However, people on Mediterranean, vegetarian and vegan diets have been getting sicker, despite their claims to the contrary. One only has to open one’s eyes to see that obesity is becoming more and more of a problem and that people are becoming less and less healthy.
Your family and acquaintances may not support you in making a dietary change for the better. While you are trying to remove the low-nutrient foods from your house, they bring you cakes, cookies and fruit for you to eat as a “treat,” saying, “It won’t hurt to just eat a little bit.”
A low carb/healthy fat diet works great for health and weight optimization, but only if you do it correctly. If you get off track just once, the metabolic effects may affect you not only for that day but could last up to a week. That can be a setback for people who are trying to prevent the progression of conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, to name a few. Getting off track could be the beginning of a downward spiral, in which someone who was doing well on a low carb ketogenic or carnivore diet goes back to eating starch and sugar, losing the benefits that they had enjoyed earlier from eating the natural human diet.
The physicians on your insurance plan may not be up to date on the latest nutritional science supporting low carbohydrate diets. If you are going to go low carb, why not do it right and get the results beyond your expectations, like hundreds of thousands are doing? A low carb doctor can be an invaluable aide to cheer you on, dispel myths about diet and help you navigate the challenges you face along this amazing way of healthy recovery.
Request a consultation with Clara P. Triane, M.D.
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