One such doctor is Jason Fung. As a nephrologist (kidney specialist) and best-selling author on diabetes, he understands all too well the relationship between high blood glucose/diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney disease. It only made sense to him that if high blood sugar was a major cause of kidney disease, then the answer was to address the high blood sugar.
After years of research, and application of common-sense dietary approaches with his patients, Dr. Fung came to the following conclusions regarding diabetes:
I. Type 2 diabetes is fully reversible and preventable.
The truth is that diet and lifestyle changes, not medications, can reverse diabetes, because it is largely a dietary disease. Many medications for diabetes often cause weight gain or inhibit weight loss. This is especially true if you’re taking insulin or meds that stimulate insulin production like sulfonylureas, including glipizide, glyburide, and glimepiride.
Insulin is a fat storage hormone, so treating diabetes with insulin is only going to cause more weight gain. It makes no sense, because weight loss is imperative if you want to reverse type 2 diabetes. So, the principles that help reverse type 2 diabetes are the same ones that prevent it. As Fung states, “obesity and type 2 diabetes are closely related, and generally, increased weight increases the risk of disease… Maintaining an ideal weight is the first step to prevention.”
II. Diabetes is caused by too much sugar.
When you eat sugar, your body secretes insulin to help move the sugar into your cells for energy. If you don’t burn off that sugar sufficiently over time, your cells become completely filled and cannot handle any more sugar. So now, when you eat sugar, insulin is unable to force any more into your stuffed cells. The result is that the sugar now it spills out in your blood in a form called glucose, which is the primary symptom of type 2 diabetes.
It’s dangerous to have this excess glucose in the body, so your body secretes even more insulin to try and shove it into the cells to keep your levels normal, which makes your insulin resistance worse and creates more weight gain. Sooner or later insulin is no longer able to force more glucose into the cells.
III. Diabetes, affects every organ in the body.
If you do not remove the excess glucose, your body will continue to increase insulin production to force more glucose into your cells. This just makes insulin resistance worse. Insulin can no longer keep up with the rising resistance, so glucose spikes in the blood as it spills over, leading to a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.
What if you’re not given insulin, but rather a drug called metformin to lower blood glucose? Its job is to take dangerous glucose out of your blood and move it back into your body. It pushes it into your other organs, like your eyes, heart, kidneys, and nerves. This is why diabetics are more prone to losing their vision, having heart attacks, experiencing neuropathy and having high blood pressure and kidney disease. We’re shoving sugar into places it doesn’t belong.
IV. Type 2 diabetes is reversible and preventable without medications.
Once we understand that type 2 diabetes is simply too much sugar in the body, the solution becomes obvious – get rid of the sugar. Don’t hide it away. Get rid of it. There are really only two ways to do this. One way involves putting less sugar in, and the other way involves burning off the remaining sugar.
The first step is to eliminate all sugar and refined carbohydrates from your diet. Follow your GHS food plan. Part of that plan includes eating healthy fats that help us feel full and satiated without feeding sugar into the body. Moderate protein is also very important because it breaks down into amino acids required by the body for good health. Too much protein that cannot be stored or used by the body will be converted in the liver into glucose. Therefore, too much protein will add sugar to the body. This is why your Genesis plan is a reasonably balanced approach to proteins, carbohydrates and healthy, life-sustaining fats.
Don’t be fooled. The statistics are not going down. Rather, they are going up in a dramatically concerning way. If the same old paradigm were working, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. It’s time for lifestyle change. You really do have to take control of your own health if you want to get your life back.