Curing diabetes has been at the forefront of medical research for decades. The “Why” of diabetes has befuddled millions in Establishment medicine for a long-time. In the mid-1900’s diabetes was joined at the hip with the “Cause of Heart Disease” crowd, blaming fat as the main culprit and then advocating a low-fat diet:
* overweight and obesity soared as people fattened up like cattle in a pen
* people became fatter at an ever-quickening pace
* no one connected the dots to see that it’s actually carbohydrates that cause diabetes
Wow, cholesterol and fat were not the cause of diabetes. That’s what I’m telling you. The research is just now coming in and the story is that it always was our much-loved carbohydrates that were doing the damage. And just not sugar, but fruits, and grains, and many vegetables. The low-fat dogma blinded otherwise brilliant people and blinded them.
How did it turn out that fat got blamed? There was one major bogus study published in 1953 that implicated fat and then that idea steam-rolled everyone and became the entrenched dogma. It’s still believed here in 2009. But… fat was not the culprit and the evidence began to shake out by the mid-1980’s that it was blood glucose arising from carbohydrates that was the villain.
Are you shocked? We’ve all been deluded because no one took the time to understand the basics. It was known by 1950 that the body aggressively converted carbohydrates to fat.
Starting during the early 2000’s explosion of interest in low-carb, young, unbiased researchers set up some very good experiments to study the diet. What was the outcome? The results disproved all the negative statements that had been made during the last four decades:
* the low-carb diet out-performed the low-fat diet and the Mediterranean diet in weight loss and fat loss
* sugar in the blood dropped whereas there was no change in the low-fat diet group
* fat levels in the blood dropped because of low-carb eating
* the recommended low-fat diet was defeated by the low-carb diet
The low-carb diet is just what a diabetic needs to solve this disease. And changes happen rapidly when you decrease carbohydrate intake. Fat-burning increases and sugar use drops while blood sugar drops dramatically. Just what the doctor should be ordering.
Associated with diabetes and obesity is Metabolic Syndrome which is characterized by:
* obesity
* disturbances in both fat and sugar metabolism that cause diabetes
* heart and vascular diseases
* increased blood pressure
Recent studies show that carbohydrate-restriction might sensibly be the “default” diet to be tried FIRST for patients with Metabolic Syndrome. In the case of normal weight people with this condition, carbohydrate restriction may be the only effective non-drug approach for treating it.
Low-fat was never proven to be healthful and low-carb was shown to be a great health improver. Unfortunately, no one read this research completed during the last 50 years of the 20th century. Claims were just made about the dangers of eating diets higher in fat (although followers of the low-carb diet actually don’t eat more fat).
Eating carbs and fat together is a prescription for disaster yet this is the way most people eat — a balanced diet the “experts” call it. Wrong. Switch to low-carbohydrate but don’t follow either the Atkins’s diet or South Beach Diet. Atkins’s plan if full of flaws and South Beach isn’t even a low-carb diet.
