Here’s another interview with pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Jake Kushner.
Dr. Kushner is not the typical endocrinologist. He has come to believe that limiting carbohydrates in the diet is helpful for preventing or mitigating diabetes complications in long term diabetes.
Ivor and Jake talk about the reduced longevity of people diagnosed as children and how managing blood sugar by reducing carb intake can effectively reduce the out-sized health risks of people with diabetes.
Eighty-five year old Dr. Richard Bernstein is brought up in several places in the conversation. Bernstein has lived with type 1 diabetes for over 60 years and is an ardent proponent of low carb eating. In this conversation, Ivor Cummins cites that Dr. Berntein’s coronary artery calcium score is zero, the best possible score.
I realize that this is not the only successful way of eating when living with diabetes but it’s one I’ve had success with since 2012. What I’ve come to conclude, however, is that the standard American diet, one with high carbs and high fat, combined with lots of processed foods is likely the best way to eat if you don’t mind the metabolic mayhem it generally produces.
Great video - what I like is that he is not strictly married to Low Carb/ High Fat. He acknowledges that protein and other foods along with low carbs work as well. Now that we have more and more CGM technologies available and on the horizon, I hope that there will be studies on the effect of blood glucose standard deviation and cholesterol. On low carb diet, I find it much easier to flat-line blood glucose trend. For the past decades we have all been hung up on A1C but after recently greatly improved LDL-C I finally realized that in order to keep both blood glucose and cholesterol LDL-C in line it appears that the BG spikes is the biggest culprit of elevated LDL-C even with a low A1C and may very likely be the culprit of the truly nasty atherogenic small LDL particles that build up in arterial walls and cause strokes and heart attacks.
I am currently working on a project on myself to prove or disprove this theory in my body. A CAC and/or Carotid artery scan is next in order to see how much plaque I am dealing with but being treated by a large clinic with “old school” thought process and policies makes this a very long and tedious process.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I found it very interesting! I’ve been following a low carb diet for about 6 months. I’ve lost about 20 pounds — about halfway to my goal — and my bg and A1c numbers have been decreasing. At my last visit with my endocrinologist, last month, she was very pleased with my progress. She told me that, for any other patient, she would suggest only two visits per year, but she knows that Medicare wouldn’t work with that. I’m going to look up the Facebook group mentioned in the video. Connection is important.
If you want to follow Bernstein’s method, the TypeOneGrit community is amazing. Their glucose management results have been documented and shown to work. See this study published in Pediatrics.
