There are some things I would never recommend. Some things will only change with an apocalypse.
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“My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”
Oy.
P.S. Full disclosure: I would never wish diabetes on anyone, ever. However I can’t help wondering whether it might just be the only thing capable of jolting some individuals out of their smug, complacent, frozen mindsets.
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I’ve mentioned this before but I wish I could put people, like the author of the linked article, on a diabetes simulator. That simulator would allow control of nutrition, medications including insulin, and exercise inputs. The output would look like a blood glucose trace on a CGM. The simulator would work in faster than real time fashion and provide a summary grade based on percent time in range, time low, time high, standard deviation, and average BG. I fantasize about this setup at a professional meeting of diabetes medical professionals.
Maybe after repeated attempts to implement a high carb diet with diabetes they may learn that their methods are just wishful thinking. I think the linked article’s author would fail miserably. And they’d have a new appreciation for the value of “healthy whole grains!”
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Thanks Brian for this post. 
Feels good to see I’m not the only one who feels this way about “reverse” and “cured”. Part of the reason I had a hard time with the Diabetes Summit. All they kept saying was “reverse, reverse, reverse, cure, cure, cure.” I had to exit some of the videos. Some I couldn’t watch, just for the reason that it was all about selling their product, diet, vitamins to cure you or motivational talks. I have a good friend who is Type 2 and buys into the “cure” terminology. Keeps telling me how being a vegan has cured him. I prefer the term “well managed”. He and I go back and forth all the time., Now all of a sudden last month, he has an A1C of 8.2. Guess the “cure” is over. smh.
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I have received emails from several retired doctors who were recently diagnosed with diabetes, who wrote to tell me how bad they felt about the advice they had been giving patients when they were practicing.
I always tell them, “Let your peers know what you have learned, because they don’t pay any attention to those of us who don’t have the M.D.s.”
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Have you guys heard of the Newcastle protocol?
It appears to reverse type 2 - blood sugar normalizes, and starch tolerance too, in some patients:
The hypothesis is that the rapid weight loss promotes loss of pancreatic and liver fat.
What’s not clear to me, is if going ketogenic for several weeks will do the same thing.
Starvation does amazing things. This diet is a medically supervised protein sparing starvation diet. It is a very low carb diet. I consider the diet to be basically stupid and not advisable. It seems to be attractive because it can only be done safely under a doctors supervision, which of course generates revenue. Unfortunately telling people it works will have them go off and do it themselves with potentially dangerous consequences. You can only do the Newcastle protocol for a few weeks before you run the risk of permanent damage. And yes, I think you are right, you can get the same results with a very low carb diet.
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Amen. +1, etc.
Let’s not forget Mike Huckabee’s T2 “cure.” Surely he wouldn’t shill it if it wasn’t true!
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Dr BB, it seems to me that people with type 2 are often first Dx’d further along in their disease process - so it is symptoms of already started complications that clue the,m in. At least with type 1 (for me 30+ years) the symptoms came on hard and strong. I am also better suited to dealing with typre 1 - it is more straight forward math, chemistry, bu9iology and physics - at least to me. I think dealing with type 2 would be like trying to nail jello to a wall.
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I only need to do a raw juice fast and I’ll be cured. Didn’t I know that raw juice fasting works for both type 1 and type 2. Of course it is my fault I have diabetes, and hypothyroid. If I ate better and exercised more, and had made a better choice about my genetics before being born, and avoided environmental pollutants, managed my stress better, didn’t hang on to emotional baggage I would not be diabetic or for that matter have any other health issues. I would be blonde and beautiful, wealthy and successful, and forever young.
That simple and that damaging to one’s self esteem to be personally at fault.
I think the correct term should be manage diabetes.
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I agree that things such as statins, pesticides and herbicides etc don’t actually help at all. I’ve given up my statins after extensive research into them. The things I’ve read about statin side effects far outweigh its better qualities. I don’t think that type 2 diabetes is caused by overeating, although this does not help the condition. I am a very active person, I garden, DIY, and am not a couch potato. No one in my family has had diabetes and although I am overweight, who is ever the correct weight? I am pretty trim and feel comfortable at the size I am. I’m pretty good at sticking to my diet. I’ve had the comment from a health professional who said, “You don’t look like a typical diabetic”. I resisted the temptation to ask what a ‘typical diabetic’ looked like!! This kind of prejudice is typical of most peopel.
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It’s an uphill battle. See this article and some of the comments that follow.
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I cannot even count the number of times I was told that I didn’t look like a “typical diabetic!” Though I currently have gained some weight (since starting on insulin), I was close to “ideal weight,” active and had a fairly healthy diet at diagnosis (and for quite some time prior). I am not the only T2D in my family - my mother is Type 2 (though she is sedentary and obese – and her D is MUCH more easily managed than mine) - still diabetes is extremely rare in my family. At the end of the day, none of that matters - I still have T2D and will probably have to take insulin going forward.
By the way, one of the docs who told my how atypical I looked for T2D was my sedentary and obese former endo!
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I don’t believe that diabetes can be reversed. The symptoms can be reversed somewhat but that person still has diabetes that they can control with diet & exercise. If they eat strawberry shortcake or the like, their postprandial numbers will skyrocket.
Thin people can have T2D too, like for example, Billie Jean King. Nowadays, both type 1 and type 2 can happen in any age (type 1 can happen to the middle-aged people and type 2 to the kids).
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Are you considering this procedure? If I were an obese T2D and failed at other attempts to improve my diabetic health, I would consider this option. Are there any significant adverse effects experienced by a percentage of the surgery patients?
By the way, I like to always look at the date stamp of any info like this. Do you know what it is? I tried to find it on the Cleveland Clinic website and failed. Good luck to you.
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Bariatric surgery has been found to dramatically improve blood sugar control, particularly right after surgery. But again, it is misleading to think it reverses diabetes or that it would be a preferable treatment in the majority of cases. There are high complication rates from bariatric surgery and often the outcomes are bad as you can be left permanently injured, still having diabetes and have to deal with malnourishment and other problems.
The studies of bariatric surgery are seriously flawed and don’t look at long-term outcomes. And one should be a bit wary of Cleveland clinic. And at least right now the criteria indicating you are a candidate for bariatric surgery are 100 lbs overweight and BMI > 40. Even the Cleveland Clinic which aggressively shills for patients only does this treatment on severely obese patients.
Before even considering this treatment it would be prudent to try a low carb diet and see how the GLP-1 drugs work (since they also work along the same incretin axis that bariatric surgery claims to effect). And always be wary of people claiming that they have cured or reversed diabetes.
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Bariatric surgery is a major surgery and comes with certain risks. Complications are not uncommon and actually happen in more than 50%. Guess where your blood sugar levels will be if this happens. It’s like defeating the purpose.
I think you’re right when warning to be wary of Cleveland Clinic. I used to work in the system and have seen surgeries turned to nightmare that was totally preventable had the surgery not been done in the first place.
I blogged about it another day
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