The End of Diabetes (8 page)

Not only does eating low-nutrient food build up more toxins, creating inflammation and disease in our cells and organs, but the buildup of these toxins also leads to us to feel ill the minute our digestive tract is no longer busy digesting. So we are almost forced to overeat to prevent withdrawal symptoms. As soon as the digestion of food is complete, changes in all body systems begin to occur. Some patients report symptoms even within a few hours of not eating a food. Coffee drinkers, for example, are usually on an obligatory ingestion cycle and may get withdrawal headaches and cravings within hours of missing regular coffee doses.

It has already been noted that overweight individuals build up more toxic waste products and express heightened inflammatory markers and oxidative stress when on a low-nutrient meal compared to normal-weight people.
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Because of this, men and women prone to obesity experience more withdrawal symptoms, causing overconsumption of calories. It is a vicious cycle promoting the problem and preventing its resolution.

People who eat healthier diets do not build up inflammatory markers nearly as much as people who don't.
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The point here is that many people are overweight because their body is forcing them to require more calories just to feel normal. They don't feel well when they attempt to eat the amount of calories better aligned with their metabolic needs. A critical feature that makes a person overweight or diabetic is the environment of excessive and toxic food in the modern world. This in turn leads to the chronic oxidative and inflammatory stress created by modern food choices. This cellular “dis-ease” then creates symptoms that support its continuation, just like a cocaine addict seeks cocaine. This is why diets always fail. The secret to beating this vicious cycle is to focus on micronutrient quality. Only then will the desire for excessive calories cease.

Every cell is like a little factory—it makes products; produces waste; and then must compact, detoxify, and remove the waste. If we let waste metabolites build up through the consumption of processed grains, oils, and animal products and insufficient consumption of vegetation, the body will attempt to mobilize these wastes (creating discomfort) when it can. But it only can do that effectively if it's not actively digesting food. Eating alleviates the discomfort because it halts or delays the detoxification process.

What I have observed and quantified with not merely hundreds but with thousands of individuals is that the drive to overconsume calories is blunted by high-micronutrient, high-antioxidant food consumption. The symptoms that people thought were hypoglycemia or even hunger simply disappear after eating healthfully for a few months. After a two- to four-month window, when micronutrients in the body's tissues are enhanced, people not only lose symptoms of fatigue, headaches, irritability, and stomach cramping, but they also get back in touch with true hunger felt in the throat. This sensation, they report, makes eating more pleasurable and better directs them to an appropriate amount of calories for their body's biological needs.

My discovery documenting the changing perception of hunger, resulting in a lower caloric drive in more than seven hundred people eating a high-nutrient diet, was published in
Nutrition Journal
in November 2010.
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Of interest was that hunger became a sensation in the upper chest and throat for 90 percent of those compliant with the dietary recommendations and also that it took three to six months for most of the participants to experience this change in hunger and the lessening of hunger symptoms. Three to six months corresponds with the time frame it takes to achieve adequate tissue levels of phytochemicals after dietary excellence is begun. The study's conclusion was:

 

Our findings suggest that it is not simply the caloric content, but more importantly, the micronutrient density of a diet that influences the experience of hunger. It appears that a high nutrient-density diet, after an initial phase of adjustment during which a person experiences “toxic hunger” due to withdrawal from pro-inflammatory foods, can result in a sustainable eating pattern that leads to weight loss and improved health. A high nutrient-density diet provides benefits for long-term health as well as weight loss.

 

True hunger signals when our bodies need calories to maintain our lean body mass. When we eat food demanded by true hunger and true hunger only, we do not become overweight to begin with. However, in our present toxic food environment, we have lost the ability to connect with the body signals that tell us how much food we actually need. We have become slaves to withdrawal symptoms and eat all day long, even when there is no biological need for calories. The body has a compounded sensation of hunger and cravings that, for most, is simply overwhelming. As a result, people are either unable to lose weight or are unable to keep it off.

In an environment of healthy food choices, we would not feel any symptoms after a meal until our bodies actually require more nourishment. Our bodies have the beautifully orchestrated ability to give us the precise signals that tell us exactly how much to eat to maintain an ideal weight for long-term health and well-being. Thousands of people have learned this and have demonstrated that this phenomenon is real. After learning and applying this information, many have lost over a hundred pounds, some more than three hundred pounds, without surgical intervention and have kept the weight off.

In a portion-controlled (calorie-counting) diet, it is likely that the body will not consume adequate fiber or nutrients. The body will have a compounded sensation of hunger and craving that, for most, is impossible to control. Invariably, it results in failure to lose weight or the cycle of losing weight and eventually gaining it back. Calorie counting simply doesn't work in the long run. Diets based on portion control and calorie counting generally permit the eating of highly toxic, low-nutrient foods and then require us to fight our addictive drives and attempt to eat less. This combination undernourishes the body, resulting in uncontrollable and frequent food cravings. Without an adequate education in nutrition and solid principles to stick to, people on these diets are forced to flounder and fail, bouncing from one diet to another, always losing a little and regaining it. They frequently regain more than they lost.

Life is prolonged by eating less while maintaining a high-nutrient cellular environment. However, trying to eat fewer calories is ineffective and almost futile. The secret is to desire fewer calories. The high consumption of low-calorie, high-nutrient foods such as raw vegetables, cooked greens, beans, and seeds prepared in delicious combinations makes you feel physically full from all the fiber and satisfied from all the chewing. You lose the addictive cravings, and then you simply and naturally desire less food. It makes it quite simple to lose lots of weight. The core elements to this revolutionary diet are:

 

•  Micronutrient-per-calorie density is important in devising and recommending menu plans and dietary suggestions for the most effective approach for both weight loss and for preventing and reversing diabetes and heart disease.

•  Low-nutrient eating (and toxic eating) leads to increasing cellular toxicity with undesirable levels of free radicals and AGEs. This toxicity causes addictive withdrawal symptoms (toxic hunger), which result in more frequent eating and overeating.

•  Dietary micronutrient quality (H=N/C) must be increased accordingly to utilize dietary recommendations therapeutically for disease reversal or to protect high-risk individuals.

 

This is not a diet in the sense of something you do to lose weight. This is a new diet style for life—a diet style that every American has the right to know about, so we all have the choice to protect our precious health. It is healthful eating. It is effective for long-term weight control because it modifies and diminishes the sensations of so-called hunger, enabling overweight individuals to be more comfortable eating fewer calories. Make the change for life.

CHAPTER FIVE

High-Protein, Low-Carb Counterattack

Jessica was a forty-eight-year-old mother of two teenagers, who originally weighed 193 pounds. She was what I call a vegejunkarian, eating highly processed vegetarian foods and few fresh fruits or vegetables. Looking back on her health at that time, Jessica said, “My health was in the toilet! I had aches and pains all over, including chest pains, severe diabetic [frozen] shoulder that caused my arm to be nearly immobile, and horrible gastroesophageal reflux disease. I napped three times a day. I also had a host of skin conditions, rosacea, and tendonitis in my left hand. I had chronic insomnia and had to get up two or three times a night to go to the bathroom. My vision was really blurry from the out-of-control sugars. I had neuropathy in two toes in my right foot, and I was losing a lot of hair. I was a walking time bomb!”

Jessica's fasting blood glucose level was 282, her HbA1C was 12.2, and her blood pressure was 150/110. She was on no medications because she was in complete denial and wouldn't go to the doctor.

After searching for an answer and finding my program online, Jessica became a member of my online support center and began following a healthy, nutritarian diet. Six months later, she reported her weight dropped to 151 pounds. Her fasting blood glucose level is now 96, her HbA1C is 5.4, and her blood pressure is 110/70. The only medication she takes is 100 micrograms of levothyroxine per day for her low thyroid function. She now describes her health as “so much better! No more aches or pains. No more gastroesophageal reflux. My frozen shoulder is 98 percent healed. My vision is much better, and my painful neuropathy is completely gone (that took three months). I rarely have interrupted sleep anymore, and I never have to get up at night to pee. My tendonitis seems to be gone, my hair is fuller, my eyes are brighter, and my skin is clear. I am a new women, and it has only been six months.”

Jessica was delighted to observe the reactions of people she works with. “I went to my office last Friday—I hadn't been there in six months, as I work from home. Several people absolutely did not recognize me. I spent the whole day explaining this program, and I'm sure I sold a few books . . . that day.”

D
iabetics mostly die of heart attacks. A meat-based diet promotes atherosclerosis, increases the risk of blood clots, and accelerates kidney failure in diabetics. A diet high in animal products and low in vegetables and beans is the formula for a medical disaster. Diabetics need the opposite: a diet high in vegetables and beans and low in animal products.

Some people have bought into the faulty logic that if sugar and refined grains and other high-glycemic foods raise blood sugar and triglycerides, then we should eat more animal products instead of these refined carbohydrates. Unquestionably, sugar, white flour, and other processed grains are unfavorable and must be removed to achieve good health, but to increase animal products at the expense of vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds, and other low-glycemic, nutrient-rich plant foods (which are protein adequate) is not only dangerous but also reduces the potential for the diabetic to recover and get off all medications.

Carbohydrate-restrictive diets that are rich in animal products can offer some short-term improvement in glucose control and can potentially aid weight loss in some people, but because those diets are too rich in animal products (which do not contain phytochemicals or antioxidants), they incur other significant risks such as cancer, heart disease, and kidney disease. The main problems with recommending a diet with a significant amount of animal products for diabetics are that the increased protein intake promotes the progression of diabetic kidney disease, and the animal-source protein and saturated fat intake raise cholesterol and promote heart disease. Even though a protein-dense diet might offer some marginal weight loss benefits compared to a diet with lots of processed carbohydrates, it still does not allow the substantive weight reduction that diabetics really need to rid themselves of the disease.

Emerging evidence also suggests that carbohydrate-restrictive, also called ketogenic, diets “create metabolic derangement conducive to cardiac conduction abnormalities and/or myocardial dysfunction.”
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In other words, it may cause other potentially life-threatening heart problems. Ketogenic diets are the most dangerous; medical literature has shown them to cause cardiomyopathy, a pathological enlargement of the heart that is reversible but only if the diet is stopped in time.
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Even following a ketogenic diet short term, such as with the induction phase of the Atkins or Dukan diets, is dangerous, and deaths have occurred from cardiac arrhythmias induced from the electrolyte derangement.
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Not only are diets very high in animal products dangerous in the short-term, they are more dangerous when followed long term. Animal products need to be restricted for disease reversal to occur predictably. Diabetics have significantly better chances at reversing their disease when they avoid excess animal protein. Scientific studies have demonstrated that a high intake of animal products creates an excess of branched-chain amino acids, which further inhibit insulin function and worsen diabetes control.
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This worsening of diabetes from increased animal product consumption was borne out in a recent study in which researchers analyzed the diets of 38,094 participants from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study. Researchers found that for every 5 percent of calories consumed from animal protein, the risk of diabetes increased 30 percent.
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Increased animal protein intake also coincided with increased body mass index, waist circumference, and blood pressure. Vegetable protein was not associated with increased diabetes risk. Quite a few other studies corroborate that diets that contain meat enable or worsen diabetes. Of note is the most recent Adventist Health Study-2, involving more than sixty thousand men and women, which is revealing because when those eating only a small amount of animal products were compared with those eating none, those following the vegan diet were found to have a diabetes prevalence that was approximately one-third that of the nonvegetarians (2.9 percent versus 7.7 percent). The lacto-ovo vegetarians, pesco-vegetarians, and semi-vegetarians had intermediate diabetes prevalence rates of 3.2 percent, 4.8 percent, and 6.1 percent, respectively.
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Obviously, the best way to reverse diabetes is to avoid diets centered on processed and high-glycemic carbohydrates and animal protein.

 

Tip: Eat more foods rich in vegetable protein and less or no foods with animal protein.

I have seen many diabetic patients on physician-recommended high-protein diets develop kidney or heart problems. Numerous people have suffered and died needlessly because of misinformation. I consider this advice malpractice. This issue still exists. Many doctors are still advocating this diet style for diabetics. Advocates for high-animal-protein diets flood bookstores and the Internet because people want to hear they can eat all these rich foods that they desire. People buy into the hype and often don't understand the dangers until it is too late. Some enthusiastically jump on a bandwagon of pseudoscientific claims that support the continuation of their preferred food habits and food addictions.

These enthusiasts would have you brainwashed with saturated fat. To undo the damage, let's review some more of the evidence. A May 2004
Annals of Internal Medicine
study showed that a third of Atkins dieters suffered a significant increase in LDL cholesterol and virtually none of them achieved a favorable LDL below 100. My nutritarian diet invariably drops cholesterol radically and is the only diet style tested in the medical literature to drop LDL cholesterol as much or more than cholesterol-lowering drugs, as reported in the medical journal
Metabolism.
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The goal is to have nonmedicated LDL cholesterol below 100, and that will almost never occur with a meat-based diet.

A landmark study published in 2000 actually measured what was happening to the arteries of people on low-carb, high-protein diets. Utilizing SPECT scans to directly measure blood flow within coronary arteries, the development of heart disease was examined in sixteen people on a vegetarian diet that was high in fruits and vegetables and in ten people on a low-carb, high-animal-protein diet. The results were shocking. Those sticking to the whole foods vegetarian diet showed a reversal in expected heart disease. Their partially clogged arteries literally got cleaned out, and blood flow to their heart through their coronary arteries increased by 40 percent. Those on the high-protein diet exhibited rapid advancement of their heart disease with a 40 percent decrease in blood flow in the heart's blood vessels.
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Thus, the only study on the high-protein diet to actually measure arterial blood flow showed that this style of eating is exceedingly dangerous.

The main problem with low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets is that the intake of the high-nutrient plant foods that contain protective fiber, antioxidants, and phytochemicals, is lowered while calorie-dense and nutritionally poor animal products is raised. Both of these factors are known to diminish cardiovascular health and increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. This was further documented in a large study published in the
British Medical Journal.
To conduct the study, researchers examined nearly forty-four thousand Swedish women aged thirty to forty-nine years and followed up an average of fifteen years later. During the fifteen-year study period, 1,270 cardiovascular events took place in the 43,396 women (55 percent ischemic heart disease, 23 percent ischemic stroke, 6 percent hemorrhagic stroke, 10 percent subarachnoid hemorrhage, and 6 percent peripheral arterial disease). Researchers found that cardiovascular disease incidence more than doubled in the low-carb, high-protein followers.
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Fortunately, the Atkins diet has lost its luster as a result of studies like these, and more doctors are informing their patients about its dangers. Unfortunately, other diets with similar strategies but different names, such as the paleo or Dukan diets, keep popping up and luring individuals into the same disproven and dangerous eating patterns. Many people are lured into these dangerous diets because they cling to any argument that condones their food preferences. Diabetics can't afford to make such mistakes, because these mistakes of judgment could result in dramatically increased suffering and a curtailed life span. The paleo diet uses a distorted view of ancient history to argue that a diet of 50 to 80 percent animal products is the most life span enhancing. (This recommendation is double to triple the average animal product consumption in America today.) Early humans ate many different types of diets in various parts of the world, but what they ate here or there is not even the relevant question. It is how long they lived, and how long present humans will live (in good health) with various diet styles that is more relevant. The answer to this question is clear as the preponderance of evidence is overwhelming today.

If the increased risks of heart attack and cancer aren't enough of an argument, a large study tracking kidney damage showed that a high-protein diet accelerates kidney damage in people with even very mild compromise to their kidneys.
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Almost 25 percent of people over forty-five, especially those with diabetes or high blood pressure, have some degree of kidney impairment. Although the study did not proceed long enough to detect kidney damage in those with perfectly healthy kidneys, it's important to note that kidney damage is often not detectable at lower levels of damage. Higher levels of damage make it easy to diagnose, but by then it could be too late to reverse, especially in diabetics. In fact, Dr. Knight, the lead researcher in this study concluded, “The potential impact of protein consumption on renal function has important public health implications given the prevalence of high-protein diets and use of protein supplements.” It is also well established that lots of meat equals lots of gout and kidney stones.
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In a press release titled “American Kidney Fund Warns About Impact of High-Protein Diets on Kidney Health,” AKF Chair of Medical Affairs Paul W. Crawford, M.D., said, “We have long suspected that high-protein weight loss diets could have a negative impact on the kidneys, and now we have research to support our suspicions.” Dr. Crawford is worried that the strain put on the kidneys could result in irreversible “scarring in the kidneys.” Dr. Crawford also discussed the risk that bodybuilders take in eating high-protein diets while building muscle. He noted, “Bodybuilders could be predisposing themselves to chronic kidney disease because hyperfiltration (the strain on the kidneys) can produce scarring in the kidneys, reducing kidney function.”

Dr. Crawford concluded, “Chronic kidney disease is not to be taken lightly, and there is no cure for kidney failure. The only treatments are kidney dialysis and kidney transplantation. This research shows that even in healthy athletes, kidney function was impacted and that ought to send a message to anyone who is on a high-protein weight loss diet.”
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There is a vast amount of scientific literature supporting what constitutes excellent nutrition. I have reviewed over twenty thousand studies that indicate that what we put in our mouth
does
matter and that we
can
prevent disease with a high-nutrient diet. It is important that we all know that we can no longer deny the dangers from a diet style rich in meat and other animal products.

Humans are primates, and all primates eat a diet of predominantly natural vegetation. If they eat animal products, it is a very small percentage of their total caloric intake. Luckily, we have modern science that shows that most common ailments in today's world are the result of wrong nutritional choices arising from misguided nutritional information. Now our knowledge base has taken a giant leap forward and we can eat a diet rich in phytochemicals from a variety of natural plant foods that can afford us the ability to live a long, healthy life, which was not easily obtained by our ancestors.