Sent to you via Google Reader
Mark Hyman, MD: 5 Steps To Reversing Type 2 Diabetes And Insulin Resistance
Breaking news!
Some newly discovered compounds have just been found to turn off all of the genes that cause diabetes.
Are these compounds found in a pill bottle? No!
Instead, you'll find them on your dinner plate -- in rye bread and pasta.
(As I recently wrote in one of my blogs, rye contains special phytonutrients that turn off all the genes responsible for diabetes -- in just a few weeks.)
Last week, I explained how to find out if you are pre-diabetic or diabetic. Half of the 24 million people with diabetes don't know they have it and nearly all the 60 million people with pre-diabetes don't know they have it.
Today, I want to share with you more information about what you can do NOW to prevent and reverse diabetes and pre-diabetes.
And rye bread isn't the only answer -- I've got a lot more good advice, too.
But first I want to emphasize new research that should be headlines news but never saw the light of day. Do our current drugs treatments for diabetes actually work to prevent heart attacks and death?
Surely lowering blood sugar in diabetics is an effective strategy for reducing the risk of death and heart disease. It would seem obvious that if diabetes is a disease of high blood sugar, then reducing blood sugar would be beneficial.
However elevated sugar is only a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The real problem is elevated insulin unchecked over decades from a highly refined carbohydrate diet, a sedentary lifestyle and environmental toxins.
Most medications and insulin therapy are aimed at lowering blood sugar through increasing insulin. In the randomized ACCORD trial of over 10,000 patients, this turns out to be a bad idea.
In the intensive glucose-lowering group, there were no fewer heart attacks, and more patients died. Yet we continue to pay $174 billion annually for this type of care for diabetes, despite evidence that lifestyle works better than medications. We also pay for cardiac bypass and angioplasty in diabetics when evidence shows no reduction in death or heart attacks compared to medication.
So now that we know what doesn't work, let me review what does work.
Ginny
