Rescue from Diabetes

I copy/pasted part of an article from www.mercola.com. If you are like me, pre-diabetic, perhaps you can adjust your lifestyle according to some good sense. My good friend Song Sun died a year and a half ago due to type 2 diabetes complications. He found it very difficult to change his lifestyle in order to reverse things before the dominoes began to fall on his organs. I hope that you and I are able to change ours. God, bless us.

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Why is Diabetes Such a Dangerous Disease?

Diabetes has become so common that many don’t even bat an eyelash anymore. It’s almost as if diabetes has become “ok.” Just take your meds and you’ll be fine.

Not so!

Aside from the potentially deadly side effects of diabetes drugs, which I’ve covered in previous articles, the additional health complications that diabetes fosters are multiple, and quite serious, including:

Heart disease and stroke – Death from heart disease and risk for stroke is two to four times higher among people with diabetes
High blood pressure – 75 percent of diabetics have high blood pressure (130/180 mm Hg or higher)
Blindness -- Diabetes is the leading cause of new cases of blindness among adults aged 20 to 74 years
Kidney disease – Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure. In 2005, more than 45,700 people began treatment for end-stage kidney disease in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and another 178,700 were living on chronic dialysis
Nervous system disease -- About 60 to 70 percent of people with diabetes have mild to severe forms of nervous system damage such as: impaired sensation or pain in hands or feet, poor digestion, carpal tunnel syndrome and erectile dysfunction
Amputations – In 2004, 71,000 lower limb amputations due to diabetes were performed in the U.S.
Dental disease -- Almost one-third of people with diabetes have severe periodontal disease
Pregnancy complications -- Poorly controlled diabetes before conception and during the first trimester of pregnancy among women with type 1 diabetes can cause major birth defects in 5 to 10 percent of pregnancies, and spontaneous abortions in 15 to 20 percent of pregnancies
Putting a Price Tag on Diabetes

There’s yet another updated study that warrants mentioning here: the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) study on Economic Cost of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2007.

The total estimated cost of diabetes in the U.S. in 2007 tallies up to $174 billion. This includes $ 116 billion in excess (read: unnecessary) medical expenditures, and $58 billion in reduced national productivity.

Having diabetes not only plunders your health, but your pocketbook too. People with diagnosed diabetes incur an average medical expense of $11,744 per year, almost 2.5 times higher than those who do not have diabetes.

Follow the Bread Crumbs

The concept that diabetes is NOT a blood sugar disease is one that I keep striving to make well-known. As you can see by the numbers above, understanding the TRUE underlying cause of diabetes has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives.

Type 2 diabetes is a disease caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling, both of which are regulated through your diet.

Until that concept becomes well-known in both the medical community and by the public at large, the misconception about what diabetes is and the appropriate way to treat it will continue to be promoted.

Conventional treatment that is focused on fixing the symptom of elevated blood sugar, rather than addressing the underlying disease, is doomed to fail in most cases. Treatments that concentrate merely on lowering blood sugar while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication. It just trades one evil for another.

Since most treatments for type 2 diabetes utilize drugs that either raise insulin or lower blood sugar, the tragic result is that the typical, conventional medical treatment for diabetes contributes to the additional diseases and the shortened lifespan that diabetics experience.

For the last 50 years or so, Americans have followed the dietary recommendations of a high complex carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet.

As an example, WebMD; one of the most visited medical information sites on the web, states that people with diabetes, who also have abnormal cholesterol levels, would be well advised to follow a diet that calls for 50 to 60 percent of your daily total calories to be in the form of carbohydrates.

That’s absurd.

They also state that table sugar is okay, as long as you readjust your medications to compensate appropriately (i.e. take more drugs to increase your fat cell storage capacity). Using toxic artificial sweeteners in lieu of sugar also gets the green light.

Folks, many of these recommendations are not based on what’s nutritionally healthy. They’re based on industry lobbying – just like the USDA’s Food Pyramid, which is fraught with industry conflicts of interest.

The proof is in the pudding as they say, and concomitant with the standard nutritional recommendations the incidence of diabetes and obesity has skyrocketed, and has become one of the worst epidemics the world has ever seen.

Eating a high "complex" carbohydrate, low saturated fat diet for health and longevity has been shown to be wrong. Minimal common sense would say to try something else.

How to Avoid Becoming a Statistic

Getting appropriate and regular amounts of exercise, and adopting an eating plan that emphasizes good fats, and reduced non-fiber carbohydrates and starches as outlined in my Total Health Program, can place you on the right path. Doing so will greatly improve and even reverse type 2 "insulin resistant" diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, many other chronic diseases of aging, all without the use of potentially dangerous drugs.

Excerpted from www.mercola.com.