Fasting and Eating for Health (20 page)

The Remedy Is Worse Than the Disease

The administration of insulin and oral medications attempts to address only one aspect of the problem—the increased blood sugar levels. Because insulin increases one's appetite and increases glucose uptake by the cells, the diabetic patient becomes more diabetic and eventually requires more insulin, and so on.

Increased insulin is responsible for increased death from heart attacks. Giving a type II diabetic insulin is like giving an alcoholic more alcohol.

Hypoglycemic pills (the oral diabetes medication) are not as bad as insulin; however, they too have been shown to increase the risk of dying from heart disease 2.5 times more than that of diabetics treated by diet alone. They can cause dangerous side effects such as jaundice, anemia, skin rashes, and even, though rarely, death." But the main problem is that the blood-sugar lowering effect of these medications is achieved mainly through stimulating the pancreatic islet cells to produce more insulin. Attempting to stimulate the 104

weakened pancreas eventually takes its toll, aggravating the loss of beta cell function. Thus, again, the person is likely to become more diabetic. The oral medications also increase glucose and fatty acid uptake in skeletal muscles and fat
cells,
helping the person gain weight more easily and become more diabetic.15,16

Both insulin and oral hypoglycemic agents can also cause potentially life-threatening episodes of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Both medications, when compared to diet control, accelerate the aging of the diabetic, accelerate the complications of the disease, and aid in the early death of the diabetic.

Today's typical treatment combined with the usual American Diabetic Association diet is a proven dangerous approach. The ADA-recommended diet has been shown to promote heart disease in patients who do not have diabetes. Therefore, in the diabetic it is an extremely foolish practice. Feeding a diabetic a high-fat diet including multiple daily servings of chicken, meat, fish, and dairy products will greatly accelerate his or her death. Then, when we combine this with the typical treatments offered by most physicians, it is no wonder diabetics suffer from multiple medical complications and die an unnecessarily early death. I can only view today's treatment of diabetic patients as malpractice, yet it is the standard of care. If they are not given this basic information, we are depriving them of their opportunity for wellness and normal life spans.

A Plant-Based Diet Is an Effective

When Elizabeth first came to me she weighed 222 pounds, she was taking 115

units of insulin daily, and her fasting blood sugar levels were between 250 and 300. Her prior physician was concerned that her diabetes was still so poorly controlled on increasing doses of insulin. He did not know what more he could do and suggested adding an oral hypoglycemic medication to the high dose of insulin to see if the sugar levels could be better controlled.

Instead, Elizabeth saw me and we started a more effective approach. I cut her insulin back to a total of 70 units daily as she began following my dietary suggestions. She phoned two days later to report that her blood sugar levels were running between 130 and 152, so we cut the insulin back to 40 units per day. She returned for a followup visit a few days later, one week after her initial appointment, and was doing so well that she had stopped her insulin completely the day before. Her sugars were now running below 150 and she had lost 7 pounds during that first week. She went from using 115 units of insulin a day while her diabetes was under poor control to requiring no insulin at all, and this took place in merely one week's time. She is continuing to lose weight.

The diet plan to reverse diabetes and enable patients to eliminate their dependence on drugs is one derived from vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. Refined and overly processed foods, convenience foods, and foods that are high in refined carbohydrates, salt, and other additives should all be avoided for good health. The diabetic, who is even more sensitive to the 105

harmful effects of the American diet, should take care to consume a natural plant-based diet with an abundance of raw vegetables in the form of large salads every day. It is essential that the diabetic avoid concentrated vegetable oils including margarine, olive oil, corn oil, and other fats. Nuts, olives and avocados are also best left out of the diet due to their fat content.

A large green salad, eaten daily, is the only food that has shown a significant correlation with longer life in scientific studies.17,18 Guar and other water-soluble fibers in beans, oats, barley, and fruit are also important, and are present in large quantities in a plant-based diet. No sweets except for fresh fruit should be eaten. Fruit juices and dried fruit should also be limited or avoided.

Weight loss in even the slightly overweight diabetic is essential, so regular exercise is an important part of the prescription. Both aerobic and weight training or Nautilus-type exercise should be done on a regular basis to keep a very high muscle-to-fat ratio in the body. The goal is to make the body "lean and mean."

When following the above recommendations, patients lose weight and their blood sugar levels drop immediately. Additionally, the low protein content of this diet protects the kidneys.

This program is so effective that I have developed the position that a diabetic patient who is not a strict vegetarian is either ill-informed or foolish. Doctors who know this information are irresponsible if they do not explain it to their patients.

Nutritional Supplements Are Not the Answer
Many nutrients are often touted as effective remedies for the diabetic.

Chromium, for example, has been shown to improve glycemic control in diabetics who are chromium deficient. Supplementation with vitamin E has also been shown to have a favorable effect on blood sugar control in diabetics.19

Vitamin C supplementation to 1,000 mg per day has been shown to retard. the damaging effects of glucose on body proteins, thus lessening the damage from the high glucose levels in diabetes and retarding the aging process.20

The point to remember is that every nutrient that has been shown to have a favorable effect on glucose control is present in abundance in fresh fruits and vegetables and deficient in processed foods, dairy foods, and animal foods.

When we consume a diet of primarily raw and conservatively cooked plant foods, we consume very high levels of these nutrients, plus nutritional factors that have not yet been discovered or isolated and that are essential for optimal health. More than six hundred antioxidants have been identified so far, many of which work synergistically (strengthening the protective effects of the other nutrients they accompany) with other compounds to produce observed effects, such as LDL oxidation. Obviously, we can get adequate amounts of all these beneficial nutrients only by eating an abundance of unprocessed natural foods (many of the protective nutrients are lost in processing). Merely adding supplements to an inadequate diet will never suffice.

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If you are on the optimal diet already, will taking extra amounts of vitamins E

and C and chromium be important? The answer is probably not. A natural plant-based diet already provides more than 1,000 mg of vitamin C, for example. Only time and further research will tell if the diabetic will benefit further from supplementation once he or she is eating optimally. If you are on the standard American diet or a diet recommended by the typical health professional, similar to the suggestions of the American Diabetic Association (a diet that I consider dangerous for diabetics), then it would make sense to supplement your diet with other nutrients such as superoxide dismutase complex, rutin, bioflavonoids, and carotenoids, since those diets are significantly lacking in essential protective nutrients, especially antioxidants.

Fasting Can Aid in Recovery from Diabetes

Fasting can play an important part in the recovery from adult-onset diabetes.

In fact, early in this century, many years before insulin was ever used to treat diabetics, fasting was used as an important therapeutic modality to prolong life in diabetic patients.21 It was reported at that time that even in severe cases of adult diabetes, the signs and symptoms of the disease resolve with fasting.

Glycosuria and acidosis resolved with recovery occurring even in the weak and emaciated patients.

In these early studies on fasting done at the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, the physicians employing this therapy noted that "fasting has not appeared harmful even in these few cases where it has not been successful." Even in these early investigations the importance of keeping the patient permanently "below weight" after the fast and the importance of restricting the quantity of fat in the diet to maintain the benefit gained from the fast were repeatedly emphasized. The authors stated,

"Anyone can readily convince himself that, in a suitably severe diabetic who is symptom-free for days or weeks (after a fast) and on a fixed diet, the addition of some quantity of butter or olive oil to the diet will bring back the glycosuria, ketonuria and other symptoms immediately or within a short time."

Unfortunately, now that physicians are able to control these symptoms with drugs, these pearls of knowledge gleaned by researchers from the days when no drugs were available are largely ignored.

More recent studies reporting on the fasting of diabetic patients have likewise shown excellent results,22,23,24 and confirm the changes I see with my patients.

They concluded that, following a prolonged fast, the diabetic patient shows a substantial improvement in insulin function independent of the degree of weight loss, and restoration of pancreatic function can occur that does not occur with weight loss alone. Complete remission of diabetes was reported in many patients.

Fasting should not be used early in the treatment, but rather after many months on the diabetic reversal diet, when the person has lost most of the excessive weight. At this point an extended fast can remove the last bit of 107

difficult-to-lose weight and, more important, can give the pancreas a chance to rest so it can reset its sensitivity to glucose and recover its normal function.

The fast is useful especially when the person is doing fairly well, but still has mildly elevated fasting glucose levels after following the optimal diet and having restored normal or near normal weight.

If the fast is used correctly in the type II diabetic (type I diabetics should not fast), it increases beta cell sensitivity to glucose, which can restore integrity to the pancreas and allow it to reestablish its sensitivity to glucose. This is an important therapeutic modality to bring diabetics whose sugar levels are relatively well controlled with optimal diet to the point where, after a fast is completed, the blood sugars remain entirely within the normal range while the same diet is continued.

Using fasting in a later phase of the treatment program results in restoration of pancreatic function so that patients regain normal blood sugar levels and, in many cases, have no further findings indicative of diabetes. Fasting too early in the treatment program may temporarily slow the metabolic rate, actually making further weight loss more difficult, especially if the individual is not lean after the fast.

When Bill first came to see me, he had already suffered from one heart attack. He was taking an oral hypoglycemic medication for his diabetes, as well as other drugs. I stopped his oral diabetic medication at the first visit, and he began my recommended diet for diabetes. When Bill returned two weeks later his blood sugar levels were around 140, much better than they had been on the medication, with his previous diet. His blood pressure remained high, however (180/95 while taking the Tenormin, a bloodpressure-lowering medication), and we decided to begin a fast rather than add further medication at this time. When he arrived a week later to begin his fast, he already had lost about 10 pounds since I had first seen him about three weeks earlier. All medications were stopped and he fasted 20 days. When Bill completed his fast, he had lost 20 more pounds, and not only did his blood pressure remain around 110/70 without medication, but also his fasting glucose levels stayed under 120, within the normal range.

Occasionally, a diabetic patient who is significantly overweight may need to eat correctly, exercise appropriately, fast, continue to eat correctly for a few months, and fast again. In this manner the overweight diabetic grows lean and strong. By combining exercise and extremely low fat, high-fiber, plant diets with fasting, the patient builds a new body. Both the patient and I develop excitement at the new, lean, trim, muscular body that eventually reveals itself from under the old cloak of fat. Like training for and competing in the Olympic Games, these patients reach their own sustained triumph as they recover and maintain their health.

The combination of fasting, which places the least demand possible on the patient's overworked pancreas, with the lower insulin demands of the new diet gives the pancreas its well-earned rest and enables the body to accomplish internal housecleaning and to repair cells damaged by years of diabetes.

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Importantly, since all diabetics have significant blood vessel disease with hardening of the arteries diffusely throughout their vessels, the fast is able to address the damage already done. Like no other therapeutic modality, fasting removes the risk of a cardiovascular accident or other complication that was practically inevitable without this intervention.

Before insulin was discovered earlier in this century, many patients with diabetes were treated in the manner described—by very low fat diets and fasting. The medical profession abandoned the practice after insulin was discovered because physicians of the time thought diabetes was licked and that no one should have to deprive him-or herself of food in order to get well.

Insulin gave diabetics the freedom to continue to be fat, to continue to abuse their bodies, and to continue to allow their body to age and weaken from the effects of diabetes without having the immediate symptoms of dry mouth, frequent urination, and weakness. But now we know better.