Cure your diabetes in 30 days!! Part Two

Ok, so to follow-up on Part One of this post, here is my interpretation of this "phenomenon." As a reminder, diabetes is conventionally thought of as a chronic illness--ie one that will never be "cured" but rather "managed" through proper diet, physical activity, and medication compliance. The belief (and what decades of sound medical research supports) is that people with good glycemic control can become resistent to a hormone called insulin that is produced by an organ in our body called the pancreas. When we eat, the carbohydrate in our food is converted to glucose, which is absorbed into our blood and supplies the necessary energy to our body. In order to bring the levels of glucose back down to normal, the pancreas produces insulin. Sometimes, as we get older and/or gain weight, our bodies don't use the insulin as efficiently--this condition is called insulin resistance or pre-diabetes. If this condition is addressed early on with diet and exercise (and sometimes medication), it can be reversed. BUT if it is not addressed, it can progress to full-blown diabetes. Once you become diabetic, your pancreas is so diseased that as far as we know it cannot suddenly heal and start working properly again. This is what makes diabetes incurable and a therefore qualify as a chronic illness.

First and foremost, the main problems I have with this film are with the claims these Raw Food people make of "reversing" and "curing" this disease--I believe them to be extremely misleading and potentially very dangerous. There is no evidence to my knowledge of the pancreas suddenly regenerating beta cells and producing more insulin--this is giving scared vulnerable people false hope. NOT GOOD.

Second, the people in the film were told to reduce their medications by half right off the start. As any physician/health care professional knows, it's generally not a good idea to drastically reduce a medication. Normally patients are weaned off their meds, as this provides the body more time to adjust and doesn't provide as much a shock as as drastic dose reduction would provide. So right there I became concerned.

Third, they were started on an vegan raw-food diet, which for all of them involved a complete swing of the dietary pendulum. I'm sorry, but anyone who goes from eating McD's twice a day to eating a diet of organic produce and sprouted grains is going to see a health benefit. But cure an illness in 30 days?! That seems a little far-fetched. As any nutrition professional knows, just getting people to follow any diet is nearly impossible long-term--imagine what it feels like to only be "allowed" to eat raw food! Talk about compliance issues, people. Tooooootally impracticle. On a side note, I went on a raw food diet for a week as a class assignment, and wrote about my experience. As you can imagine, I normally eat a healthy diet, so this wasn't such a huge switch for me, but let me just say I felt like CRAP and could barely stand it for 7 days. And I'm a nutritionist with fairly reasonable access to this food--how is the average person supposed to handle this?! Don't get me started...

Featured in the film were the numerous health benefits of this raw food diet that were aside from curing diabetes--blood lipids (think cholesterol) all decreased, blood pressure decreased, energy increased, and guess what--they people lots tons of weight! Something that averaged out to between 4-5 pounds/week. ASTONISHING! So many things wrong with this, where do I start!? First, if you want to be healthy and lose weight, losing 1-2 lbs/week MAX is what is recommended for sustained weight loss. Second, I recall some research done with obese diabetic patients who underwent bariatric surgery (think stomach-stapling). Miraculously after they lost 40, 50, 60 pounds within the first month or two post-surgery, their blood sugars were so improved that they seemed to have reversed their diabetes! So this would be my guess as to why the people in the film had improved glycemic control all of a sudden--it has nothing (or very little) to do with the raw food diet, but instead with the fact they lost so much weight in such a small amount of time. Something important to mention--the post-bariatric surgery patients' glycemic control returned to baseline (before the surgery) after a few months, so no cure for their diabetes. Interestingly enough, there was no follow-up with the patients in the film to see if they had still remained "cured."

Last but never least, the credentials of the people who spoke at this event in Oakland were wonky at best. The "doctor" was actually a "board-eligible chiropracter" who is "certified" in digestive disorders or something like that. "Board-eligible"...REALLY?! And this guy gets paid to counsel people!? Incredible. He flat-out told the audience that the pharmaceutical industry CAUSED their diabetes. CAUSED! He said the vaccines we received as kids CAUSE diabetes, and he quoted from this far-out British publication called What Doctors Don't Tell You. Fantastic stuff, and everyone paid $20 to attend. Plus $50 for the DVD of the film with its bonus footage, and $15 for some raw food to eat, plus $10 for the most wretched zero glycemic "chocolate" that was NO JOKE beign sold by a man in a head-to-toe pleather rainbow suit WITH matching top hat.

Need I say more?