Understanding Diabetes
Many people don’t realize that type 2 diabetes is a disease
that can be largely prevented or reversed through dietary intervention. If you
want to have a normal sugar numbers, the safest way is to reverse the disease
itself by eating a whole food plant-based diet. Many people are convinced that
sugar is the problem when it comes to diabetes. Barnard points out that this is
an unfortunate mistaken approach. People think that they have too much sugar in
the blood so get rid of sugar in the diet, they believe and the diabetes will
improve. Some extend this judgement to all carbohydrates and even fresh fruits.
What people don’t understand, Barnard explains, is that glucose isn’t getting
into the cells. It's staying in the blood. This bears repeating because the
misconception is so common: Diabetes is not a disease caused by consuming too
much sugar; it’s a disease caused by problems getting sugar into the cells. It's not that sugar is good, rather it is to caution you that if you focus only on
avoiding sugar or carbohydrates, you will miss the real culprit. One should definitely
be looking at the amount of sugar consumed but should also pay attention to the
the real culprit. It turns out that fat is jamming the locks so insulin cannot
open the door. The implication of this is clear: diabetes is caused by the high
fat, meat heavy, high calorie western diet, coupled with sedentary lifestyle
and also consuming far more sugar than we actually need, and after a while your
cells become desensitized to insulin.
The woes of excess sugar
Now your bloodstream is flooded with sugar and your liver-
the great metabolizer and detoxifier- must figure out what to do with it all.
Some of it is packaged into triglycerides and very low-density lipoproteins,
some is turned into stored sugar glycogen and placed in fat cells, and some of
it gets excreted in the urine. So, from this, we tend to see high cholesterol,
abdominal weight gain, and increased risk of urinary tract infections. These symptoms
often begin to develop during early stages of insulin resistance.
reference
Whole food diet
John Mackey
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