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The Doctor Asked: “What Have You Done?” 53
The Truth About Burger King 33
Statins May Cause Diabetes 14
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. Teens Has Diabetes or Prediabetes! 22
Across the river for water: Surgery for diabetes 25
Is the Solution to the Obesity Epidemic Launching Today? 22
Low Carb Explained 79
The Death of the Low-Fat Diet 28
Surprise: More Sugar, More Diabetes 20
The Science of Low Carb 48
Interview: Good Food is Good Medicine 5
FatChance
The Book of the Year 20
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How to Cure Type 2 Diabetes

June 2 11:48 in Diabetes, Weight Loss

Is it possible to cure type 2 diabetes? Doctor Jay Wortman, MD, knows more about it than most people. He developed type 2 diabetes himself ten years ago. After a simple dietary change he is still completely symptom free, with no medication.

Wortman also did a spectacular study on native Canadians. When they started eating the same food that their ancestors ate their Western diseases disappeared.

Here’s a 25 minute interview I did with dr Wortman during the recent Low-Carb Cruise. Links to things mentioned in the interview: Continue Reading →

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The Doctor Asked: “What Have You Done?”

March 17 13:35 in Diabetes, Weight loss stories

Yet another story from a person with type 2 diabetes, who has tried an LCHF diet:

At an appointment with my doctor, after being on an LCHF diet for one year (diabetes checkup):

The first thing she asks me is…. “What have you done?” – with a big smile.
“I started eating an LCHF diet”, I say.
“I just knew it had to be something like that!”, she says.

All numbers are good. Blood sugar normal, cholesterol numbers good, blood counts…. everything that can be measured is great (all was not good a year ago). My waistline has shrunk by 5 inches, and I have lost more than 30 pounds (have acquired more muscle mass too, so my fat loss is probably significant).

In addition I have completely stopped taking some antidiabetic medications (don’t need them anymore), and am currently taking half the dose of the last remaining antidiabetic medication that I take daily. I don’t need more than that when I eat an LCHF diet.

Then comes the funny part (or the not so funny part). She tells med that many of her patients have changed their diets to an LCHF diet on their own. And they all lose weight, they all improve their health markers, become healthier and feel much better.

“Isn’t this amazing?!”, she says, adding “And I am not allowed to recommend this to my patients, because we have to follow the official guidelines. Our whole society is sugar-poisoned.”

Congratulations!

The doctor’s idea that she is not allowed to recommend an LCHF diet is a common urban legend, that is spread by ignorance. As a physician in Sweden you may certainly recommend an LCHF diet. I have done so to appropriate patients more or less daily for the past six years, with results similar to the above.

Previously on diabetes

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Statins May Cause Diabetes

March 15 14:47 in Cholesterol, Diabetes, Drugs

Statins-diabetes

Cholesterol-lowering drugs, so called statins, may decrease the risk for heart disease somewhat. But they may also lead to side effects, such as: muscle pain, muscle fatigue, disorientation and a lower IQ, fatigue, impotence and so on.

One side effect that has long been known is that statins increase the risk of developing diabetes. You could, for example, have read about this on my Swedish blog three years ago and in my Swedish book The Food rEvolution, 2011. Now, a few years later, it’s been added as a “very important” update of the text in the Swedish catalogue of approved drugs, FASS: Diabetes is a possible side effect.

Hence another reason not to spread statins far and wide to heart-healthy individuals with “high cholesterol” – which is often defined as 200 mg/dl and above. Most of the healthy population has a total cholesterol number above 200 mg/dl, so this is one of the more obvious cases of disease mongering (the “selling of sickness”) you can imagine.

When it comes to heart disease (angina, previous heart attack) the benefit of statin treatment might be worth the risk. But if you treat your normal cholesterol number with statins you risk getting diabetes for no good reason. Does this sound like a good idea? Hardly, but it happens many times every day.

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Sugar, Diabetes and E-mails From Lustig

March 8 11:06 in Diabetes, Robert Lustig, Sugar/fructose

Do you remember the new study showing that more available sugar in countries is closely followed by more cases of diabetes?

As I wrote this kind of observational correlation does not really prove causation. But the story is slightly more complicated. Dr Lustig emailed me yesterday: Continue Reading →

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Surprise: More Sugar, More Diabetes

February 28 10:35 in Diabetes, Robert Lustig, Sugar/fructose

sugar

Can sugar cause diabetes? Has the increase in sugar consumption caused the worldwide epidemic of type 2 diabetes? Ask the sugar industry and the answer is a definite NO. Ask a random scientist in the field and the answer is likely to be “probably”, “possibly”, or “maybe”.

Ask dr Robert Lustig and the answer is emphatically yes. And I think he’s absolutely right.

A new study adds more support. Looking at the available sugar during the last decade in 175 countries the relationship is clear: The more sugar available, the more diabetes. Less sugar, less diabetes.

One extra can of soda per day corresponds to an extra 1.1 percent prevalence of diabetes. If correct this would mean a single extra can of soda per day would cause 3,500,000 more people to suffer from diabetes – just in the US. A relationship that rivals the disease-causing effects of smoking.

This relationship is clear even when correcting for other possible causes like obesity. In other words: Here’s more support for the theory that excess sugar does not just make you fat. Sugar can probably make you sick even before you get fat.

To be fair, this study is just about statistical correlations: it does not prove causality. But it’s another smoking gun for the sugar industry to try to explain away.

The evidence of harmful effects of extra sugar in our diets is piling up. And there’s no need to consume it, there’s nothing nutritionally necessary about pure sugar in excessive amounts. Let’s just get rid of our sugar addiction and stop this disaster.

More

More about diabetes

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The Death of the Low-Fat Diet

February 25 21:16 in Diabetes, Failed low fat diets, Heart Disease
Real food

Healthy high-fat food

It’s February 25, 2013, and the low-fat diet is dead.

The low-fat diet has been on life support since 2006, when the failure of the WHI trial was published. A low-fat diet did not succeed in preventing heart disease. Instead people with pre-existing heart disease had a 30 percent increase in risk of heart disease!

Now it’s game over. Today the result of another large trial is published in the The New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigeous scientific journal in the world for this type of research.

About 7,500 people were randomized to either get advice on a low-fat diet or a Mediterranean diet with more fat, specifically olive oil or nuts. After almost five years the trial was stopped in advance. The result was clear. The group getting the low-fat diet advice got significantly more heart disease, again.

NEJM: Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet

An earlier report from the same trial looked at the risk of diabetes. People exposed to low-fat diet advice had a much higher risk of getting diabetes. And study after study show that people have a harder time losing weight on a low-fat diet. So it’s more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease on low fat.

R.I.P. low-fat diet. Welcome back, fat.

Continued: What the Dangerous Low-Fat Diet Looked Like

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The Book of the Year

January 5 10:34 in Diabetes, Industrial food-like products, Insulin, Metabolic syndrome, Robert Lustig, Sugar/fructose, The Obesity Epidemic

FatChance

It’s out. The book “Fat Chance” by professor Robert Lustig, the man who made millions of people watch a 90 minutes long lecture on nutrition (“Sugar, The Bitter Truth”). Lustig has the ability to make a subject exciting and his message could not be more important.

I’m reading the book right now and I’ll return with a more thorough review. But I want to tell you right now. While it’s only January 5th and while I haven’t yet finished the first read-through I’m already certain: This is the book of the year.

Do you want to know:

  • Why a calorie is not a calorie?
  • Why obesity is not about gluttony or sloth?
  • What the real problem is with sugar and processed food?
  • The cause of the epidemics of obesity and related diseases?

Here’s the answer (it starts with the letter “i”) in a fascinating read and with a concluding list of scientific references that should make the most inveterate critic give up.

Read the first pages for free on Amazon.com.

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Is the Solution to the Obesity Epidemic Launching Today?

September 12 2012 20:44 in Diabetes, Gary Taubes, Science & Health, Weight Loss

Obesity and diabetes rates are skyrocketing across the world and the consequences are staggering. How will we stop it? Not by continuing to do what we’re doing, because it’s obviously not working.

We need to question some of our fundamental beliefs that are, amazingly, not grounded in good science.

Enter Gary Taubes and Peter Attia, the co-founders of the non-profit organization Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI, pronounced “new see”), which launches today. It’s goal is to make sure that the important scientific studies get done. We’re talking about very major studies on for example low carb diets.

After spending some time discussing it with Taubes and Attia at the AHS conference recently I was extremely impressed by their thinking and plans. I do believe that this could change the world.

I’ll write more about NuSI and post a video interview I did with Peter Attia on it. But for now see the video message from Peter Attia (above) and then check out their website:

NuSI.org

What do you think?

Also, both Gary Taubes and Peter Attia have posted on NuSI on their blogs today.

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Interview: Good Food is Good Medicine

July 12 2012 13:28 in Diabetes, Low Carb High Fat, Metabolic syndrome, Weight Loss

Here’s the first of several interviews with experts on low carb nutrition. First out: “Denver’s Diet Doctor” – dr Jeffry Gerber, MD. This was recorded at the ASBP obesity conference in Denver back in April.

Dr Gerber, like me, is a family physician specializing in treating patients with obesity, diabetes and other metabolic problems. He’s also a super nice guy. So what’s it like being a doctor treating patients with advice on high fat and Paleo diets? Listen and find out!

Dr Jeffry Gerber’s website

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Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. Teens Has Diabetes or Prediabetes!

June 1 2012 20:06 in Diabetes

This is absolutely insane. In less than a decade the number of U.S. kids ages 12-19 with diabetes or prediabetes has skyrocketed from 9 to 23 percent!

TIME: Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. Teens Has Diabetes or Prediabetes

If anyone wants a reason why real action is needed, here it is. Talk about a public health emergency! The old advice about more exercise (or “Let’s Move”), balanced junk food diets and tiny changes is obviously not enough.

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