Summary
Nutritional approaches have worked to reverse diabetes. When the body is viewed as a system, and it's inputs, outputs, and processes are examined, the mystery disappears.
[2,000 words]
by Eric Armstrong
Diabetes starts out as an "insulin resistance" condition, before it turns into an "isnulin insufficiency" condition. The major cause of the condition lies in the heat-processed fats and oils we have been consuming for decades in this society. Another important cause is the lack of chromium in the food supply. Any intelligent protocol for the management of diabetes must take into account those facts. This article describes the protocols that work, and explains the process for the condition, as well the cure.
The chemistry is fairly simple: horseshoe-shaped polyunsaturated fatty acids are twisted by heat. They're straightened out, bond-shifted, and cross-linked so that the "business" end (the active end) is worthless.
That leads to the biology of the situation. The stationary end of the fatty acid can still attach to a phosphate group to make phospholipids -- which are incorporated into the cell walls. But the other end doesn't do it's job -- it lets in things it shouldn't (the cause of allergies) and doesn't interact with things it should -- things like insulin, which causes insulin resistance, and oxygen, which allows cancer to grow. (Oxygen is supremely deadly to cancer, and the fatty acids constitute the transport mechanism.)
The bottom line is that millions of years of evolution have never prepared the body to recognize and avoid the transmogrified fatty acids. So they act, quite literally, as metabolic poisons. In the same way that cyanide connects with hemoglobin and prevents oxygen from doing so, these things are build into the cell walls, preventing the chemically-active versions from doing so.
There are many more cells, though, and there are always some good fats among the bad ones (and vice versa), so it takes a long time to see serious effects. One effect is clearly visible though, since every cell requires fatty acids to function, you eat six times more than you would with high-quality fats in the diet. Hence the excess weight.
In addition to transporting oxygen and nutrients to and through the cell walls, are the "active" parts of the brain, nervous system, hemoglobin, hormones, and immune system. It is the electrons they supply (in the right time, at the right place) that are responsible for synapses firing, hormones communicating, destruction of invaders by immune cells, etc. So its clear that good health requires eliminating the bad fats and supplying the good ones.
Chromium is needed to activate insulin. Without it, insulin won't work.
Chromium is generally found in foods that contain sugar. So the mineral you need to metabolize the sugar is right there at the same time. Pretty cool. Except that when we refine things to make white foods like white sugar, white flour, and white rice, we remove all the chromium (and any other minerals). We leave behind the sugar and starch that makes the food products taste great, but we no longer include the chromium needed to metabolize it.
That wouldn't be so bad, if we were taking in chromium from other sources. But chromium is deficient in most U.S. soils. So it's not coming from elsewhere in the food supply, either.
The result is an overproduction of insulin as the body attempts to handle the sugar in the blood stream, coupled with a deficiency of chromium.
When you go to the doctor, diabetes is a death sentence. You get medications to "control" the problem. You take insulin injections for the rest of your life, and make sure your blood-sugar testing kit is always within reach. But eventually, you know it's going to kill you.
Nutritional practioners, on the other hand, have been reversing diabetes for decades. Their "miracle cures" result from a simple fact: Given the right nutrients, the body is fully capable of healing itself. Nutritional practioners therefore make sure that the body gets the nutrients it needs, and they make sure that their patients avoid the metabolic poisons that are so prevalent in the American food supply. The result, predictably, is yet another "miracle" that modern medicine can't explain. (That's a sad reflection on medical ignornance. At the very least, one would expect them to understand how such cures work, when they occur.)
Some of the protocols that nutritional practioners advise include:
These protocols and others like them limit sugar, supply chromium to activate insulin, and make the body's cells receptive insulin once again by providing high quality fats. So of course they work!
The trans fats (bad guys) come from:
When the diet is optimal, it still takes about 2 years for the complete healing cycle, because that's how long it takes for the soft tissues of the body to be replaced. So, where do you find *good* fats:
To speed up the healing process, you may also want to consider fasting. A lot of housecleaning goes on during a fast, and many triglycerides (fatty acids) are eliminated. Fasting can speed up the process of eliminating bad fats that have already accumulated. Given a diabetic condition, however, it would be unwise to fast other than in a medically-supervised program that is geared to such undertakings. Such clinics exist. They're worth looking into.
In Raw Food Treatment of Cancer, Kristine Nolfie, M.D., writes:
"Consistent consumption of raw vegetables and fruits has a surprisingly beneficial and speedy effect on diabetes, provided the patient has not taken insulin, or, at most, only small quantities of it for a year or two. It helps also when the patient has taken large doses of insulin for several years, but it takes longer...
"...several raw vegetables contain insulin, especially Jerusalem artichokes. Most vegetables contain in their raw state the precursor of insulin known as INULIN.
"Five chemists and three physicians in America carried out a protracted examination of four thousand diabetics and concluded that only one percent needed insulin. The rest of them recovered on nutrition alone."
--pp. 30..31
A raw plant food, by definition, eliminates 100% of the bad fatty acids from the diet, and supplies the pure and natural fatty acids that are required for health. In addition, they come with what amounts to their own insulin supply. (Again, if you have started taking insulin, it makes sense to find a raw foods health clinic and make the transition under the supervision of a qualified medical practitioner.)
Finally, raw foods and other unprocessed, natural foods supply the chromium needed to potentiate insulin, along with other vitamins and minerals.
Looking at the body from a systems level, it is important to realize that in its millions of years of evolution it has never once had to worry about insulin resistance that results from cells that simply don't respond to it. Nor has it had to worry about inactive insulin, resulting from a lack of chromium.
The body, sensibly enough, monitors the amount of sugar in the blood to determine whether insulin is needed. That happens in the liver. When you think about it. There's no other way for the body to operate. If it monitored insulin, it could keep from creating more when insulin is already present in the blood supply, due to insulin resistance. But then it wouldn't know when sugar arrived, so it wouldn't know when insulin was needed in the first place.
Actually, the liver doesn't even wait to see how much sugar arrives. It expects a certain amount of sugar in the food supply, so it starts secreting insulin when you eat. Based on the amount of food that is eaten, the body secretes a certain amount of insulin. Twenty minutes later, it looks at the blood stream and measures the amount of sugar (not insulin). If there is still sugar in the bloodstream, more insulin is secreted.
In the early stages, this mechanism produces the symptoms of hypoglemcia. After eating, the body may have already produced enough insulin to take the sugar out of the bloodstream, but a lot of the insulin isn't doing anything because it can't find the right cell receptors to bind to. The body, which is measuring sugar levels only, puts out even more insulin. About forty minutes later (an hour or so after eating) there is a big blood sugar drop as the additional insulin keeps removing sugar from the bloodstream.
How this process turns into diabetes is still something of a mystery. But if the condition is correctable through diet, then it is not as simple as a simple failure to produce insulin. Most likely, it occurs when the intake of bad fats goes "over the top".
Recall that the hormones, like the brain and nervous system, are produced from fatty acids -- the good ones, that is. Because the brain and nervous system won't function without them, they get first priority for the good fats. Additional good fats are required to make hormones and other chemical messengers that operate at the cellular level ("eicosanoids"). The remaining fats get built into the cell walls and stored as fat.
If the food supply contains too few of the good fatty acids, hormones like insuin can't be built! (Unlike the cell walls, bad fats won't do.) Because raw plant foods provide insulin or its immediate precursor, that body's manufacturing defect is remedied almost immediately. Over time, then, it appears that the insulin-production capacity can be restored, as well.
A diagnosis of diabetes does not have to be a "death sentence". Nutritional approaches have been very effective.
Copyright © 1999, 2005
by Eric Armstrong. All rights reserved.
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