Here is a rather remarkable story about a man who turned 90 years old. He was diagnosed as a type I diabetic at the age of 5, so he has spent the past 85 years as a type I diabetic. How did he manage his health for so long?
Like Richard Bernstein (who is 77 and was diagnosed as a type I when he was 12), he manages his type I diabetes by following a low carb diet. So not only do low carb diets help with type II diabetes, they can also help type I diabetics live a longer and healthier life.
Showing posts with label Bernstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernstein. Show all posts
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
CWOPO
Conventional Wisdom or Prevailing Opinion (CWOPO) has really let me down in recent months. I have learned that salt restriction may actually be dangerous, contrary to what we have always been told. The idea that cholesterol causes heart disease has been debunked for years now, but the USDA still issues food guidelines that assume it is true.
Soy is supposed to be the new health super food (and it's in everything we eat that is processed--just read the labels). Yet I am discovering that soy is a very dangerous food, and that giving soy formula to infants is like giving them birth control pills.
We are told to do cardiovascular exercise, and then learn that it may actually cause heart disease.
My daughter has educated me about natural child birth and the benefits of using a nurse midwife (see the movie, The Business of Being Born on Netflix or Amazon Prime). Naturally, this movie upset the AMA.
We are told to have regular physical exams, then we are told that annual physicals don't do much for us.
The American Diabetes Association approved diet is heavy on carbs, yet these same carbs are causing blood sugar spikes. Don't these so-called professionals know this? Dr. Bernstein takes the ADA to task for its 2008 guidelines that are problematic for diabetics.
Last year, I had a scare with rheumatoid arthritis (fortunately for me, it was merely reactive arthritis), and all the conventional treatments are pretty scary, not to mention expensive. Yet there is a simple, safe, inexpensive, medically proven alternative to the other expensive and dangerous rheumatoid arthritis treatments. And this treatment is shunned by rheumatologists and the medical establishment.
I am now starting to question a lot of what I have been told to do by medical authorities. CWOPO is often seriously flawed and out of date, in my opinion. I have discovered that evidence based medicine is not usually practiced, though it should be. CWOPO is what is practiced, and it is very hard to change, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.
I am learning that if it is my health problem, I must take ownership of the problem and do the research about what to do. This is what I have done with the type II diabetes, what I did when I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis, and what I have done with my weight loss strategy. I will not merely passively accept what an M.D. tells me in the future.
Soy is supposed to be the new health super food (and it's in everything we eat that is processed--just read the labels). Yet I am discovering that soy is a very dangerous food, and that giving soy formula to infants is like giving them birth control pills.
We are told to do cardiovascular exercise, and then learn that it may actually cause heart disease.
My daughter has educated me about natural child birth and the benefits of using a nurse midwife (see the movie, The Business of Being Born on Netflix or Amazon Prime). Naturally, this movie upset the AMA.
We are told to have regular physical exams, then we are told that annual physicals don't do much for us.
The American Diabetes Association approved diet is heavy on carbs, yet these same carbs are causing blood sugar spikes. Don't these so-called professionals know this? Dr. Bernstein takes the ADA to task for its 2008 guidelines that are problematic for diabetics.
Last year, I had a scare with rheumatoid arthritis (fortunately for me, it was merely reactive arthritis), and all the conventional treatments are pretty scary, not to mention expensive. Yet there is a simple, safe, inexpensive, medically proven alternative to the other expensive and dangerous rheumatoid arthritis treatments. And this treatment is shunned by rheumatologists and the medical establishment.
I am now starting to question a lot of what I have been told to do by medical authorities. CWOPO is often seriously flawed and out of date, in my opinion. I have discovered that evidence based medicine is not usually practiced, though it should be. CWOPO is what is practiced, and it is very hard to change, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.
I am learning that if it is my health problem, I must take ownership of the problem and do the research about what to do. This is what I have done with the type II diabetes, what I did when I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis, and what I have done with my weight loss strategy. I will not merely passively accept what an M.D. tells me in the future.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Book Recommendations
That Nice Girl I Married and our daughter who is visiting from Utah took off for the weekend with a bunch of women in our ward, so I had a lot of time to read, and read I did. I read two books on diabetes that I can now highly recommend.
The first is Blood Sugar 101 by Jenny Ruhl. Jenny Ruhl also has a web site by the same name, but I found the book much more accessible. She advocates the low carb diet and gives specific blood sugar guidelines to strive for. Her book lists all of the possible drugs to treat type II diabetes, and the strengths and drawbacks of each drug. Perhaps the most useful part of the book was the section on physicians. She deftly describes physician attitudes towards diabetes and suggests that if your physician doesn't live up to a list of criteria, it's time to get a new doctor. She made me realize that my doctor, an internist, is out of date and out of touch with type II diabetes. I need a new doctor. She also mentioned how a type II diabetic who actively manages and controls the disease needs a letter signed by your doctor about your treatment plan, in case you are ever hospitalized, as they will put you on the insane high carb, low fat diet that is the exact opposite of what you need. Plus take away your diabetes management tools (blood glucose meter, drugs, insulin) while you are in the hospital and, Because They Know Better, treat you the way they always treat diabetes. Which is to say, very poorly.
The second book I read was Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars. A very interesting, if somewhat dogmatic book about the management of type I or type II diabetes. Unlike other books, this one strives to get you to normal blood sugar levels, the type that non-diabetics routinely achieve. This means HgA1C levels in the 4.2 to 5.0 range. His solutions work, though he did come across as a bit insistent and dogmatic ("use this chart and these abbreviations in this way....") but I learned a tremendous amount about managing the disease, the drugs used to treat it, insulin therapy, exercise, and diet. He, too, recommends a low carb diet for the management of both types of diabetes. His recommendations boil down using a blood glucose meter aggressively and following as many of the following four steps as it takes to achieve normal blood sugars:
1. Follow a low carb diet (and lose weight). For some, this may be enough to normalize blood sugars.
2. Get plenty of anaerobic exercise, mostly resistance training (weight lifting).
3. If the first two aren't enough to manage type II diabetes, use drugs
4. If the first three aren't enough, use a consistent, low dose of insulin
The book has tremendous details for each of the steps mentioned above.
After reading the two books, I was left with one big question: why didn't any of the physicians I have used over the past ten years know this information? I have consistently been given the wrong information about treating type II diabetes. How can a non-M.D. like Jenny Ruhl, who also writes bodice ripper romance novels (under the pen name Jenny Brown), know so much more about managing the disease than any doctor I have used?
The first is Blood Sugar 101 by Jenny Ruhl. Jenny Ruhl also has a web site by the same name, but I found the book much more accessible. She advocates the low carb diet and gives specific blood sugar guidelines to strive for. Her book lists all of the possible drugs to treat type II diabetes, and the strengths and drawbacks of each drug. Perhaps the most useful part of the book was the section on physicians. She deftly describes physician attitudes towards diabetes and suggests that if your physician doesn't live up to a list of criteria, it's time to get a new doctor. She made me realize that my doctor, an internist, is out of date and out of touch with type II diabetes. I need a new doctor. She also mentioned how a type II diabetic who actively manages and controls the disease needs a letter signed by your doctor about your treatment plan, in case you are ever hospitalized, as they will put you on the insane high carb, low fat diet that is the exact opposite of what you need. Plus take away your diabetes management tools (blood glucose meter, drugs, insulin) while you are in the hospital and, Because They Know Better, treat you the way they always treat diabetes. Which is to say, very poorly.
The second book I read was Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars. A very interesting, if somewhat dogmatic book about the management of type I or type II diabetes. Unlike other books, this one strives to get you to normal blood sugar levels, the type that non-diabetics routinely achieve. This means HgA1C levels in the 4.2 to 5.0 range. His solutions work, though he did come across as a bit insistent and dogmatic ("use this chart and these abbreviations in this way....") but I learned a tremendous amount about managing the disease, the drugs used to treat it, insulin therapy, exercise, and diet. He, too, recommends a low carb diet for the management of both types of diabetes. His recommendations boil down using a blood glucose meter aggressively and following as many of the following four steps as it takes to achieve normal blood sugars:
1. Follow a low carb diet (and lose weight). For some, this may be enough to normalize blood sugars.
2. Get plenty of anaerobic exercise, mostly resistance training (weight lifting).
3. If the first two aren't enough to manage type II diabetes, use drugs
4. If the first three aren't enough, use a consistent, low dose of insulin
The book has tremendous details for each of the steps mentioned above.
After reading the two books, I was left with one big question: why didn't any of the physicians I have used over the past ten years know this information? I have consistently been given the wrong information about treating type II diabetes. How can a non-M.D. like Jenny Ruhl, who also writes bodice ripper romance novels (under the pen name Jenny Brown), know so much more about managing the disease than any doctor I have used?
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