Sugar in or sugar out?

Type-2 DiabetesType-2 Diabetes Mellitus is an almost totally preventable, avoidable, and, early on, for some a potentially curable condition. The problem is our health services are not set up to prevent it and certainly not to cure it. Instead, they have become fantastically skilled at treating it. Imagine Type-2 is like an overflowing bath. Your diabetes- specialist doctors and nurses choose to deploy fancy syphons and are busy installing high tech’ extra plug holes. In other words, their approach is to bring the bathwater levels down as quickly as possible. They want to empty that sugary bath as rapidly and efficiently as they can. And to do this, they use the only thing they have in their tool kit – drugs. But why, I wonder, does no one do the most simple and obvious thing: just turn off the tap? Just stop pouring the sugar in. I believe that there are three reasons for this. 

• Firstly, the Official Diet advice given to people with Type-2 DiabetesType-2 Diabetes is high-carb, which often makes things worse. It keeps tossing sugary and starchy fuel onto the flames of diabetes, but fails to appreciate the link. Our doctors and nurses diligently adhere to these carb-heavy guidelines; they are pretty much obliged to. And if, or when, Official dietary advice fails to reverse their diabetes, as they usually do, they are then obliged to prescribe drugs to counteract the effects of the very diet they promote. The aim of modern diabetes management is to slow down progression of the condition using medication, not reverse it. This is sad.
• Secondly, because their Official high-carb diet advice is almost always doomed to fail, our medics and nurses have lost confidence in the power of any diet or lifestyle change to heal. This is mad.
• And thirdly, the treatment of diabetes is dominated, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else today, by the use of drugs. Diabetes treatments now consume around 15% of the total UK NHS budget. Diabetes is a pharmaceutical gold-mine. And Big Pharma’ funds much of the medical world’s influential opinion leaders and their major academic departments. Their adverts fund our medical journals. Along with the big food and drink corporations, they also fund many of the learned influential committees. They even fund national charities and support groups. Just about everyone with any power or any influence in the world of diabetes, directly or indirectly, is beholden to them in some way or another, whether they know it or not. And at the same time, the hands of the major drug and food manufacturers keep a very firm and grasping handgrip on the medical world’s funding streams. Big Pharma’ (drugs) and Big Farma’ (agribusiness) have no interest in preventing or curing diabetes. That isn’t their job. Nor do they have the slightest interesting in funding research into diet and lifestyle interventions. That isn’t their job either. Their job is to sell products and generate dividends for their share-holders. For them, Type-2 DiabetesType-2 Diabetes is the goose that just keeps on laying. Follow the money.

This blog is an excerpt from Beating Diabetes the Low-carb Way