A Prescription For A Plant-Based Diet Can Help Reverse Diabetes

A Prescription for a Plant-Based Diet Can Help Reverse Diabetes

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Chances are good that you have diabetes or know someone who does. Even if you don’t, you’re paying for the care of millions of people with diabetes through your taxes. It’s a disease that affects people of all backgrounds, income levels, and, increasingly, ages, and it costs our country nearly a quarter trillion dollars every year — that’s well over the total yearly revenue of electronics giant Apple.
New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 29 million Americans have diabetes and another 86 million have prediabetes. Hardest hit are Native Americans, followed by African Americans and Latinos. They are at far greater risk for heart attacks, blindness, amputations, kidney failure, painful nerve symptoms, and loss of a decade of life compared with those who do not have the disease.
But a recent report has found that one simple prescription could help reverse diabetes, improve blood sugar, and lower weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. It could allow the 115 million Americans with diabetes or prediabetes to dramatically reduce their medications or get off them entirely. And all this is possible, the analysis found, not with a new magic pill, but with tried-and-true, simple changes to diet.
A team of researchers from the United States and Japan, including the Physicians Committee’s Susan Levin, MS, RD and myself, published a new meta-analysis showing that a plant-based diet significantly improves diabetes management.
Combining the results of six prior studies, we found that a plant-based diet boost Continue reading

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Diabetes

Diabetes is the result of the body not making enough insulin to keep blood glucose (sugar) levels within the normal range. If the glucose in a person’s blood is too high, over time it can lead to damage of multiple body systems, including the feet.
There are three main types of diabetes:
Type 1 diabetes: is a chronic condition where the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone needed to allow sugar (glucose) to enter cells to make energy for the body.
Type 2 diabetes: (adult-onset or noninsulin-dependent diabetes) is a chronic condition that affects the way your body metabolises sugar (glucose), an important source of fuel for the body.
Gestational diabetes: is a condition where women, without previously diagnosed diabetes, show high blood glucose (blood sugar) levels during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes is caused by faulty insulin responses.
The effect of diabetes on the feet
Some people with diabetes develop complications due to their diabetes. Two of the common foot related complications of diabetes are:
Damage to nerves (neuropathy)
Damage to blood vessels (vascular disease)
Diabetic Neuropathy
People with diabetes sometimes develop nerve damage to their feet which may result in either whole or part of their feet becoming numb and insensitive to pain or injury.
If you have diabetic neuropathy in your feet you are:
More likely to get an injury AND less likely to know to get help for the injury early on.
Diabetic Vascular Disease
Diabetes can cause the lining of blood vessels to become thickened meaning that less blood is able to travel through the blood vess Continue reading

Father Devises A 'Bionic Pancreas' To Help Son With Diabetes

An alarm sounds on Ed Damiano's night stand in the middle of the night. He jumps out of bed and rushes into his son's room next door.
His son, David, has Type 1 diabetes. The 15-year-old sleeps hooked up to a monitor that sounds an alarm when his blood sugar gets too low. If it drops sharply, David could die in his sleep.
"The fear is that there's going to be this little cold limb, and I screwed up. It's all on me," Damiano says.
But when he touches David's hand, he's warm. He's OK. Damiano says, "That's the moment of relief."
The father has been doing this night after night since his son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 11 months old.
But Damiano has done more than nightly monitoring to try to protect his son. He's an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, and has shifted the focus of his career to developing a better way to care for people with Type 1 diabetes.
"It's intimidating when you start considering the list of things that influence blood sugar," he says. "Emotions and physical activity, if you're healthy. You can't possibly take into account and balance all those things. And sometimes you get it right. And often you get it wrong."
Damiano has developed a system he calls a "bionic pancreas" designed to help people better manage their blood sugar. He's racing to get it approved by the Food and Drug Administration before his son leaves for college in three years.
In tests with 52 teenagers and adults, the device did a better job controlling blood sugar than the subjects typically did on their own. The results were reported S Continue reading

Betalin Aims To End Insulin Injections By Treating Type 1 Diabetes With Cell Transplants

Of the 382 million people who have diabetes, only five to 10 percent have Type 1 Diabetes. However, unlike like Type 2 Diabetes, which can be prevented with regular exercise and a healthy diet, Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Usually diagnosed in childhood, Type 1 Diabetes is traditionally treated with daily insulin injections, and though some prick-less therapies have surfaced, they have not achieved long-term insulin independence.
But Israeli biotech startup Betalin Therapeutics may change that, making insulin injections a thing of the past.
Functioning as a gatekeeper, insulin is a hormone that enables sugar from consumed food to enter cells in the body. Without insulin, sugar builds up in the bloodstream, where it can cause life-threatening complications. Anyone who has Type 1 Diabetes needs lifelong insulin therapy, administered through daily shots or a pump because insulin typically cannot be taken orally due to interfering stomach enzymes.
SEE ALSO: Israelis, Palestinians Join Forces To Explore Local Flowers To Combat Cancer, Diabetes
However, the problem with both modes of treatment is that patients must monitor their blood sugar levels and administer the correct dose of insulin throughout the day. And even the most vigilant monitoring doesn’t prevent a sudden spike or drop in blood sugar levels. In other words, patients and doctors can only treat Type 1 Diabetes reactively.
Some researchers have been looking for a more proactive and automated approach, namely through transplanting healthy pancreatic Continue reading

What About Type 1 Diabetes?

You hear a lot about type 2 diabetes on this and other sites in the community. It’s easy to see why: type 2 diabetes is the “lifestyle” diabetes, the preventable one, the one that “doesn’t have to happen” and that you can “fix if you just dial in the food.” All true, for the most part. Whether you’re in the camp that thinks it’s red meat or egg yolks causing it, or fatty liver from excess PUFAs and fructose, the point is that people commonly accept the idea that T2D is preventable and manageable with the right diet and lifestyle. But what about type 1 diabetes? Why don’t we hear so much about it?
First of all, it’s rarer than T2D. For better or for worse, there simply isn’t as large an audience for stuff about type 1 diabetes. Second, type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease. In T1D, the pancreatic beta cells that produce insulin in the body are destroyed by an autoimmune attack. Left untreated without exogenous infusions of insulin, T1D results in severely elevated blood sugar and, eventually, death. Autoimmune diseases are confusing, tricky, and hard to manage. I mean, your body is attacking itself and preventing a completely necessary physiological function – insulin release! It’s not something you want to mess around with. It’s not a subject you can tackle lightly.
And I think that’s why people have steered clear of making any absolute recommendations regarding T1D and Primal or paleo. That said, we can make some general recommendations, I think, that won’t cause many problems and can even help solve some of them (with a doctor� Continue reading