Pills Or Paleo? Preventing And Reversing Type 2 Diabetes

Pills or Paleo? Preventing and Reversing Type 2 Diabetes

The incidence of type 2 diabetes continues to skyrocket, but current drug treatments are inadequate and potentially dangerous. The Paleo diet offers a safe and effective alternative.
This article is the first in an ongoing series that compares a Paleo-based diet and lifestyle with medication for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. Stay tuned for future articles on high blood pressure, heartburn/GERD, autoimmune disease, skin disorders, and more.
Insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. In the U.S. today, someone dies from diabetes-related causes every ten seconds, and recent reports suggest that one-third of people born in 2010 will develop diabetes at some point in their lives.
Find out how the Paleo diet can prevent and even reverse diabetes naturally.
What is particularly horrifying about this statistic is that many of those who develop diabetes will be kids. Type 2 diabetes used to be a disease of the middle-aged and elderly. No longer. A recent Yale study indicated that nearly one in four kids between the ages of four and eighteen have pre-diabetes. And some regional studies show that the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults has jumped from less than 5 percent before 1994 to 50 percent in 2004.
It’s clear that type 2 diabetes is one of the most significant and dangerous health problems of our times, and we desperately need safe and effective treatments that won’t bankrupt our health care system. With this in mind, let’s compare two possible ways of addressing type 2 diabetes: Continue reading

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Anti-Stress Compound Reduces Obesity and Diabetes Risk

Summary: A protein associated with anxiety and depression has been found to act as a link between the stress regulatory system and metabolic processes, research report.
Source: Max Planck Institute.
For the first time, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich could prove that a stress protein found in muscle has a diabetes promoting effect. This finding could pave the way to a completely new treatment approach.
For some time, researchers have known that the protein FKBP51 is associated with depression and anxiety disorders. It is involved in the regulation of the stress system – when the system does not function properly; mental disorders may develop. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry have discovered a new, surprising role for this protein: It acts as a molecular link between the stress regulatory system and metabolic processes in the body.
“FKBP51 influences a signaling cascade in muscle tissue, which with excessive calorie intake leads to the development of glucose intolerance, i.e., the key indicator of diabetes type 2,” project leader Mathias Schmidt summarizes. An unhealthy diet, rich in fat means stress for the body. If FKBP51 is increasingly produced in the muscle it leads to reduced absorption of glucose – as a result, diabetes and obesity may develop.
If FKBP51 is blocked, diabetes will not develop, even if too many calories are consumed or the body is still stressed. Less FKBP51 in the muscle tissue means reduced glucose intolerance and thus maintenance of normal metabolism.
If FKBP51 is blocked, diabetes wi Continue reading

The Global Diabetes Epidemic, Brought to You by Global Development

The link between economic growth and the worldwide diabetes epidemic, explained
Diners in Shanghai eat at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. (Aly Song/Reuters)
As globalization exports our culture across the world, it also spreads our health problems. For much of the 20th century, a person's likelihood to develop type-2 diabetes depended as much on the wealth of their nation as their biology. Those living in the developed world survived to old age and eventually succumbed to "diseases of affluence": cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. In contrast, undernourishment, violence, and communicable diseases ravaged the health of residents of developing countries.
And this is the way things remain in the developed world: even in poor parts of the United States, almost no one dies of tuberculosis. But in low- and middle-income countries, the distinction fades. The "diseases of affluence" have embedded themselves in communities anything but affluent. Now, cholera strikes next door to cancer; the malnourished and diabetic share a roof.
In this new landscape of health in the developing world, the impact of diabetes is momentous. Since 1980, the number of diabetics worldwide has ballooned from 152 million to between 285 and 347 million today. Of these, three-quarters live in the developing world, where diabetes afflicts more than six times as many people as HIV. Why, if infectious diseases persist and life expectancies remain low, has diabetes taken such a toll on the health of the impoverished?
One explanation relies on a trio of social forces: aging population, urbanization, a Continue reading

Reversing Type 2 Diabetes with Nutritional Ketosis

Virta is a science-based online specialty medical clinic using continuous remote monitoring and intensive coaching to help our patients reverse type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. A unique contributor to our success in this is harnessing and sustaining the metabolic benefits of nutritional ketosis. Admittedly, reversing diabetes is a rather bold goal. By way of contrast, the American Diabetes Association defines type 2 diabetes as a progressive disease whose course at best can be slowed by lifestyle change and medication. Based upon solid science—some old and some new—we beg to differ. Perhaps it’s time for a paradigm change.
There are few times in the lives of medical scientists where we have the opportunity to change the course of a major medical disease; and even fewer cases where we actually succeed in doing so.
In 1920, Banting’s discovery that injected insulin could control type 1 diabetes (T1D) was such an event. As a result, over the last century, millions of people with T1D have achieved long and productive lives; whereas before 1920 most of them would have succumbed to this insulin-deficiency disease within less than a year.
Type 2 diabetes (T2D), on the other hand, is a very different disease that affects hundreds of millions of people. It responds very poorly to injected insulin. Whereas T1D patients cannot make insulin, people with T2D typically make lots of insulin but are resistant to insulin’s effects across a variety of cellular functions. Despite these facts having been known for 5 decades, we are taught that the core components of T2D management ar Continue reading

Diabetes Type 3c?

Little-known diabetes type—caused by pancreas-related problems—is often misdiagnosed and mistreated a new UK study finds
It’s not Type 1…and it’s not Type 2. When researchers from the UK’s University of Surrey checked the health records of 2.3 million adults for a new study published in the November issue of Diabetes Care, they uncovered more cases than expected of a little-known blood sugar problem: Diabetes type 3c. And most were misdiagnosed, meaning people with “3c” may not have gotten the best treatment.
Type 3c is “diabetes that acts differently,” according to study co-author Andrew McGovern, a research fellow at the University of Exeter and honorary clinical researcher at the University of Surrey. It’s caused by damage to the pancreas—the gland that contains insulin-producing islet cells—from inflammation (pancreatitis), surgery or cancer. The damage knocks out some, but not all, islet cells, reducing insulin levels in the body. In contrast, type 1 diabetes is triggered by an immune-system attack that knocks out virtually all of a person’s islet cells and type 2 happens when the pancreas can’t make enough insulin to overcome insulin resistance.
The study looked at new cases of diabetes. It found 559 people with probable type 3c. It was more common than new type 1 diabetes in adults (354 had that type), which surprised the researchers. More concerning: 88% with type 3c were misdiagnosed as type 2s. That’s a problem, because conventional type 2 drugs that boost insulin sensitivity and insulin production may not work well for 3cs. They we Continue reading