Visceral Fat & Diabetes: Reducing Belly Fat

Noticing a little extra fat around your waist? That’s a clear warning sign– belly fat, or visceral fat means that your body is sounding an alarm you shouldn’t ignore. Doing so will increase your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even more weight gain.
Arm yourself with the knowledge to understand the problem with belly fat, and what you can do to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
It’s What You Can’t See That is So Deadly
Your body is programmed to store fat under the skin where you can pinch it. That’s the safest place for it, far away from your organs.
But that programming can get totally messed up.
When that happens, your body has no choice but to quickly grab up extra fat and tuck it away between your organs.
Like a boa constrictor, it wraps itself around your intestines, liver, pancreas, and even your heart. This is called “visceral fat,” and it is very dangerous.1
Each of the cross-sections in the image below shows what belly fat looks like in seven men with the exact same waist girth. The dark areas are organs and muscle. The white areas are fat:
The “very marbled steak” in the lower right hand corner is packed so full of killer visceral fat that you can’t even see the organs.
Skinny On the Outside, Obese On the Inside
Chrumaine is a lovely lady, busy school teacher, and totally devoted to her family.
In the photo to the right, you can see that she’s not morbidly obese. In fact, at 5’3″ and 157 pounds, she doesn’t have a BMI that would concern her doctor too much.
She seems healthy enough, right?
Wrong. That red shirt is hiding dea Continue reading

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Wellthy Therapeutics: Taming diabetes

Abhishek Shah, CEO, Wellthy Therapeutics, aspires to achieve a full-fledged Asia presence in four to five years
Image: Mexy Xavier
Smruti Daru is a woman who juggles many roles: Colleague, mother, daughter, wife. Her waking hours are brimming with tasks and expectations—from preparing meals for her school-going son to stressful assignments at work.
In 2009, when she was 53, Daru was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes— a condition where the body loses its ability to respond to insulin, leading to high blood glucose levels. Unlike with type 1 diabetes, where the patient is administered insulin through injections, type 2 diabetes can usually be managed through diet, exercise and pills, at least initially.
Following the diagnosis, Daru was prescribed medication and advised on the lifestyle changes needed to keep her diabetes in check. However, she found it impossible to tweak her schedule. And before she got accustomed to it, her initial dose of pills had to be doubled and then quadrupled. “I didn’t know what was happening to my body, I felt helpless,” she recalls.
Stories similar to Daru’s have become increasingly common in India. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 54 million type 2 diabetics in India, earning the country the infamous moniker of the ‘diabetes capital of the world’. WHO data shows that diabetes caused 1.5 million deaths globally in 2015, and that number is only increasing. The gravity of the situation clearly demands an approach that goes beyond traditional diagnosis and treatment.
Enter Abhishek Shah, the 34-year-old CEO of Continue reading

Eating less than 1,000 calories a day for up to five months can CURE Type 2 diabetes

A low calorie diet can reverse type 2 diabetes and save the lives of millions of sufferers of the preventable condition, research suggests.
Eating between 825 and 850 calories a day for three to five months put the disease into remission in almost half of patients in a new study.
The Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT), published in The Lancet, looked at almost 300 adults aged 20 to 65 who had been diagnosed with the disease in the past six years.
It showed that participants, who were instructed to slowly reintroduce more food, after one year had lost an average of 10 kilos (22 lbs), and half had maintained remission without antidiabetic medications.
The researchers argue that their findings show that while bariatric surgery can achieve remission for a large number of diabetics, this 'expensive and risky' method is not necessary as diet and exercise alone is 'feasible'.
Restricting calories or fasting is an increasingly popular method of tackling diabetes. The 5:2 diet, aka The Fast Diet, is the best known of the fasts to reverse the disease and was made famous by Dr Michael Mosley.
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Worldwide, the number of people with type 2 diabetes has quadrupled over 35 years, rising from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014, and is expected to climb to 642 million by 2040.
It affects almost one in ten adults in the UK, and costs the NHS around £14 billion a year.
Addressing the 'root cause'
The Newcastle University scientists say that excess calories lead to a fatty liver, which causes the liver to produce too much glucose.
The excess fat is then pas Continue reading

Crash diet found to REVERSE Type 2 diabetes in three months

(Natural News) Type 2 diabetes is one of the greatest health scourges of modern society. The American Diabetes Association reports that close to 10 percent of the American population – or around 30 million people – are currently battling this disease. Diabetes is also one of the leading causes of death, and costs the country around $245 billion annually in direct medical costs and lost productivity.
For years, doctors have claimed that diabetes is an irreversible condition that can only be treated with dangerous chemical medications to control blood sugar levels. On the other hand, complementary health advocates like Natural News founder/editor, Mike Adams, have insisted for years that the condition is reversible through simple lifestyle changes.
Now, an exciting new study led by researchers from Glasgow University and Newcastle University in the U.K., and published in the medical journal The Lancet, has confirmed what Adams has been saying all along: Even advanced type 2 diabetes is entirely reversible through weight loss.
The study, which involved 298 patients with type 2 diabetes, was presented at the International Diabetes Federation congress in Abu Dhabi earlier this month.
Half of the participants were given weight-loss suggestions and left to continue to manage their condition with medication, while the other half were taken off all medications and put on a restrictive 853 calorie per day diet for three months.
A year after the study ended, three quarters of the patients who had been on the restrictive diet were still drug free, and an average of 46 percent were Continue reading

Diabetes: Synthetic beta cells could lead to skin patch treatment

A team of scientists has created synthetic pancreatic beta cells that automatically release insulin when they sense high blood sugar.
In the journal Nature Chemical Biology, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University in Raleigh describe how they developed and tested the synthetic cells.
Senior author Zhen Gu, a professor in biomedical engineering at both universities, and team hope that one day, the cells could be used in a noninvasive skin patch to treat diabetes.
They found that just one injection of the synthetic beta cells kept blood sugar in diabetic mice at normal levels for 5 days.
Diabetes is a disease that develops when the body has problems with using or producing insulin, a hormone that helps cells to take in and convert blood sugar, or glucose, into energy.
The body produces insulin in the pancreas, which is a glandular organ behind the stomach that houses the beta cells that make and release the right amount of the hormone, depending on glucose levels.
Need for noninvasive insulin delivery
Around 6 million of the 30 million people in the United States with diabetes manage the disease using insulin treatments, either by regular injections or with infusion pumps.
Over the years, there have been attempts to develop a pill form of insulin treatment, but they have encountered problems — including the fact that the body's strong digestive system breaks down the large molecules in the pill before they make it to the bloodstream.
It is also possible to treat some cases of diabetes with transplanted pancreatic Continue reading