A Cure for Diabetes (Type 2)

Science news today - a team at the Garvan Institute in Sydney announced they have found a gene implicated in the development of type 2 diabetes following high fat intakes. Kudos to them. The press release ends with speculation about the future development of drugs to target this "to see whether we can protect against or even reverse diabetes in mice." This is pretty typical in most basic medical research in other debilitating disease areas, eg. cancer. What the article doesn't make clear is that type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly a disease of diet and lifestyle, which can be cured today in the majority of cases, with no new drugs and at no great expense.

The solution has been published in top quality, peer-reviewed scientific journals by a number of teams. Some of the most thorough work has been done by Dr Neal Barnard (scroll down for a short video) and colleagues and published in a number of high quality, peer-reviewed journal articles. Some of his latest work has been a randomised, controlled clinical trial comparing a low-fat vegan diet to a "Standard Care" diet, as recommended by the American Diabetes Association (ADA). At the end of 74 weeks, the low-fat vegan group had significantly lower body weight, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and Hb A_1c (a marker for blood sugar level control) than the standard diet group. Furthermore, they were not required to "count calories" and the adherence and acceptability of the vegan diet was comparable to the ADA diet. In less exacting research, ie. not clinical trials, astounding results have been achieved in as little as 26 days of near-vegetarian diet combined with intensive exercise (Barnard, RJ; Jung, T; Inkeles, SB Diabetes Care 1994, 17, 1469). In this case, almost half of insulin-using diabetics came completely off insulin and 140 of 197 people using oral agents discontinued their use. Impressive results, albeit anecdotal, have also been documented in using a "raw food" vegan diet and exercise over a 30 day period.

If I were to wake up one day to find myself type 2 diabetic, I would go on a mostly raw, low-fat vegan diet and instigate a challenging exercise program. The available evidence suggests that I would see dramatic improvements within days and be completely off medication in weeks. Perhaps such a big lifestyle change would require most people to take time off work to implement, but if you had type 2 diabetes before your vacation, and you didn't have it when you went back to work, I'll bet you would view it as holidays well spent!

Here is Dr Neal Barnard talking about reversing type 2 diabetes:



And finally, below is Dr Joel Fuhrman talking about reversing type 2 diabetes through diet. He is another plant-based diet advocate and has a telling story about resistance from pharmaceutical companies.