Diabetes… what the?

Managing and living with diabetes is not easy.  One must monitor their dietary intake much closer than the average person.  Adjusting to a “diabetic safe” diet is quite a shock to most people, but the real shocking thing is that a diabetic safe diet is really a rather simple and healthy diet that is not far off a recommended eating plan.

Diabetes is not a genetic disease or something that just happens.  It is a disease caused by poor nutrition.  There is no magic pill or potion, although some substances have been known to support the body in healing itself.  The answer lies in nutrition both in treatment and prevention.

High sugar and processed fats predominate in the SAD (Standard American Diet).   This diet has a devastating effect on our insulin and leptin sensitivity, our hormone balance, and our physiologic stress (and thus inflammation) levels.  Diabetes seems to be a disease of miscommunication between brain and liver and fat cells.  The communicatory substances in play are insulin and leptin. We know that insulins’ role is to reduce blood sugar by shuttling sugar to the liver, and if you lose the ability to handle the glucose you intake, insulin resistance followes. Leptin is relatively unknown to most people but it has far ranging communication between the brain and the liver and individual fat cells. Leptin is responsible for telling your brain when you’re full and how much stored “fat energy” you have available.  Errors in leptin signaling would therefore lead to calorie over consumption, dangerous spikes in insulin, excessive fat storage, and lots of global inflammation.  The answer to this specific issue of diabetes seems to stem from how we effectively keep up communication in our bodies and stay properly sensitized to leptin and thus insulin.  This proper signaling is protected by dietary intake of good healthy fats, whole raw vegetables and an absence of simple processed foods.

Preventing, managing, and treating diabetes is as easy as making healthy choices in our diets, removing processed foods and consuming more whole, raw, live foods.  Lean animal proteins and fats help to balance our macronutrient intake in a hormonally functional way.  Generally, eating this way tends to eliminate much of the food choices that have led to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.  Eating whole, fresh and live with lean animal proteins means that there is automatically an absence of processed foods (fast foods, microwave dinners, sandwich meats, etc), excessive sugars (soda, sweets, high fructose corn syrup) and allergenic grains (wheat, barley, oats, etc).  Consuming many simple sugars from processed products means eating unnatural quantities of rapidly absorbing sugars which puts a strain on our hormonal balance affecting insulin sensitivity, fat storage, stress hormone production, brain chemistry, and our digestive capacity.

Preventing diabetes is really not the issue we have to focus on, rather it is returning to a healthy lifestyle consisting of raw whole foods, good choices in lean animal protein, exercise, sunlight and good mental hygiene.  These steps not only lead to a road of diabetes prevention, but also many diseases plaguing us today.