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The Diabetes Diet Introduction Part 2Articles - Dr. Bernstein Shares His Insights Richard K. Bernstein, M.D., F.A.C.E., F.A.C.N., C.W.S., was working as an engineer, but his diabetes was killing him. He took an engineer's prospective on diabetes and figured out a way to reverse his impending complications. Read Part 2 of How I Discovered The Low-Carbohydrate Diet And Saved My Own Life to learn how you can save your patients life.The following is an excerpt from “The Diabetes Diet” Part 2 of 2 The Diabetes Diet The Diabetes Diet Introduction
Three years of blood sugar testing went by, and although I was aware of my blood sugars levels daily, I was still the proverbial “98-pound weakling,” wracked with complications. I was eating the same food and taking the same medication for my symptoms — still not connecting the dots between the foods that I ate and my blood sugar roller coaster. I was more than frustrated. First and foremost was the life and death issue — by the measure of kidney disease, I had only a few years left — but there was also an intellectual issue. I knew there was something more. I suspected that the answer to reversing diabetic complications would be exercise. I ordered a search of the medical literature on diabetic complications and exercise. In the early 1970s this was not a matter of searching keywords on Google. It was more like going to the library and looking up a subject in the catalog of periodicals, then examining the results on microfilm. Except the information I was looking for wasn’t so readily available. I had to send away for a search of the literature. What I found when I got the results of my $75 search was that my hypothesis was wrong. There was nothing on exercise helping with diabetic complications. So — as an engineer — I had left my hypothesis in serious doubt. But I discovered what the answer was. The results of my search, which took weeks to arrive, were several studies on blood sugar normalization in animals, and how it, not exercise, helped reverse diabetic complications. If I had a eureka moment, this was it. When I showed these results to my doctor, he was not impressed. If he was even intrigued, he did not show it. “Animals are different,” was his response. Anyway, blood sugar normalization, he told me, was impossible in humans. So I took up my quest alone. I spent the next year checking my blood sugars 5–8 times each day. Every few days I’d make a small, experimental change in my diet or insulin regimen to see what the effect would be on my blood sugar. If a change brought an improvement, I’d retain it. If it made blood sugars worse, I’d discard it. Invariably I found that the foods I had been told to emphasize — carbohydrates —were those that caused rapid and substantial rises in blood sugar. Those I had been told to avoid — protein and fats —were the ones that had a much less profound and rapid effect. On a graph my blood sugar swings on the high carbohydrate diet would look like sharp peaks and valleys. I discovered that with a low-carbohydrate diet, they were much closer to a somewhat wavy line. I also discovered that what had been true in the animal studies was true for me: my complications began to ease. Despite the disdain of my doctor for my tinkering, the protein disappeared from my urine. Other complications gradually evaporated. In subsequent years even complications that I assumed would never reverse have done so. Within a year I had refined my insulin and diet regimen to the point that I had essentially normal blood sugars around the clock. After years of chronic fatigue and debilitating complications, almost overnight I started to gain weight, and at last I was able to build muscle as readily as nondiabetics. People commented that my gray complexion was gone. Although I had been conditioned to fear eating fats and protein — the medical professionals told me that was guaranteed to send my cholesterol level through the roof — it turned out that my cholesterol had by then not only dropped but was at the low end of the normal range. My insulin requirements dropped to about one-third of what they had been a year earlier. With the subsequent development of human insulin, my dosage dropped to less than one-sixth of the original. In a TV movie, my doctor would try other patients on the same diet, they’d have the same results, and within a few hundred frames of film the whole of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) would have its own epiphany and do an about-face. Diabetic complications would evaporate, and within a few years every diabetic would be doing what I had done. Someone would win a Nobel Prize for medicine. Of course, that’s not the way the world works. I found myself in a quandary: everything I had been taught was wrong, and I could prove it — but nobody was listening. My doctor wasn’t interested, so I wrote a paper on my findings and even distributed it to many medical professionals, but it was uniformly ignored. All of my attempts to publish my discoveries in medical journals were met with ridicule by the editors. Nineteen seventy-six — the year of my death —came and went. I believed the only way I could beat the establishment was to join it, so at age forty-five I went to medical school. When I finished medical school and went into practice, I assumed that I would be treating type 1 diabetics like myself. Again I did not quite have a crystal ball. The vast majority of my patients were type 2 diabetics, people whose problem was not that they couldn’t gain weight, but that they couldn’t lose it. I found, however, that the program that I had been continuously developing for people like me worked equally well for them. Now, nearly forty years since I became certain my days were numbered, I am doing fine. I did not cure my diabetes, but I have what a cure will provide: normalized blood sugars. It’s ironic to think that if and when there is a cure for diabetes, I and those who have used my program will likely prove to be healthier than many of those who someday are cured. If I had never had to study my disease and all the factors that contribute to it or alleviate it, I would never have discovered how damaging high blood sugar or high insulin levels can be. I might have remained one of those people wolfing down a muffin or bagel for breakfast or picking at the bread basket on the restaurant table. Even with diabetes, I’ve found much better health than many nondiabetics with carb-heavy diets, and you can too. When I hear diabetics longing to “be normal” again, they’re most often not talking about being healthy — they can have that, even with diabetes — but about not having to worry about what they eat. I don’t worry about what I eat, I enjoy it. There are many things that you can eat —many foods you have probably been conditioned to fear as “heart-attack food” or are now confused about because of divergent views on what low carbohydrate really means. Based on years of self-experimentation, I can clear up that confusion. As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of diet books. Most are based on
a promise of weight loss that is never achieved. Some low-carbohydrate diet
books cause their adherents to lose weight too quickly then gain it back, with
the too frequent result that they end up fatter and less healthy. Although you may not notice it, much of the “science” that underlies various diet programs is shoddy. Doctors —who should know better — toss around terms like “reactive hypoglycemia” without apparently any real understanding. It is all too easy to accept popular ideas at face value without ever really examining them in depth. This is where I differ. For many years I accepted the medical orthodoxy, and it almost killed me. I’ve long had a saying: “What works, works.” When a new idea comes along, if I think it will stand up to scrutiny, I’ll try it out on myself. If it works, wonderful. If not, I discard it. Whether you’re overweight, obese, diabetic, or simply looking for the healthiest way of eating, there is no better diet than this one. When I prescribe this diet to my patients, what I am prescribing are parameters, within which patients can choose what to eat. Most diet books will lead you by the nose — one size fits all — unless the book has a gimmick to it, like metabolic or blood type or ethnic origin. Even then you are likely to be led by the nose. With the Diabetes Diet you make the decisions on what you are going to eat and, within guidelines, how much. With this book you will create your meal plan. It’s simple, and I think
you’ll agree with me that being energetic, healthy, and slim are certainly
preferable to lethargy, chronic pain, and a slow death — regardless of
whether you have diabetes. We would like to thank the publisher Little Brown and Company and Dr. Richard K. Bernstein, for allowing us to provide excerpts from The Diabetes Diet. Copyright © 2005 by Richard K. Bernstein, M.D. Author’s Note For information on how you can purchase Diabetes
Diet, go to www.Diabetes-solution.net "Getting to the Heart of Diabetes" is a guide to understanding
CVD, diabetes and insulin resistance. This is a small guide with 4 chapters,
Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, Controlling Diabetes and Warning Signs for heart
attacks and strokes. After reading the booklet, your patient can take the next
step by putting their new knowledge into action. As part of the program patients
receive the following free of charge…………. Other Products from Dr. Richard K. Bernstein.
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Con’t
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