Diabetes prevention and Reversal – T2D31
Diabetes associations repeatedly tell the story that type 2 diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease. It is inevitable, like getting older. As much as we would like to stop the process, it is impossible. There is no hope to change its course. It cannot be prevented and cannot be reversed. But multiple studies and...
X Marks the Spot – T2D 30
Triglycerides and coronary disease Gaizano et al. Circulation. 1997;96:2520-2525 Why should we care about high triglycerides? Doctors always obsess about LDL cholesterol and barely a word is heard about triglycerides, yet high blood triglycerides strongly and independently predict cardiovascular disease, almost as powerfully as LDL. Hypertriglyceridemia increases the risk of heart disease by as much...
Hyperinsulinemia and Hypertriglyceridemia T2D 29
The liver lies at the nexus of metabolism and nutrient flow, particularly carbohydrates and proteins. Situated immediately downstream from absorptive surface of the intestines, those nutrients enter the blood in the portal circulation and pass directly to the liver. The major exception is dietary fat, which is absorbed as chylomicrons directly into the lymphatic system...
Fructose, Fatty Liver, and Insulin Resistance – T2D 28
Fructose and fatty liver Fructose is even more strongly linked to obesity and diabetes than glucose. From a nutritional standpoint, neither fructose nor glucose contains essential nutrients. As a sweetener, both are similar. Yet fructose is particularly malevolent to human health compared to glucose due to its unique metabolism within the body. Glucose and fructose...
Fructose1 – T2D 27
The Deadly Effects of Fructose In 2009, Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco delivered a ninety minute lecture entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”. It was posted on YouTube as part of the university’s medical education series. Then a funny thing happened. It went viral. It was not a...
Insulin resistance protects against…insulin! T2D 26
Virtually all doctors agree that elevated insulin resistance is very bad for human health, being the root cause of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. So, if it is so bad, why do we all develop it in the first place? How can such a mal-adaptive process be so ubiquitous? As of 2015, over 50%...
Fatty Liver – T2D 25
Dr. Alfred Frohlich from the University of Vienna first began to unravel the neuro-hormonal basis of obesity in 1890. He described a young boy with the sudden onset of obesity who was eventually diagnosed with a lesion in the hypothalamus area of the brain. It would be later confirmed that hypothalamic damage resulted in intractable...
Understanding Joseph Kraft’s Diabetes In Situ- T2D 24
Joseph Kraft is a medical doctor who measured over 14,000 oral glucose tolerance tests in his lifetime. This is a standard test to measure the blood glucose response to a standardized amount of glucose over 2 hours. The difference is that he measured over 5 hours and included blood insulin levels. A summary of his...
Hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance T2D 22
Insulin causes insulin resistance Laura was only 25 when she was diagnosed with an insulinoma, a rare tumor that secretes abnormally large amounts of insulin in the absence of any other significant disease. This forces blood glucose very low causing recurrent episodes of hypoglycemia. Laura was constantly hungry and soon began to gain weight. As...
The ‘X’ Factor – T2D 21
Searching for the X factor Hyperinsulinemia plays the dominant role in provoking obesity and fatty liver disease, but what causes it? Insulin is intimately related to our diet, so that was naturally the first place to look. Highly refined and processed carbohydrates, such as sugars, flour, bread, pasta, muffins, donuts, rice and potatoes are well...
Diabesity – T2D 18
The term diabesity is the unification of the words ‘diabetes’, referring to type 2, and ‘obesity’. It is a wonderful word because it is at once able to convey that they are truly one and the same disease. It is incredibly descriptive and evocative in the same way as the word ‘bromance’. Strange as it...
End Organ Damage – T2D 17
Hyperglycemia may be the hallmark of diabetes, but does not cause most of the morbidity. Blood glucose is fairly easily controlled by medication, but this does not prevent the long-term complications. Despite blood glucose control, damage occurs to virtually every organ system. It would be difficult to find a single organ system NOT affected by...
