Always intrigued by mainstream media articles that promise “cures” for chronic disease, when I saw the link on MSN last week for an article detailing a “cure” for Type II diabetes, of course I had to read it.
The ever-hopeful part of me thought perhaps this time they got it right. That the article would be about the importance of diet exercise in managing this insidious disease. Maybe it would even detail a new way of helping diabetics make better food choices. Or ,*gasp* detail strategies for identifying these patients earlier, when diet exercise are more effective treatment protocols.
However, what I read nearly made me fall out of my chair.
The supposed, new “cure” for Type II diabetes is bariatric surgery.
Uh, does this sound barbaric to anyone else? “You have Type II diabetes, so we’re going to open you up, staple your stomach so that you can barely eat, severely disrupt your body’s digestive process so you become protein vitamin deficient causing your body to waste away and everything will be all better!” That’s not even taking into account the common and often horrendous side effects and complications of the surgery.
A further consideration is the cost. No wonder health care is so expensive in this country when we are recommending procedures that cost into the tens of thousands of dollars. Sure, the cost would be justified if that were the only solution, but its not.
The simple, but not so elegant truth, is that food is the cause of Type II diabetes and so must the remedy be.
Type II diabetes is not a disease that happens overnight or comes out of the middle of no where. Currently, the standard for diagnosing diabetes is two consecutive blood glucose readings of 120 or higher. The normal range for blood glucose is 85-100. However, measures of blood glucose alone can’t reliably tell us if diabetes is developing because glucose levels can be effected by many things including what you ate recently and what your stress level may have been when your blood was drawn.
Blood sugar goes hand-in-hand with blood fats, namely measures of your cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL and LDL. This is because high levels of glucose in the blood can damage the linings of the blood vessels. Normally, the body tries to prevent clotting in the blood vessels because clots and plaques imped blood flow. But once the lining is damaged, the body goes into full-on repair mode. Cholesterol is actually the spackle used to patch the holes created in the lining of the blood vessels. Some triglycerides get incorporated too. You may have heard of LDL being called the so called “bad” cholesterol. Part of its bad reputation is because it brings cholesterol from the liver to the site of the damage in the blood vessels. HDL, often called the “good” cholesterol, shuttles cholesterol from the blood back to the liver.
Now that you have a basic primer on the relationship between blood sugar blood fats, you can understand that by looking at cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL LDL, we can see if a blood glucose reading of 110 is the beginning of insulin resistance, aka ‘pre-diabetes’, or if its just because you got into a minor fender-bender on the way to the lab and stress hormones have mobilized blood sugar for a flight-or-flight response. If you fasted before the blood draw, your cholesterol should be under 200, your triglycerides should be about half of your cholesterol number and HDLs should be about half of your number of triglycerides. When I see patient with triglycerides HDL numbers approaching their cholesterol number, I definitely suspect insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance develops when blood sugar has been slightly high for a prolonged period of time. Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas that stimulates cells to take in sugar (glucose). Yes, we need glucose too make energy, but you can have too much of a good thing. Over time, the cells start refusing to take in so much sugar and insulin becomes less effective, hence ‘insulin resistance.’ If you keep eating carbohydrates, especially simple ones, glucose begins to accumulate in the blood where it can damage the lining of the vessel walls.
The good news is that with a few dietary changes aimed at leveling blood sugar levels and possibly the use a few herbs and/or supplements, the development of insulin resistance into Type II diabetes can be significantly slowed or even halted. Since this strategy has many benefits beyond just blood sugar regulation, I’ll take that as a ‘cure’ over a barbaric surgery any day.
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