Are diabetes and insulin resistance really reversible?

Diabetes is not reversible and controlling your blood sugar with insulin or drugs will protect you from organ damage and death. Now that's what the medical profession would have you believe. Okay, I'm Mark Hyman and I'm going to tell you otherwise and I want you to remember what Mark Twain said. It ain't what you know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so. And that's where we are with diabetes today in America. The medication and insulin can actually increase your risk of getting a heart attack or dying. And what you're not hearing about is another way to deal with this epidemic. Today I want to review in detail a new way to think about diabetes and next week I want to tell you exactly how to prevent, treat and reverse it. So the diabetes epidemic is accelerating along with the obesity epidemic and it's entirely preventable. You know, type 2 or adult onset diabetes is a worldwide epidemic affecting 100 million people and over 20 million Americans. We're seeing dramatically increasing rates, especially in children which has increased over 1000% in the last decade and was unknown in little kids a generation ago. That's why we call it adult onset. You know, one in three children born today will have diabetes in their lifetime. In a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Walter Willett said that 91% of all type 2 diabetes could be prevented through improvements in lifestyle and diet. So this all starts in childhood. And it's often undiagnosed until later stages. We call it insulin resistance. This is when the body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin. And it's the main cause of the disease. And when our diet is full of empty calories and abundance of quickly absorbed sugars and carbohydrates like bread and potatoes and rice and pasta, the body slowly becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and it needs more and more to do the same job to keep your blood sugar even. Now high insulin levels are the first sign of a problem, but nobody checks them. High insulin leads to an appetite that's out of control and an increased weight gain around the belly. And this high insulin level precedes the diabetes diagnosis by decades. Now, it's often associated with increasing fat around the middle, fatigue after meals, sugar cravings, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, low good cholesterol or HDL, problems with blood clotting, as well as increased inflammation. And these clues can often be there decades before anyone ever gets diabetes and may help you prevent it entirely. Now, if you have a family history of obesity, especially belly fat, and diabetes and early heart disease or even dementia, you're more prone to this problem. Now most people know about the common complications such as heart attacks, strokes, amputations, blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage. And some may even know that it increases the risk of dementia and cancers and can cause impotence, right? It's the number one cause of impotence. But most people don't realize that insulin resistance or pre-diabetes can be just as bad causing heart attacks, strokes, dementia, cancer, and impotence decades before you get diabetes. In fact, most people with prediabetes never get diabetes and they're at the same severe risk. Now, we have to live in harmony with our genes and we have this condition because we're highly adapted to a nutrient-dense, low sugar, high fiber diet that's rich in omega-3 fats. And when we eat out of harmony with our genes, we turn on genes that promote diabetes. like the Pima Indians. They were fit and thin 100 years ago and they ate 70% carbs and they ate lots of fiber and plant foods and they had no diabetes. Now in one generation they're nearly all obese, 80% have diabetes. By the time they're 30, 80% have diabetes. That's because they're eating all the food that turns on the wrong genetic messages like white flour and trans fats and processed foods. Now this is a reversible problem. And once you have diabetes or prediabetes, the new science out there shows us that it's actually reversible through an aggressive approach of lifestyle, nutritional support and occasionally medications. So it's important to diagnose it early and it's often not diagnosed till very late. In fact, half people walking around don't even know they have diabetes. All doctors should aggressively diagnose this and diagnose prediabetes decades before any damage occurs. In a recent study, anybody with a fasting sugar over 87 was increased risk of diabetes. So that's not what we think when we wait until the blood sugar is high. So here's the things you need to test and ask your doctor to do. Check your blood sugar and insulin after we call it a glucose challenge test. You have to measure blood sugar and insulin. You need to check also your hemoglobin A1c which can be elevated and a sign of early problems with blood sugar. You need to check another test called your cholesterol profile because your HDL is a clue. If the good cholesterol is under 60 and your triglycerides are over 100, then you should be very suspicious. You should also look at the size of the particles because the big, large, fluffy particles of cholesterol are not harmful, but the small dense ones like golf balls are very damaging to your arteries. You should also check for inflammation with a high sensitivity C-reactive protein because inflammation is one of the classic conditions that causes insulin resistance. And you should check homocysteine and fibrinogen and other markers that go bad when you have diabetes. You also might want to check ferritin which can be a sign of inflammation and uric acid also which are also associated with diabetes. And lastly, you should check your liver because the number one cause of fatty liver, an elevated liver function test is sugar and pre-diabetes and diabetes. So these are tests that every doctor can perform. They're covered by insurance and I've included my interpretation of these tests with my written blog so you can be sure exactly where you should be. Now in next week's blog, I'm going to tell you how to prevent, treat and even reverse diabetes. I've seen this hundreds of times in my patients and there's no reason you can't achieve the same thing if you apply these principles. Till then, remember what Michael Pollan said. He said, Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. So thanks for listening.