The following is the first chapter in my newly-released book,Type 2 Diabetes Reversal Secrets: 4 Simple Steps to Lower Blood Sugar in 1 Month – Without Medications.If you want to get it,click herefor my Canadian readers, andherefor my non-Canadian readers.
There are plenty of myths around diabetes. Some of them, you might actually believe. Lucky for you that youre reading this book, because in this chapter, well bust 10 of the most common myths about diabetes.
In no particular order:
Myth #1: It Runs in My Family, So Theres Nothing I Can Do About It
Theres a saying that “genetics load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.” That is to say that you may have the genes for type 2 diabetes, butgenes are not destiny. Rather, theyre more like an on/off switch. If the environment is right, the switch will be turned on (youll get diabetes). If the environment is not conducive to diabetes (and therefore, conducive to good health), the switch will be turned off.
Thats not to say that genetics dont play a role in your diabetes. They do. But the main message is that genes are not destiny.
So yes, your whole family may have diabetes, but you dont have to get it as well. Or, if you already have it, in a very large number of cases, its highly reversible. Follow the advice in this book for at least 2 months, and see if that doesnt turn it around.
Myth #2: You Have to Lose Weight to Lower Your Blood Sugar
There is a mountain of studies (many of them included in the different chapters throughout this book) showing decreased blood sugar when X increases/decreases (where “X” can be fibre, calories, exercise, etc.), without concurrent decreases in weight.
So maybe its not the weight loss thats causing the lower blood sugar, but the stuff you have to do to lose weight, like eat a diet higher in fibre, and lower in processed food (therefore lower in calories). But what if calories were the same, but your fibre content increased? Or what if your weight stayed the same, but you started exercising? Or what if your weight stayed the same, but you took a supplement to help you lower blood sugar? Would it work? The research is fairly conclusive on this one: yes!
Thats not to say that you shouldnt lose weight if youve got the weight to lose. It will have other benefits besides lowering your blood sugar. But as anyone whos ever tried to lose weight knows, its a long, slow, laborious process. Losing 50 pounds might take 25-75 weeks. But normalizing blood sugar? That can be done in 2-3 months.
In fact, with many of my clients, their blood sugar normalizes far before their weight comes into the “ideal” range.
Myth #3: Diabetes Just Comes with Age
Not true. If age was the single most important factor in the development of diabetes, then everyone over a certain age would have it. But not everyone does.
Theres a saying that “time amplifies bad habits.” If you have a bad habit for a year, thats not great. But if you carry the same bad habit for 40 years, well, its a lot worse, and youll feel the consequences much more.
You dont exercise when youre 25? No big deal (not great, but the effects arent noticeable yet). You dont exercise when youre 65? Big deal.
You eat poorly when youre 25? No big deal. You eat poorly when youre 65? Thats 40 more years than 25 years of bad eating habits.
So its not like diabetes just comes with age it doesnt. Your bad habits have greater consequences the longer youve been doing them.
Fortunately, many of these bad consequences are reversible. You have diabetes? Thats because youre sending signals to the body, to make it believe that high blood sugar is advantageous to the inputs youre putting in. Change the inputs (exercise, nutrition, supplements, sleep), and your output changes (lower blood sugar, more energy, less body fat, better sleep, etc.).
Myth #4: Diabetes Can be Cured
Unfortunately, at this time, there is no cure for type 2 diabetes. A lot of people confuse curing diabetes with reversing diabetes. They are not the same.
To cure a condition means that you got rid of it, and theres nothing you can do to bring it back. You can eat whatever you want, and theres no way that that condition is coming back.
Thats not the case with diabetes. You can reverse diabetes with better nutrition and exercise, but if you revert back to the habits that caused the diabetes in the first place, youll get diabetes again. So you can reverse diabetes, but you cant cure it.
Myth #5: Diabetes is Caused by Excess Consumption of Sugar
On the surface, you would think that by eating sugar, you raise your blood sugar to the point that you get diabetes. Perfectly logical, but not correct.
See, in a healthy person, when you eat sugar, your pancreas releases insulin and brings blood sugar down to normal levels. No problem.
Also, when the sugar you consume is within your calorie limits, its not as big of a problem, either. This is not just my opinion. One study concluded “excess sugar can promote weight gain, thus T2DM [editors note: T2DM stands for “type 2 diabetes mellitus”], through extra calories, but has no unique diabetogenic effect at physiological levels.” In another study, researchers divided participants into 2 groups:
Group 1: was given sugar.
Group 2: was given an equivalent amount of calories as group 1, but in bread.
During and after that meal, there was no difference in the blood sugar levels between the 2 groups.
And there are many more studies like this, basically showing that dietary sugar does not have special diabetes-causing chemistry. Sugar is only responsible for diabetes in its ability to add excess calories to the diet.
It just so happens to be that sugar tastes great! So you want to eat more of it. It triggers you to eat more than you would have otherwise. After all, when you eat ice cream or cookies, how often do you eat more than you were planning to? Has that ever happened to you when eating broccoli or chicken? Point made . So the way sugar increases your risk of diabetes is not through something inherent in sugar, but simply in that it makes you eat more calories.
I can hear some readers thinking “but wait what about all the studies saying that sugar is correlated to diabetes?” Sure, sugar is correlated to diabetes, but it doesnt mean it causes diabetes. Sunscreen sales are correlated to drowning, but it doesnt mean that sunscreen causes drowning. Its quite simple the higher the temperature, the more people buy sunscreen. And the higher the temperature, the more people go swimming. Same with sugar higher sugar is correlated to diabetes. And higher calories are correlated to diabetes. But it doesnt mean that sugar in and of itself causes diabetes. Remember correlation is not causation.
Myth #6: If My HbA1C is Normal, I Dont Have Diabetes
If youre a diabetic, you probably know what HbA1C is, but just in case its confusing to you, Ill explain. Simply put, its your average blood sugar over the past 3 months. Ill go into much greater detail on this in the chapter on testing.
In statistics (and medicine uses statistics), there is the concept of false negatives. A false negative is a result that says you dont have something, when you actually do. As it applies to diabetes, it might mean that your blood sugar levels are appearing normal on the test, but you actually do have diabetes. Why might that be?
One of the most common reasons for false negatives in your HbA1C levels is a high number of red blood cells. This could happen due to supplementation with vitamin B12 and folic acid. Also, high iron levels can cause false negatives in your HbA1C. This can happen in people with hemochromatosis, thalassemia, and others. Certain medications can also falsely lower HbA1C.
There are other reasons as well, but these are the most common ones.
Hence the need to run various tests for blood sugar to confirm or deny the results of any single test. The tests are discussed in the following chapter.
Also, any single test must be looked at in the context of other tests. If you got your HbA1C, and it seems normal, also check your red blood cell markers (RBC, hemoglobin, vitamin B12 and folic acid). If you want the full list of tests that I give to my clients to ask their doctors to run, you can download it for free at www.DiabetesReversalSecrets.com.
Myth #7: If I Have a High HbA1C, Im a Diabetic
Just like there are false negatives, there are also false positives. A false positive is a test telling you that you have something, when you actually dont.
One of the most common reasons that you may get a falsely elevated HbA1C is if youre low in iron, so it might make sense to also check your iron markers (ferritin, RBC, hemoglobin and others).
Myth #8: If My Blood Sugar Levels Are Normal, Im Good
The current model of diabetes is less a continuum, and more of a “fall off the cliff” type of model. That is your blood sugar is normal, until its abnormal. For instance, your HbA1C is 5.3%. The next test, its 5.6%, then next test, its 5.9%, and finally, you hit the big 6.0%, and “suddenly” youre a prediabetic.
Thats a hard slap in the face. Feels like it came out of nowhere. But it didnt. Typically, by the time you get type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, its been building up for years, if not decades. You just werent using the tests that would tell you ahead of time (years ahead of time) when something is just starting to go wrong.
Some of the tests that are early warning signs that something with your blood sugar is wrong are fasting insulin, C-Peptide, glycomark, and the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). Ill go into more detail on all of these tests in the next chapter.
Myth #9: Theres Only One Possible Reason I Have High Blood Sugar
A lot of people have the simplistic idea that if you eat too much sugar, it will cause chronically elevated blood sugar (diabetes). But we busted that one in myth #5. The truth is that physiology is much more complex than that, and there are a number of reasons why you may have high blood sugar, besides simple overconsumption:
Here is a list of possible reasons why blood sugar might be high:
1. High cortisol. If youve listened to the media long enough, you know that cortisol is whats been dubbed “the stress hormone.” One of its functions is to raise blood sugar levels. Research shows that if you have high cortisol, thats a possible contributing factor to your diabetes.
2. Infection: at least one study found that blood sugar goes up during certain infections. The reason for that rise is that insulin suppresses to some degree inflammation, and free radicals.
3. Inflammation can be a causal factor in elevated blood sugar, according to this study.
4. High cholesterol and/or triglycerides. While the cholesterol picture is much more complex than we thought decades ago (high cholesterol = bad), thats beyond the scope of this book. But high cholesterol and/or triglycerides can precede insulin resistance. In diabetics who have high cholesterol and/or triglycerides, one study proposed that in them, insulin resistance is beneficial, because its protective of the heart.
This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are other possible reasons why blood sugar might be high. To look at blood sugar alone, while ignoring these (and other) factors would be too narrow-sighted, and potentially cause you to use the wrong approach to lower blood sugar, which could do more damage than good (Ill give an example in the next myth). The treatment for diabetes should be matched to the cause of diabetes.
Of course, thats not to say that overconsumption of calories is not a factor. It absolutely is. Its just not the only factor.
Myth #10: High Blood Sugar is Always a Problem
We know that when blood sugar is high, we try to get it down. But should we get it down all the time? Or are there times when its actually beneficial to have it elevated?
We have to think the bodys pretty smart. If we have high blood sugar, thats probably because the body believes that thats the appropriate output, given the inputs that were sending it.
Most of the time, yes, its beneficial to lower high blood sugar. But in certain cases, its actively harmful. You can have better blood sugar, and worse health.
Case in point, one study said “we question the dogma that insulin resistance is primarily harmful to the body and should be counteracted at any cost. Instead, we propose that insulin resistance, particularly in this high-risk subgroup, is a defense mechanism that protects critical tissues of the cardiovascular system from nutrient-induced injury. Overriding insulin resistance in an effort to lower plasma glucose levels, particularly with intensive insulin therapy, could therefore be harmful.”
In another study, researchers successfully lowered the blood sugar levels of certain people to essentially prediabetic levels yet more of these folks died compared to those who maintained high blood sugar levels. So they had to terminate the study early, since people dying as a result of treatment is a pretty bad (and unexpected) treatment.
Sometimes, high blood sugar is a defense mechanism against something even worse than diabetes, and when you “solve” the high blood sugar through aggressive means, you take away the defense mechanism.
In cases like these, high blood sugar shouldnt be looked at as the problem itself, but rather, more of an indicator marker. You would work on the biggest problem at hand, and check how the “indicator” is doing, without you targeting the indicator directly.
Of course, you have to do a bit more investigating to figure out whether elevated blood sugar is the biggest problem, or whether the body is using it as a defense mechanism against something else, but the figuring out of this should really be left to great medical professionals.
Myth #11: Diabetics Shouldnt Eat Dried Fruits
We know that dried fruits like raisins, dates, figs, and prunes are sweet. Thats their main attraction. So we use our simplistic thinking that because theyre sweet, theyll also raise blood sugar. So some researchers wanted to put that simplistic theory to the test.
In one study, what researchers did was recruit 51 diabetics, and divided them into 2 groups:
Group 1: ate 28 grams (1 ounce) of raisins 3 times per day for 12 weeks
Group 2: ate a snack 3 times per day for 12 weeks. The snack had identical calories, carbs, protein and fat content to the raisins.
The results: the raisin group maintained their blood sugar (HbA1C). The snack group actually raised their blood sugar by a bit.
Why did such a highly concentrated snack of almost pure sugar not raise blood sugar as much as would be expected? For two reasons:
1. Fruits are primarily fructose. Fructose doesnt raise blood sugar (ie blood glucose) the same amount as glucose. Surprised that glucose in food raises blood glucose? Dont be
2. Yes, dried fruits are concentrated sugar, but theyre also concentrated fibre. As youll learn in the chapter on nutrition, fibre reduces the amount of carbohydrates that convert to glucose and enter the bloodstream.
For those reasons, dried fruits are perfectly fine for diabetics, as long as theyre within the calorie limits of each person.
If you like what you just read, and you want more, get my full book,Type 2 Diabetes Reversal Secrets: 4 Simple Steps to Lower Blood Sugar in 1 Month – Without Medications.Just until this Sunday, Aug. 1, it’s on sale for 57% off. If you want to get it before then,click herefor my Canadian readers, andherefor my non-Canadian readers.
