If you are diabetic and fail to control your blood glucose levels, you will most likely end up with several debilitating health problems such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, nerve damage, diabetic neuropathy, digestive problems, blindness, or a variety of infections.
Many of these conditions can be fatal.
So taking drugs to manage your diabetes would seem like a smart thing to do.
Not so... for several very good reasons.
Survival rates using diabetes medications
According to a research paper Benefits of Diabetes Drugs Dubious, published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in December 2014, no doctor-prescribed diabetes drug has been shown to save the life of a diabetic. There is no proof that they prevent heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, nerve damage, blindness or other diabetes complications such as the need for amputations.
High blood glucose levels are not the same as diabetes. They are signs of diabetes but they are not the disease itself. The problem is: diabetes drugs target blood sugar levels... they do not treat diabetes. But very few people die of high levels of glucose in their blood.
However they do die of the damage caused by diabetes: heart disease, strokes, kidney disease and raging infections... and diabetes drugs do nothing for them.
A peer-reviewed meta-study Comparison of Clinical Outcomes and Adverse Events Associated with Glucose-lowering Drugs in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016, showed that there was no increase in survival rates among type 2 diabetics who took diabetes medications.
The drugs failed to prevent heart attacks and strokes. They also failed to reduce all-cause mortality for these patients.
The study examined nine classes of diabetes drugs, including insulin, comparing the drugs to a placebo. The researchers reviewed more than 300 randomized clinical trials covering nearly 120,000 patients before reaching their conclusions.
Dangers of diabetes drugs
Drugs for diabetes are dangerous.
Their side effects include cardiovascular reactions, flu-like symptoms and dizziness. They have been linked to muscle and stomach pain, diarrhoea and anaemia. In addition, if diabetics are not careful, these drugs can cause dangerously low blood glucose levels.
The sad thing is that many patients take two or even three of these drugs at the same time, all prescribed by their local doctor or diabetes clinic.
But, instead of reducing deaths, this multi-drug regime increases death rates.
A research paper Effects of Intensive Glucose Lowering in Type 2 Diabetes, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008, concluded that intense efforts to lower blood glucose with drugs resulted in a 22% higher rate of death from all causes. The same study showed that deaths from heart disease went up by 35%.
So what to do?
Reversing diabetes
The fact is that there is no need, unless your diabetes is far advanced, to use these drugs at all. You can reverse your diabetes using diet alone, perhaps with a little extra exercise thrown in.
There is no cure for diabetes, ie once you have it you will always have it. So when I say you can reverse your diabetes, I mean you can beat the nasty consequences the disease brings such as the cardiovascular problems, strokes, kidney disease and so on.
The beating-diabetes diet is simple. It requires but a little discipline.
You can reverse type 2 diabetes by eating foods that are (1) low in sugar, (2) low in fat, (3) low in salt, (4) high in fibre and that (5) are digested slowly. The easiest way to do this is by concentrating on natural, unprocessed foods that are mostly plants. You also need to avoid all dairy products and eggs, and to drink plenty of water.
The fundamental cause of type 2 diabetes is fat blocking the receptors in your muscle cells, leaving glucose (produced by the digestive process) and insulin (produced by the pancreas) swirling around in your bloodstream. This condition is called insulin resistance.
The diet works because it minimises your intake of fat so that, after a month or so, the fat blocking the receptors in your muscle cells will have disappeared.
Unblocking the receptors ensures that the insulin can do its job of opening those receptors to get the glucose out of your bloodstream and into cells, thus 'reversing' your diabetes.
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