Quote:
One of the absolute worst things conventional medicine does is treat type 2 diabetics with insulin. This only exacerbates the problem. The key to treating and reversing type 2 diabetes is to cut down on net carbs, replacing them with high amounts of healthy fats and moderate amounts of protein. Noakes has researched reversal of type 2 diabetes in South Africans, coming to the same conclusion.
"It seems to me that provided you remove the carbohydrates, you don't need the insulin," he says. "We're looking at the whole body … [W]e're looking at every organ in the body that we believe has been influenced by type 2 diabetes.
We're seeing how they differ in people who reversed their type 2 diabetes on this diet, versus those who continue to be treated with standard therapy, including insulin … [This has] not been done anywhere else in the world. It's just the most exciting work I can think of."
Removing net carbs is only one side of the equation, though. That will reverse the insulin resistance, but equally important is having the ability to burn fat as your primary fuel. Paradoxically, driving your insulin level too low can result in a rise in blood sugar. The reason this can happen is because the primary function of insulin is not to drive sugar into the cell, but to suppress the production of glucose by the liver (hepatic gluconeogenesis).
In situations like this, eating a piece of fruit, for example, will actually lower your blood sugar. This is what happened to me, as I went a bit too extreme in my ketogenic approach. That got me to explore this whole process, eventually concluding that continuous ketosis may not be a wise long-term approach.
