How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes
Dr. Jason Fung, an expert on intermittent fasting and low carbohydrate diets, explains how these approaches can help prevent and reverse type 2 diabetes.
Turn back the clock on insulin resistance
This is Dr. Jason Fung. He’s a world-leading expert on intermittent fasting and low carbohydrate approaches to diet. He also co-founded the Intensive Dietary Management Program, later rebranded to the snappier title: The Fasting Method, a program to help people lose weight and reverse type 2 diabetes. Dr. Fung is certified with the Institute for Functional Medicine, for providing functional medicine certification along with educational programs directly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME).
Why Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is a well-established, well-evidenced, healthful practice for most people. In the case of diabetes, it becomes complicated, because if one’s blood sugars are too low during a fasting period, it will need correcting, thus breaking the fast.
Note: this is about preventing and reversing type 2 diabetes. Type 1 is very different, and sadly cannot be prevented or reversed in this fashion.
However, these ideas may still be useful if you have T1D, as you have an even greater need to avoid developing insulin resistance; you obviously don’t want your exogenous insulin to stop working.
Nevertheless, please do confer with your endocrinologist before changing your dietary habits, as they will know your personal physiology and circumstances in ways that we (and Dr. Fung) don’t.
In the case of having type 2 diabetes, again, please still check with your doctor, but the stakes are a lot lower for you, and you will probably be able to fast without incident, depending on your diet itself (more on this later).
Intermittent Fasting can be extra helpful for the body in the case of type 2 diabetes, as it helps give the body a rest from high insulin levels, thus allowing the body to become gradually re-sensitised to insulin.
Why low carbohydrate?
Carbohydrates, especially sugars, especially fructose*, cause excess sugar to be quickly processed by the liver and stored there. When the body’s ability to store glycogen is exceeded, the liver stores energy as fat instead. The resultant fatty liver is a major contributor to insulin resistance, when the liver can’t keep up with the demand; the blood becomes spiked full of unprocessed sugars, and the pancreas must work overtime to produce more and more insulin to deal with that—until the body starts becoming desensitized to insulin. In other words, type 2 diabetes.
There are other factors that affect whether we get type 2 diabetes, for example a genetic predisposition. But, our carb intake is something we can control, so it’s something that Dr. Fung focuses on.
*A word on fructose: actual fruits are usually diabetes-neutral or a net positive due to their fiber and polyphenols.
Fructose as an added ingredient, however, not so much. That stuff zips straight into your veins with nothing to slow it down and nothing to mitigate it.
The advice from Dr. Fung is simple here: cut the carbs. If you are already diabetic and do this with no preparation, you will probably simply suffer hypoglycemia, so instead:
- Enjoy a fibrous starter (a salad, some fruit, or perhaps some nuts)
- Load up with protein first, during your main meal—this will start to trigger your feelings of satedness
- Eat carbs last (preferably whole, unprocessed carbohydrates), and stop eating when 80% full.
Adapting Intermittent Fasting to diabetes
Dr. Fung advocates for starting small, and gradually increasing your fasting period, until, ideally, fasting 16 hours per day. You probably won’t be able to do this immediately, and that’s fine.
You also probably won’t be able to do this, if you don’t also make the dietary adjustments that help to give your liver a break, and thus by knock-on-effect, give your pancreas a break too.
With the dietary adjustments too, however, your insulin production-and-response will start to return to its pre-diabetic state, and finally its healthy state, after which, it’s just a matter of maintenance.
Want to hear more from Dr. Fung?
You may enjoy his blog, and for those who like videos, here is his YouTube channel:
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Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
Dr. Jenn Simmons shares vital tips on preventing cancer and inflammation, advocating for lifestyle changes and proactive health management at any age.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as she—then a breast cancer surgeon—got breast cancer, decided the system wasn’t nearly as good from the patients’ side of things as from the doctors’ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started already—all strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you don’t have a genetic risk factor, even if there’s no history of it in your family, there’s just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesn’t know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food “this thing causes cancer” warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and it’s one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. That’s why so often you’ll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
“and now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-aging”
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
See: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Don’t settle for “normal”
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
- It’s normal to have less energy at your age
- It’s normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
- It’s normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
…and many more. And these things are true! But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If we’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where we’re most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then now’s a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
See: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Fast to live
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyle—that is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it one’s “new normal” and just continuing it for life.
This doesn’t mean “never eat”, of course, but it does mean “practice intermittent fasting, if you can”—something that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
See: Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
While this calls back to the previous “fight inflammation”, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
It’s never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of “well, I already have cancer, so what’s the harm in…?”
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if it’s anticancer, it’s anticancer, no matter whether it’s before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
- Knowing stuff
- Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Enjoy!