Why does curing type 2 diabetes remain a secret?

I find it shocking that, as easy as type 2 diabetes is to reverse,  backed up by even human clinical trials validating this concept, few doctors inform their diabetic patients of this. 

Oddly, now that GLP-1 agonist (disastrous) drugs are available, the reduction in blood sugar coupled with weight loss has brought the idea of type 2 diabetes remission to the forefront, since it now is profitable to reverse it. 

But you do NOT need any pharmaceutical to reverse type 2 diabetes in the majority. 

Transcript

Why Diabetes Remission Gets Ignored

William Davis, MD 0:00

There's an odd thing going on in healthcare that I've been talking about and complaining about for over 30 years, and that is the situation we have with type 2 diabetes. We know with confidence now, in dozens of studies, that a person with type 2 diabetes, at the very least, can, through diet means, reduce hemoglobin A1C and other measures of blood glucose. But there's also a growing appreciation that you can reverse or put type 2 diabetes into complete remission. Now, the American Diabetes Association for decades has claimed that this is impossible. They used to actually very publicly and vociferously deny that type 2 diabetes was a reversible condition. And likewise, most endocrinologists, many primary care doctors, and other physicians would say, oh no, once you have type 2 diabetes, you cannot get rid of it. Well, that's simply not true. I can tell you there's actually an abundance of data to show that the various forms of reducing dietary carbohydrates, you could label it ketogenic or carnivorous or agkins or any of the other iterations on low-carb diets. And we know with confidence you can reduce the measures associated with blood glucose, like the hemolobin A1C, fasting glucose, fasting insulin. You can lose abdominal visceral fat, and you in many cases become a non-diabetic. I have done this hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I actually did with myself many years ago, inadvertently. So let me tell you my story.

How A Low Fat Diet Backfired

William Davis, MD 1:31

About 40 years ago, I heard Dr. Dean Ornish, he's a primary care doctor who very loudly advocated the power of a very low-fat vegetarian diet. He published his data in a very small study called the Lifestyle Heart Trial, where he purports, he did not, he purports to have reversed coronary disease. Well, there's multiple methodologic flaws in that study that make the study essentially worthless, but nonetheless, it was used to back up the claim that a low-fat vegetarian diet reverses heart disease. By the way, of the 28 people who were originally in the study, the vast majority over five years had heart attacks, died, went through bypass surgery, heart catalytic. In other words, this was not reversal of heart disease. So I do give them credit for reporting their five-year outcome data, but it did not show reversal of carneur disease. The angiographic or the imaging study used that they uh reported as reversing carneary disease did not. It was a misinterpretation. In a nutshell, they failed to factor in what's called endothelial dysfunction. Uh, they did not show reversal of carneur atheroscloctic plaque, they showed reversal of endothelial dysfunction, but uh Ornish was a primary care doc, not a cardiologist, and so we can't expect him to really understand coronary disease. Nonetheless, I heard this study reported almost 40 years ago when I was at the American College of Cardiology meetings in Atlanta, Georgia, where most of us as cardiologists would attend this very large meeting, 30,000 colleagues, where we heard about all the new technologies. This was a time when there was all these emerging efforts, new ways to drill, cut, open arteries, stent them, all that sort of thing. It was a very exciting time, 40 years ago. So me and colleagues would go to these meetings and learn about all the new technologies, all the new evidence, all the new data, all the new products. Well, it just happened that Dr. Ornish was going to give a talk on his lifestyle heart trial. So I attended it, and I at first took his arguments at face value that he claimed to have reversed coronary disease using diet. Well, I brought that message home with me in practice, and while I was also doing all kinds of heart procedures, I also helped patients to help uh change their lifestyles. Because we know that once you have coronary disease, it's an endless revolving door. You're back in the hospital, new procedure, back in the hospital, over and over and over again. Once you've had a stent, heart attack, bypass surgery, you're back in the hospital frequently. And so I wanted to give people a better tool. So I took a lesson from Dr. Ornis's lifestyle heart trial, and I saw it end in disaster. I saw that people did not reverse their carneurid disease, in fact, had dramatic metabolic deterioration, including myself. So this was a time in my late 30s where I was riding my bike, I was jogging five miles a day, a couple of times a week at a nearby park, I was playing tennis, and in other words, I was very active, in addition to putting a lot of hours in the hospital. And I became a type 2 diabetic. I happened to be at another meeting and had some testing done, finger stick testing, and I was horrified. My triglycerides were 390 milligrams, my HDL cholesterol was 27, which is exceptionally low, and a high risk marker for cardiovascular risk. Small LDL is about 1800 nanomoles per liter, which is a very high count. That's the real cause, by the way, of carnary disease, not this absurd idea of LDL cholesterol. My fasting blood glucose, my fasting blood glucose was 161 milligrams per deciliter, and I was hypertensive. In other words, on a very low-fat vegetarian diet purported to reverse carony disease, I became a metabolic disaster while exercising very vigorously and very frequently. So I stopped the diet in myself as well as in dozens, if not hundreds, of patients, and I saw things revert back to much better. Personally, my hemoglobin A1C dropped to 4.8%, which is ideal, less than 5% is ideal. My fasting glucoses run the 80 milligrams, my small LDL particle number is zero, my blood pressure is normal. In other words, everything normalized off the super low-fat vegetarian program. So I reversed my type 2 diabetes. Now, it took some time as I tried to understand, because this is 40 years ago, when a lot of the lessons we've learned over the years, largely from the blunders made by the USDA, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, dietary guidelines, other agencies purporting to give you advice on health, we learned a lot over the years. We also learned a lot from the blunders made by consumer choices. That is, people recognized that conventional dietary advice was flat wrong and caused problems. And so people went to find better answers in the form of, say, ketogenic diets, carnivorous diets, paleo diets, all those kinds of things. And there are some issues with that also, we'll get to in a moment.

Keto Evidence And ADA Diet Logic

William Davis, MD 6:45

Point is type 2 diabetes has been shown repeatedly to be reversible. For instance, Dr. Eric Westman at Duke University did one of the first studies many years ago where he took well-established type 2 diabetics and put them on what he called a ketogenic diet, essentially a no-carb diet. And he did over six months show that a good number of the type 2 diabetics became non-diabetic, and the rest were able to reduce their medications dramatically. Now there's a problem here in that the people who advocate diets for type 2 diabetics, like the American Diabetes Association, for decades have advocated a very high carbohydrate diet, typically over 200 grams per day, which is huge. You know, my programs, we limit ourselves to no more than 15 grams net carbs per meal. So the American Diabetes Association for years advocated hundreds of grams of carbon. Why would they do something as stupid as that? So ignorant that we know sends your blood glucose sky high. Why would they do that? Well, the reason they did that was because they were aware that if you go on insulin and you don't stack up on carbohydrates, you may have episodes of hypoglycemia. So they gave everybody the so-called ADA diet, American Diabetes Association diet, filled with carbohydrates to raise blood glucose so that when you went on insulin, you didn't have episodes of hypoglycemia, which can be very dangerous. And that became the diet that my colleagues used for decades. I saw this play out in hospitals, for instance. Someone would come into the hospital for whatever reason, maybe atrial fibrillation or congestive heart failure, and they would be put on a, we said, an ADA 1800 calorie diet. That would be a very common prescription, a common order in the hospital. An ADA 1800 calorie per day diet. And we would watch this person go from being non-diabetic or pre-diabetic into full-blown type 2 diabetes and then discharged from the hospital as a diabetic when they didn't enter as a diabetic. Now they're on insulin and other drugs to control blood glucose. So over and over again, we saw conventional advice explode, backfire, achieve the opposite. Now, uh American Diabetes Association knew this, they know this, and it took them many years to finally inch towards cutting back carbohydrates. And you look at their current diet, they do try to limit carbohydrates. They say refined carbohydrates, but there's really no difference. Um, most more recently, but never admitting all the mistakes they made and the fact that they gave bad advice to millions of people over many decades. No apologies for all that mistake. Now there's an odd twist to this conversation. So one of the things you have to know is the American Diabetes Association receives millions of dollars, millions of dollars every year in donations from pharmaceutical companies. And at least in past, they've been very squirrely lately about reporting who's paying them. Uh in they used they were much more open in the past, but in past, big food also, companies like Nabisco and General Mills also contribute huge amounts of money. But right now I do know for a fact that companies like Sanafi and Merck and Glaxo SmithKline donate huge amounts of money to the American Diabetes Association. Because these are the companies that manufacture diabetes drugs. It's very important to recognize that the market, the U.S. market alone, not worldwide, U.S. market alone for diabetes, type 2 diabetes management, is a $43 billion a year business. So while we hear news from the CDC that says things like, well, it's it's terrible now. There's an epidemic of type 2 diabetes. Over 40 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, over 110 million Americans now have pre-diabetes on their way to type 2 diabetes. We hear that as bad news from the CDC. But if you were a healthcare insider, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, this would be reason to throw a party, to pay all your a lot of your staff, your your C-suite staff, to have an all-pay, all expense paid vacation in the Bahamas. In other words, bad news like that is good news if you profit from it. And believe me, I know, I've known over the years, many of the insiders they throw parties because of this. And so don't be fooled by this, oh, we're here to cure diabetes. That's nonsense. They're here to make money from type 2 diabetes. And that's the thing here. Why aren't my colleagues telling you that there's more than ample evidence to tell us that restricting carbohydrates in the diet in its many forms does reduce type 2 diabetes, all the measures surrounding it, as well as provide remission. Now, an odd twist on this has come about in the last few years. And that is the GLP1 agonist drugs, which were initially introduced to reduce blood glucose, also achieve weight loss. And these are the drugs like we Govi Munjaro, all those drugs now that people are scrambling for, paying a lot of money for, to lose weight.

GLP-1 Drugs Make Remission Profitable

William Davis, MD 12:09

And lo and behold, many type 2 diabetics are now going into remission. Now the GLP1 agonists reduced blood glucose as well as cause weight loss. So it's a combination of effects. But all of a sudden, because there's now a way to profit or monetize from getting type 2 diabetics go into remission, now they're starting to talk about remission of diabetes. The American Diabetes Association and the chronologists, other physicians, are now beginning to embrace the idea that type 2 diabetes can go into remission, even though we've known this for decades, because they now have a way to profit from. And don't be fooled. When doctors say to you, oh, we can't profit from the prescription, we write, oh, sure they do. There are loopholes in regulations that allow physicians to profit from prescribing medications. For instance, large multi-specialty groups have their own pharmacy, and there is a way to profit from that. And so know that it took the GL2 and agonists, this horrible, destructive class of drugs, that essentially ensure early death and a future life of falls, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, uh, and an acceleration of dementia. That's what these drugs do. Now, but they also achieve remission of type 2 diabetes because of the weight loss in the near term has now opened the door to this conversation that type 2 diabetes can go into

Nutrients And Fiber For Insulin Resistance

William Davis, MD 13:35

remission. Now, there's a smarter way to do this. Yes, you can achieve a lot by slashing carbohydrates in your diet. But you can go further, and this is what I do in my programs. We also address common nutrient deficiencies that, when restored, help reverse insulin resistance, the process that drives type 2 diabetes and weight gain. So we address vitamin D, magnesium, omega-3 fatty acids, and iodine, all of which are lacking in modern lives. And when restored, together, all four synergize to minimize insulin resistance. We also addressed the microbiome, the gastrointestinal microbiome. That is the Achilles heel, by the way, of all those low-carb diets. And it's been one of the reasons why there's been some hesitation to more broadly advocate low-carb diets because many of those diets, especially ketogenic carnivorous diets, when they eliminate carbohydrates, they go too far. And they eliminate sources of fibers and other nutrients that nourish your gastrointestinal microbes. So the analogy I draw is imagine you have a dog and you tie it up in your backyard to a steak, and then you forget. You get distracted by business or school, whatever, and maybe five to seven days later you come back. Oh no, I forgot all about my dog. What happened to the poor dog? Well, it's starving and maybe dead. Same thing happens when you neglect to feed the microbes in your gastrointestinal tract. They feed on fibers and polysaccharides. So you must, you can do all those diets if you want, but you have to make sure you get root vegetables, you get some small quantities of fruits, you get mushrooms, you get all the foods that have fiber in them. And the more fiber, the better, because those microbes do require those fibers. Odd things happen when you don't feed them. One of the phenomena that's been seen, for instance, is the microbe acromancia mucinophila. When you don't feed your microbes, fibers, acromancia, which is a beneficial microbe when it's present at about 3 to 5% of the entire gastrointestinal microbiome. In other words, acromancer is a very dominant microbe comprising about 3 to 5% of all microbes in the colon. If you fail to get those fibers, as you would say on a ketogenic or carnivorous diet, acromancia likes those fibers, but when it lacks it, it has this added unique capacity to consume human mucus. Its full name, right? Acromansia mucinophila, mucus lover. So acromantia explodes because it's one of the few microbes that has that capacity to feed on human mucus. Now, human mucus is protective in the colon, in the small intestine. But when acromantia comes to comprise 12%, 18%, 24% or more of the entire gastrointestinal microbiome, which is what happens when you starve it of fibers, it eats human mucus, it thereby proliferates better than other species. Other species are diminished or lost, that you might not be able to get back, by the way. Acromancia overpopulates, and over time, it may take a year or longer for this to happen, but when you have acromancia overpopulation that consumes your human mucus, you have intestinal inflammation, could even cause something like ulcet of colitis, increase your potential for uh diverticular disease and colon cancer, and it increases endotoxemia, that is, the entry of bacterial breakdown products into the bloodstream that then reverses all the benefits you got in the upfront period. So you may have lost a bunch of weight in the abdomen, your blood pressure may have dropped, your triglycerides may have dropped, your HDL may have gone way up. All that reverses once this process occurs, and you lose all those advantages. And you'll hear people say, Well, I've been doing a ketogenic diet or adkins or whatever for 18 months, and lately my triglycerides are going back up. I'm regaining weight, my abdomen, my blood pressure's back up. I'm constipated. Well, that's because they've disrupted the gastrointestinal microbiome from neglecting. It's the Achilles heel of low-carb diets in all its forms. So don't allow that to happen. So we address those four common nutrients that, when together, synergize to minimize insulin resistance. We address the gastrointestinal microbiome to not allow overproliferation of species like acromansia and cultivate species that produce fatty acids that are beneficial for your metabolic control, including reduction of hemoglobin A1C and blood glucose. And of course, we use the diet, but we make sure we do not neglect intake of fiber and related compounds. And bottom line, type 2 diabetes is entirely reversible in the majority.

Who Cannot Fully Reverse Diabetes

William Davis, MD 18:34

The only exceptions, besides people don't care. But if you do care, the people who can't reverse type 2 diabetes are those who incur damage to their pancreatic beta cells. The cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. So for instance, if you had triglyceride level for a long time, over a thousand, or you had very high blood glucose with your type 2 diabetes, sufficient to damage your pancreatic beta cells. If you consume wheat and grains, that also have components that damage the pancreatic beta cells. There's a long list of factors that can damage your pancreatic beta cells. That may mean, let's say you lost half your pancreatic beta cells, that's going to be a person who can't fully reverse type 2 diabetes, who may need to be on something like metformin or maybe some other drugs to maintain a normal blood glucose. But the majority of people who have not damaged their pancreatic beta cells have the capacity to return all the way to normal. If they stay on this approach. Yeah, people say, well, what if they go off? Of course, your type 2 diabetes comes back, right? So if you stay on all these factors, type 2 diabetes can go away in the majority. Sadly, the only reason it's coming to fore now is because the GLP 1 agonist people are seeing a profit center, a profit source. Now they're talking about it also. But know that you don't need a GLP 1 agonist to be a non diabetic.