How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes

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⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Increasingly many people, especially in North America (due in part to the “Standard American Diet”, or, appropriately enough, “SAD”), are diabetic or pre-diabetic.

  • However, type 2 diabetes can be prevented, and can be reversed.

    • Today’s featured expert, Dr. Jason Fung, has a well-tested two-part model for achieving this:

      • Dietary adjustments, to reduce intake of carbohydrates and especially fructose, while enjoying more fiber and protein

      • Intermittent fasting, working up from a smaller to a longer fasting period, to give the body a break from insulin, and thus re-sensitize the body to it.

• Handwash-only drinkware (especially flasks/bottles and the like that can’t be dried by hand) tend to come with an extra problem: drying it without it taking forever and being a home for new and more interesting germs along the way.

  • Today’s sponsor, Kuppy, have a novel solution that takes a fraction of the time and is much more hygienic.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Increase Your Mitochondria—Your Body Will Thank You!

Dr. Perlmutter explains some exciting research that shows how a dietary intervention can dramatically increase the number of mitochondria in immune cells:

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Cellular menu:

• 0:00 | About mitochondria

• 2:23 | About the study

• 8:56 | Conclusion

🕑 MAIN FEATURE

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.

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.

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:

1. Enjoy a fibrous starter (a salad, some fruit, or perhaps some nuts)

2. Load up with protein first, during your main meal—this will start to trigger your feelings of satedness

3. 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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❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

The quicker, more hygienic way to dry your drinkware

Do you know the smell of the inside of an insulated flask? You shouldn’t; it’s not supposed to have a smell; the smell comes from bacteria. But you probably do know the smell, don’t you? Join the club.

There is a better way:

The Kuppy drying rack has air slots to let air flow naturally, which will dry your drinkware 5x faster, and prevent bacteria and their odors from taking root.

And unlike most regular drying racks, it can be washed quickly and easily by hand or in the dishwasher—so it’s not putting new and more interesting germs straight back onto your clean drinkware.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Study unveils a neural mechanism involved in terminating decisions

• New genetic test reveals a person’s predisposition to happiness

• Bilingual program improves blood pressure in patients with previously uncontrolled hypertension

• How can I lower my cholesterol? Do supplements work? How about psyllium or probiotics?

• Jamais vu: the science behind the eerie opposite of déjà vu

• New study uses brainwave activity to assess depressed mood in healthy people

• Added sugar, total sugar, and fructose associated with higher coronary heart disease risk

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain – by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

We've reviewed books about neurology before, and we always try to review books that bring something new/different. So, what makes this one stand out?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the world's foremost neuroscientists, starts with an overview of how our unusual brain (definitely our species' defining characteristic) came to be, and then devotes the rest of the book to mostly practical information.

She explains, in clear terms and without undue jargon, how the brain goes about such things as making constant predictions and useful assumptions about our environment, and reports these things to us as facts—which process is usually useful, and sometimes counterproductive.

We learn about how the apparently mystical trait of empathy works, in real flesh-and-blood terms, and why some kinds of empathy are more metabolically costly than others, and what that means for us all.

Unlike many such books, this one also looks at what is going on in the case of "different minds" that operate very dissimilarly to our own, and how this neurodiversity is important for our species.

Critically, she also looks at what else makes our brains stand out, the symphony of "5 Cs" that aren't often found to the same extent all in the same species: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression. This latter being less obvious, but perhaps the most important; Dr. Feldman Barrett explains how we use this ability to layer summaries of our memories, perceptions, and assumptions, to allow us to think in abstractions—something that powers much of what we do that separates us from other animals.

Bottom line: if you'd like to learn more about that big wet organ between your ears, what it does for you, and how it goes about doing it, then this book gives a very practical foundation from which to build.

Click here to check out Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, and learn more about yours!

May your health go always from strength to strength,

The 10almonds Team