I am new to raw fooding and I have diabetes. I am finding that my blood sugars are soaring after some meals and I am worried about the safety of raw fooding and diabetes. Is there anyone out there who has cured/controlled their diabetes with raw food and if so, what do you eat? Do you still take diabetic medication? How long did it take to get normal blood sugars if at all. Basically, I am asking if this is safe, and should I continue. Thanks.

sueko

type 1 or 2?

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

I never had diagnosed diabetes, but I suspect I was pre-diabetic due to the boatloads of sugar I ate as a child.

There is mounting evidence that a low-carb diet can cure diabetes.

The idea is to replace carbs with healthy fats so there are no more insulin spikes or sugar lows. The body adapts and blood-sugar becomes more stable through the process of gluconeogenesis - the production of sugar from proteins in the liver.

Jodi -- I have type 2, for approximately 15 years, now on oral meds. Long story short: Was on insulin for a while, doc took me off insulin and started me on Byetta. I threw up all the time and quit it. Now the med I'm on has been linked to cardiac disease. I've had it with the medical/chemical system, hence my presence here!

Jono -- I've done the low carb thing, but it was almost all meat (0 carbs) with some veggies (the carbs) and I resisted it all the time because I am committed to a healthier WOL. Does anyone low carb raw?

>>>Does anyone low carb raw?

i've been doing so for nearly a week now. i sent you a pm.

Dr Graham and Dr McDougall have helped a lot of people with type 2 diabetes heal their diabetes on a low fat vegan and low fat raw vegan diet. It is excess fat in the diet and ultimately in the bloodstream that cause sugar issues to arise, including insulin resistance.

Check out these articles:

Too Much Fat Causes Diabetes

Type-2 Diabetes – the Expected Adaptation to Overnutrition

McDougall Program Success Story:Obesity, Type-2 Diabetes, Hypertension

Bryan, what do you make of recent studies showing that a low-carb (high fat) diet IMPROVES blood lipids better than a low-fat diet?

For example recent studies are showing that a lowcarb diet consistently reduces serum triglycerides, raises HDL (good) cholesterol, and lowers blood pressure, in addition to improving insulin sensitivity and normalizing blood-glucose levels.

Naturopath Dr. Fuhrman has helped a lot of people with type 2 diabetes, too. He advocates vegan diet, rich in raw but not exclusively raw. He's written a couple of books and has a web presence [www.drfuhrman.com].

hi sueko

yeah, Advantia is not a good thing. And the FDA is really showing their ass over this one.

But, my mother who is Type 2, has stabilized her blood sugar, reduced meds, and has gone from a size 2x to a size 14 in about 12 weeks following a low-fat, vegan, lots of raw food diet. She's been roughly following the suggested diet of Neal Barnard, tweaking here and there to suit her own tastes. So, cutting back on calories and reducing fat intake has really helped her.

Interesting that studies are pointing again to low-carb (which has really been the standard approach to diabetes for many years). But in my experience with my mom, lowering fat intake is a bit easier to do than lowering carb intake. I guess it depends most on what you like best to eat. Common sense will tell you that you will need to lower one or the other as high-fat, high-carb would probably not facilitate any change to your body.

good luck,

khale

Sueko,
I'm going to give you a link to a video on welikeitraw.com which I discovered through a vegan girl in my nutrition class in college. It doesn't have alot of details or information but it is very interesting to watch.

[www.treeoflife.nu]

"Raw For 30 is a powerful documentary, in the works, about a group of average Americans who healed their diabetes naturally, (thnx Chris Whitcoe for the link). Produced by Patagonia Films, a Gabriel Cousins inspired venture, this flick has the potential of being being as big, or bigger, than Supersize Me."

This video is the thing which first introduced me to the idea of a raw diet

Here is an interesting view of diabetes treatment with a low-carb diet:

It was written in response to an article published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal). If you follow the link you can click and view the abstracts of all the referenced studies.

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[www.bmj.com]

Beware of the carbs!

In their review Heine and colleagues claim that there are “no high quality data to support the effectiveness of dietary treatment of type 2 diabetes” referring to a recent Cochrane analysis.1

However, at least 22 experiments have documented the benefits of reducing the dietary intake of carbohydrates in type 2 diabetics.2-23 Most of them were controlled studies where a low- carbohydrate diet was compared with a low-fat diet, and almost all of them found that the former was better than the latter as regards weight reduction and glycemic control. In several of the low- carbohydrate groups patients were even able to reduce or stop their antidiabetic treatment.

Most of these studies were ignored by the Cochrane authors because their length was shorter than six months. However, to-day four studies with a length of six months or longer have been published and with similar benefits as in the short-term experiments.14, 15, 19, 23

The main argument against a low-carbohydrate diet is that we do not know the long-term effects. Concern has in particular been raised about an increased risk of cardiovascular disease because of the higher intake of dietary fat, and an increased risk of renal failure because of the higher intake of protein. The first argument is invalid because in almost all studies total and LDL-cholesterol were unchanged, in a few HDL cholesterol went up and in almost all studies the low-carbohydrate diet was followed by a significant reduction of the triglycerides. The second argument is based on the finding that a reduction of dietary protein may retard the development of renal failure in patients with kidney disase indirectly suggesting that a high intake may have the opposite effect. There is no evidence that a high protein intake may worsen renal function in healthy people,24 but the high incidence of nephropathy in type 2 diabetes is reason for concern in this aspect However, the other benefits from the low-carbohydrate diet may probably outweigh this risk because in a recent case report it was possible to reverse a steady worsening of the renal function in a patient with diabetic nephropathy by reducing his intake of carbohydrates.25

The resistence against the low-carbohydrate diet is particularly curious in view of the fact that no long-term trial has ever shown that a low-fat diet is effective in diabetic patients or in other people, neither for improving glycemic control or for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease.


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Another response found on that page is titled "It's not just science, but also common sense, that supports the use of low-carb diets in the management of diabetes".

I'm posting this press release and the link to www.pcrm.org - there is more info and some good videos on there too.
It's not raw, but it's vegan and it might be easier to transition to vegan first and then to raw if you have good results as vegan ... of course you can be high-raw vegan, that wouldn't hurt!


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Low-Fat Vegan Diet Rivals Oral Diabetes Medications in Federally Funded Study
WASHINGTON—A low-fat vegan diet treats type 2 diabetes more effectively than a standard diabetes diet and may be more effective than single-agent therapy with oral diabetes drugs, according to a study in the August issue of Diabetes Care, a journal published by the American Diabetes Association. Study participants on the low-fat vegan diet showed dramatic improvement in four disease markers: blood sugar control, cholesterol reduction, weight control, and kidney function. The randomized controlled trial was conducted by doctors and dieticians with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the George Washington University, and the University of Toronto with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Diabetes Action Research and Education Foundation.
The vegan diet [no meat, fish, eggs, or dairy] represents a major departure from current diabetes diets, in that it placed no limits on calories, carbohydrates, or portions. “The diet appears remarkably effective, and all the side effects are good ones—especially weight loss and lower cholesterol,” says lead researcher Neal D. Barnard, M.D., PCRM president and adjunct associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University. “I hope this study will rekindle interest in using diet changes first, rather than prescription drugs.”
Diabetes rates have climbed rapidly in recent years, and more than 20 million Americans now have the disease, which is linked to kidney failure, blindness, and cardiovascular disease.
Two study participants are available for interviews. Vance is a study participant and former police officer who lives in the District of Columbia. In response to the intervention diet, Vance’s high blood sugar plunged rapidly into the normal range, and he dropped about 60 pounds. Nancy also has a compelling story to tell. Until she tried the intervention diet, Nancy’s diabetes was worsening and not responding to intensified drug therapy. During the course of the study she lost about 42 pounds and was able to discontinue one of her medications.

Founded in 1985, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a nonprofit health organization that promotes preventive medicine, especially good nutrition. PCRM also conducts clinical research studies, opposes unethical human experimentation, and promotes alternatives to animal research.
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Those low carb studies to not imply the healing of diabetes. Take a person on a low carb diet, give them some significant carbs, and their insulin resistance will show up again. There has only been symptom suppression rather than a change of the insulin resistance. However, people on the low fat vegan diets are able to eat all the carbs they want. This is more than symptom suppression, this is healing.

Hello sueko,

I'm a Type 1 Diabetic so I'm in a bit of a different boat than you are, and I won't pretend to know know anything about the day-to-day management of Type 2 Diabetes.

I haven't been able to cure my Type 1 diabetes, but I have definately heard that Type 2 diabetics have had VERY high success with healthy diets centering around veganism and raw veganism.

I know a lady who was Type 2 and overweight and after going on a raw food diet (i believe loosely based on 80/10/10 ratios) reported greatly improved health. When I ran into her months later, I barely recognized her, she had lost so much weight and undergone such a transformation!

If you haven't already read it, "The pH Miracle for Diabetes" by Robert Young is a fantastic book that promotes a (close to) vegan, low-carb diet high in raw foods that the author shows has healed a number of Type 2 Diabetics in a controlled study. The diet in this book is very easy to adapt to a purely 100% raw-food diet if one wishes to do so, because the author promotes eating primarily raw foods.

Aimee Perrin at [www.livingandhealingraw.com] writes about having very good success with her T1 diabetes eating a low-carb raw diet. She has released a number of newsletters on the topic, and you might find some good information there.


What could I personally say? Well, just general info you probably know already:

- Healthy eating, avoiding any and all junk food and refined carbohydrates. "Avoiding" is the key word - I believe it's better for a person to eat a little bit of healthy cooked food as a part of their diet versus going on destructive binges and eating junk food.

- A high percentage of raw food in your diet. Green Smoothies are fantastic, whether you do them high-carb (fruit) or low-carb (avocados, veggie smoothies).

- Lots of pure water, at least 2 litres a day.

- No caffeine, as this does bad things to blood sugar stability.

- Regular aerobic exercise brings down sugar levels.. even just walking every day.




Gabriel Cousens also did interesting work with diabetics (as someone mentioned in a previous post). There's a page on his site with some info:

[www.treeoflife.nu]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2007 09:18AM by Witek.

The article I posted earlier is the study done by Dr. Barnard, as mentioned by khale also.