Tagged: DIabetes, hyperglycemia, mellitus, metabolic syndrome, Type 2
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February 9, 2024 at 4:01 pm #41629Danial BeardModerator
Metabolic Syndrome:
It might seem a little strange to find this subject matter on a ham club website, but given the relative explosion of type 2 diabetes in the world population, (contrary to what one might think, it is no longer a uniquely American problem) and given the relative age and physical condition of the American amateur radio operator cohort, it’s not as silly as it seems at first blush. All one has to do is glance around the room at any given meeting, and count the number of people present who are already full-on or pre-diabetic. Anyone else who isn’t quite there yet, sooner or later will be if they follow — even loosely the as-published American FDA dietary guidelines. Statistically, if you eat the standard American preferred diet, and live a mostly sedentary lifestyle, you WILL eventually develop Metabolic Syndrome.
By and large, for most of us, (and I absolutely include myself) it’s a triple whammy of genetic predisposition, lifestyle choices and a badly misplaced trust in the FDA. If you’re shocked by that, you shouldn’t be. The so-called food pyramid is an inverted dietary time bomb. A high-carb low-fat diet, especially in typical American portions, is a fast-lane super highway to metabolic disaster. Need proof of that? Take a look around you. Obesity is the rule, with morbid to extreme (grade 3~4) being quite common. (I can tell you it’s quite a shocking eye-opener to glance over your physician’s shoulder and see, “morbid obesity” written in red on your own chart.)
I won’t go into the excruciating details here, but I absolutely do recommend reading The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung as soon as possible. Until you do, you may not fully understand metabolic syndrome, diabetes and the ugly consequences of the standard allopathic medical treatments currently in use. Fortunately, he’s easy to read and provides good footnotes, supporting research, clear evidence and well researched solutions. The severely shortened version is, insulin resistance is the problem, and hyperinsulinemia and hyperglycemia are the cause and result. Yeah. It’s a circular problem. Trying to add or induce more insulin to cram even more glucose into already saturated cells won’t fix the underlying problem.
Layman’s overview:
From this layman’s 30,000ft overview, here’s the meat of the matter as I understand it. First, some ugly truths, starting with this. Pre-diabetes is in no way shape or form a sinecure. It is already a clear exigent sign of liver stress and decompensating metabolic dysfunction, (aka, type 2 diabetes). It just hasn’t hit high critical yet. It isn’t something to be pooh-poohed or dallied with. Type 2 Diabetes is really just one of an overall cluster of diseases included in Metabolic Syndrome. Among the others, hypertension, hyperglycemia, hyperinsulinemia and Hyperlipidemia, None of those are particularly well known for their positive outcomes.
Next, denial is deadly. Modern medicine is capable of some pretty miraculous things, but the brutal truth is, once your metabolic system gets busted, it’s gonna give you all kinds of chronic grief. That internal check-engine light is going to spend more time on than off. That can’t be ignored either. Trust these sorts of troubles can be kinda unforgiving. Typically most people’s first major heart attack or stroke … is also their last.
Talk to the Sawbones! Ask questions. Listen to the answers:
That brings us to a quality cooperative relationship with your own doctor. Here you have a number of decisions to make, too. Treatment options are essentially divided into two categories, Allopathic, or Homeopathic. In most cases, once you’ve been diagnosed, you will be advised about the latter, but almost surely and immediately treated with the former. Integrative medicine (using mixed aspects of both allopathic and homeopathic) is likely to produce far better success, but only if the patient is willing and able to make the lifestyle changes necessary.
That kinda begs the question, why do doctors prescribe the treatments and drugs they do. That’s easy. Doctors have come to automatically prescribe certain drugs due to a single simple sad fact. Their patients habitually and chronically tend to refuse to listen to sound medical advice and follow the corrective dietary and lifestyle measures actually needed to effectively treat the disease. Therefore, they have to treat the symptoms. This isn’t particular nor limited to metabolic syndrome patients. The exact same cycle of denial and failure to follow unpopular medical advice lay at the foundation of almost all chronic modern medical ailments.
The trouble with that is, (and our doctors are sadly hyper-aware of this) all medicines are essentially poisonous, otherwise, they wouldn’t work. Our doctors are playing the odds on a curve, balancing efficacious treatment against inherent toxicity. But that’s nothing new, either. Thus is the ultimate catch 22 of the practice of modern allopathic medicine. It’s not quite as dangerous as the days of bleeding and leaches, but surely not without consequences.
Yes. It is all about you:
But for our purposes, and in the interest of brevity in what is already going to be a long article, I’ll limit it to this. Almost every allopathic pharmacologic medication commonly prescribed for treatment of Diabetes Mellitus are indeed poisonous. All have long-term costs. Your liver, kidneys, pancreas and other organs will eventually pay the price of that compromise. Among those organs, the ones which scares me the most, are my eyes. Both diabetes itself, and the medications used to treat it, are hell on your vision. Almost all medications for diabetes will also eventually lose efficacy and become counterproductive. That’s inevitable in that they treat only symptoms, not causality. You’ll have to treat the base causal disease through your own altered behaviors and choices.
In the meantime, once diagnosed, you’re going to have to learn to live with a medical alphabet soup of 3 month A1C blood testing, finger sticks, mg/dl, BGL, BMI, CGM and several others I can’t remember right now. You will also deal with some rather strange symptoms and a bunch of un-fun restrictions and choices. Among the least pleasant of these are the up to thrice daily finger stabs and depressing meter reads, (or continuous monitoring and smart phone alarms for the lucky ones) and a bizarre roller coaster of unstable BGL numbers, blurred vision, circulation issues, tingling extremities, (the beginnings of neuropathy) changes to taste and smell, and out-of-control weight loss and/or gain.
The Bad News:
Unfortunately, dealing with diabetes is not a pop-a-pill proposition. No matter what kind of meds you are on, you will still need to be cognizant and responsive to the concepts of glycemic index and glycemic loading. Rude realities then ensue. Among those, most delightful comfort foods are on the no-no list. Cinnamon rolls, biscuits and gravy, mashed taters, dinner rolls, white (and wheat) bread, pie, cookies, cake, pasta, rice and breakfast cereal gotta go.
You’ll also come to the realization that 80% of the contents of your favorite grocery store is poisonous to you. That seems like something horribly sudden and new, but it’s not. It’s always been that way. We just didn’t notice and hadn’t internalized that fact until we were diagnosed. Likewise, most of your own pantry is likely toxic. White and wheat flour, brown and white sugar, rice, corn meal, baking mixes, pie fillings, honey, jelly, canned fruit, Pop Tarts, BBQ sauce, ketchup, sweet pickles, hot cocoa etc. are all non-starters. Sadly, so is most of the menu at all your favorite cafes and restaurants. Small cafes are the worst. Almost all of their fare is based in easy and cheap calories, which means high sugar content and lots of carbs. Your first encounter with breakfast after being diagnosed is a horrible moment of truth. Toast, french toast, pancakes, waffles, hash browns, hash, biscuits, gravy, syrup, jelly, grits, honey (sigh) and cereal are all off the smart menu. In most places, including our own kitchens, that doesn’t seem to leave a lot of choices. Depression soon follows. However, there’s no reason to blow out the pilot light, and turn on the gas. There are options, and good ones. It just means learning or re-learning how to cook at home.
A quick word here about denial, compromise and fooling ones self. Breaking even … isn’t. Even partial indulgence is a slippery slope. That said, I well understand saying, “Yabbut, I ain’t gonna give up, {insert your non-negotiable here}”. In my case, there are a few things I just refused to give up. One of those is parsnips. Another is blue corn tortilla chips. I can get by with it most of the time, but both must be done rarely and in moderation.
I do pay for those occasional indulgences. Parsnips can only be included in soups and stews so they don’t spike my BGL too high, but they do necessitate being quite aware of the order in which I eat which foods, and then only in quantities which I can get by with safely. Experimentation was required to get that data, and trust the first few attempts spawned some really ugly numbers. For an explanation of fiber combination and food order phenomenon, hit YouTube and search for Dr. Jason Fung and “why food order matters”. He has several short videos which explain these and other concepts very well. Check his video on using vinegar, too.
Sugar types and sorry substitutes:
What’s in common with aspartame, diet soda, high fructose corn syrup, and strychnine?
Same difference. All are highly toxic poisons. And whilst on the subject, refined sugar is indeed delightful, but it’s poisonous, too. It always has been. We’ve just gotten used to it. Amounts matter, the poison is in the dose, and we’ve gone bug-nuts with refined sugar. Sugar is a carbohydrate compound chemically extracted/derived from various plants. Table sugar (sucrose) is about 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Neither is particularly good for you, but of the two, fructose is the biggest offender. Your body can burn glucose without additional processing. Fructose can only be handled and processed by your liver. It also tends to convert directly to fat. Fructose tastes sweeter, but it’s devilishly hard on your liver, and thus your body. It will not only spike your liver with fat, it can and will also spike your triglycerides. That’s bad news for anyone who likes peanut brittle, which is made up almost entirely of high fructose corn syrup.
I put sucralose (Splenda) in the same category as Aspartame. Nasty stuff, both! And both marketed by particularly nasty people. Nope. I just ain’t going there.
The bottom line here is, high fructose corn syrup really should be marketed with a skull and cross bones on the bottle, along with a Mr. Yucky sticker. Aspartame is an evil which never should have been marketed at all! Sucralose (Splenda) ain’t a helluvalot better.
Most of the sugar alcohols are acceptable substitutes. When you decide which to use, be sure to check high temperature stability for cooking, and any known side effects. Flatulence can become an issue. Also avoid those when mixed with maltodextrine. It may say, “no sugar” on the packaging, but maltodextrine’s glycemic index is actually worse than table sugar. Be careful with sorbitol, too. In large amounts, it can have un-fun digestive consequences. Maltitol is okay, but should be used sparingly as well. It is safe for BGL, but it’s not without caloric content. All that said, of all the alternative sweetener choices I have explored so far, I prefer Monkfruit and Stevia. I’ll let you do some research and figure out why.
Some things to expect:
If you decide to go the route of dietary discipline, cutting almost all sugar and carbs out of your diet, don’t expect immediate results in your BGL numbers. It’s working, but it’s gonna take three to six months to resolve into appreciably lower levels. Your system has been hyper-saturated with glucose, and your body has crammed the dang stuff anywhere it can to get it out of your blood. Your cells and tissues are stuffed to leaking with it. Exercise will help burn off what is immediately in the blood, but as BGL drops, excess glucose will leach back out of your body tissues and interstitial spaces. Remember your system is hypersaturated. That means high A1C levels will persist for a while, subject to continued leaching and normal cellular turnover. The glycinated hemoglobin in your red blood cells burns off eventually, but typically it runs in a 3 to 6 month cellular turnover / cellular replacement cycle.
Expect unexplained rapid and unstable vision changes. As it turns out, the lenses in your eyes are quite susceptible to glucose saturation, and their shape will change accordingly, resulting in fairly rapidly visual changes corresponding to saturation level. Once that roller coaster starts, don’t waste your money on any new fancy bi or trifocal lenses. Just get a cheaper single vision set for driving, and one for reading, and wait for things to stabilize.
This all depends, of course, on burning off more glucose than you take in. That means exercise. Any glucose which does not get burned off will stay in your blood, or eventually be converted into fat by your liver, and then stored anyplace available. In short, your biology was designed to not let you starve, and sadly for us … it’s quite good at it.
That brings me to the subject of diet and exercise. When it comes to weight loss and muscle tissue, the reality is, use-it-or-lose-it. By habit, your body will burn off relatively equal amounts of fat and muscle when you lose weight. The only way to slow down the loss of muscle, is to exercise whilst losing weight. Understand that you’re still going to end up facing some challenges in that department. Not the least of which is a completely screwed up sense of balance and body tolerances. Daily range of motion movement may help alleviate that, but the faster the weight comes off, the worse that aspect will be. Also get ready to have bones sticking out where there used to be fat padding. Keep a pad handy for hard seated chairs.
Don’t get discouraged by spiking fasting BGL levels in the mornings. Believe it or not, that’s natural. Around 0300~0400 your body will cortisol kick the liver into dumping a load of glucose into your blood to prepare you for the coming day. As long as your BGL settles down again later in the day, it’s not worth worrying about … unless it gets over 140 mg/dl, and stays there. Then go talk to your doctor about it.
A warning here. Simply drastically cutting calories won’t help you. In fact, it will make things harder. Doing so will drive your body into starvation mode. Then your body won’t allow you to lose, and you won’t get anywhere but more frustrated and miserable. Intermittent fasting is the key. Again, Dr. Jason Fung can provide the details much better than I can. Go back and read that book I recommended above.
Substitute sweeteners and shameless shenanigans:
Once you begin to detox off sugar, you will soon discover there’s more to it than just sweetness. In fact, sugar is very good at masking other flavors. A few sugar substitutes can and will do the same thing. Erythritol comes immediately to mind. Of all the substitutes / replacements, this stuff comes the closest to mimicking real sugar. However, that being said, go easy here and do your own research into this stuff before you heavily indulge. I suspect it is actually problem free, but there has been a single sketchy study (chicken little style) quoted recently which claims erythritol may be co-indicated in some heart attacks and strokes among diabetes patients. (Sigh!)
Yes, I have looked into that one, and found both the study and its funding source severely flawed and suspect. That doesn’t, however, mean more investigation is not warranted. The American Beverage Association was investigated and warned by the FTC for their equally sketchy tactics regarding aspartame – which they sell and heavily support. They were the original funding source for several so-called studies which cast unfounded FUD on almost every other non-aspartame sweetener on the market. That single erythritol study failed to establish any causation or consistent pattern of negative outcome, and only spoke in very general and non-specific terms about a loose correlation with patients who had metabolic syndrome. Thus they attempted to taint erythritol, (and any other non-aspartame sweeteners), with a connection to negative outcomes.
In other words, they pounded on the table and loudly swore that because most cars in accidents have radios, radios must surely be the cause of all car accidents. In short, methinks it was bought-and-paid-for pseudo-science proven by means of illicit money and logical fallacy.
This is not the first time these people have gotten stupid. Early last year – about the time the WHO finally admitted aspartame causes cancer – they made heavy advertising purchases with CNN, and then with a wink and a nod, suggested perhaps Stevia might be problematic, too. True to form, CNN did what they do best – fake news. I’ve still got a copy of the resulting story CNN ran with. To call it anything close to either accurate, news or in any way ethical would require a stretch of imagination few reasonably intelligent people are capable of. (Contact me if you would like a copy. The journalistic misfeasance, malfeasance and stone cold negligence involved is almost hilarious.)
The whole stinkin’ thing put me in mind of the great egg scam during the Johnson administration. (Eggs are one of the best foods for diabetics, by the way.) When egg prices rose in the spring of 1966, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman told Johnson not much could change market forces, Johnson snorted and ordered the Surgeon General to issue multiple alerts about dangerous cholesterol in eggs. Sadly, to this day, those flawed and nefarious studies are still believed, quoted and taught today.
(You might want to remember these things the next time the FDA declares, “beyond a doubt” something else is completely safe and effective. Yeah. The FDA is not your friend. (Ref. tonka beans, eggs, aspartame, sucralose, thalidomide, remdesivir, molnupiravir and various and assorted “vaccines”.))
Supplementation:
Reality check: nutrition absorption gets broken with age, behavior and diet. Once we’ve gotten here two things are clear. Our diets haven’t been stellar, and we’ve gotten older, no longer spunky spring chickens. That brings me to the subject of supplements. The bottom line here is, the older you get, the more difficult it is to extract all the nutrients your body could use from the foods we eat. Climate, weather and direct sun exposure are unpredictable as well. In some cases, our skin hasn’t had a decent direct sunbeam fall on it for months. Ergo, vitamin D gets a bit hard to come by. So, the smart person supplements in the face of iffy absorption.
You will eventually have to do some of your own homework, so I’m just going to list what I take, and then let you dig a bit to find out why.
Berberine
Fenugreek
Ceylon Cinnamon (Cassia vs Ceylon: Both are effective but one is potentially dangerous due to toxic coumarin content. Cassia contains ~1% vs Ceylon containing ~0.0004% Choose wisely.)
Ubiquinol vs CoQ-10 (Both are somewhat the same, except Ubiquinol is a more readily bio-available form. Those under 50 should take CoQ-10. Those over 50, Ubiquinol.)
Vitamin D (D2 and D3)Vitamin K2 (MK7)
Gymnema
Magnesium
Chromium (3)
PQQ (This stuff is totally amazing at clearing away brain fog!)Epilogue:
So that’s a rough starting place on our journey of learning how to live and deal with the 800-pound Type 2 gorilla in the corner. As simplistic as it sounds, in the end it all comes down to understanding the nature of the beast for what it really is, and making appropriate decisions about how you want to handle it. As it turns out, I’ve been on the downward path to this crossroads for a lot longer than I thought. Mea culpa. I wasn’t hearing what my physicians were saying either. Nor was I responding to what my own body was screaming at me.
That said, thinking you already know something, and have nothing left to learn is dangerous. It also turns out that much of what I had been taught, and thought I knew, was completely erroneous. I was taught once you got Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus it was a long slow wasting road into misery and darkness – incurable, unrecoverable and unstoppable. Common wisdom had the inescapable progression as Metformin to insulin to dialysis to peripheral neuropathy to amputations to blindness or worse.
After doing the homework now I know that’s all a complete load of pig pickles and bunny-buttons! As it turns out, we are indeed the masters of our own destiny … in this respect at least. There is not only hope, but promise. The outcome we get with this, is all about — and determined by — the choices we make and the actions we take.
By way of full disclosure, I chose the no-meds diet and exercise route, and so far, it’s working very well.
73 and good luck.
Dit, dit.
February 9, 2024 at 6:00 pm #41630Danial BeardModeratorThis is an enlightening interview.
https://rumble.com/v4azgvi-big-pharma-is-fooling-you-again-and-you-dont-even-know-it.html
February 12, 2024 at 6:35 am #41643Danial BeardModeratorFoods which contain unexpected amounts of suger
- Canned soup (Campbells soups are totally shot through with it.)
- Fast food french fries
- Boullion cubes Yeah. I know. Whoodathunkedit!
- Steak sauce (Okay, this one isn’t all that surprising.)
- BBQ Sauce. (Especially the good ones. (Sigh!))
- Jerky
- Bacon
- Sausage (store bought)
- Pickles
- Store bought salad dressing (Even the Italian is sweetened)
- Vtamin pills (childrens chewables and gummies)
Foods which contain hidden Aspartame
- Wrigleys chewing gum — all flavors
- Dairy case chocolate milk (Using several creative monikers)
- Voortman sugar free cookies (several varieties)
- Some sugar free sports drinks
- Some brands of childrens vitamins
February 12, 2024 at 1:45 pm #41650Danial BeardModeratorHemlock by any other name …
Common re-branding names used for Aspartame:
- Equal
- NutraSweet
- Sugar Twin
- Canderel
- Ajinomoto
- AminoSweet
- Sanecta
- TwinSweet
Aspartame has been owned by:
- G.D. Searle (original inventor/producer)
- Monsanto
- NutraSweet
- J.W. Childs Associates Equity partners II LP
February 13, 2024 at 6:11 am #41659KI5VGQMemberI sure have to change my eating habits. I am pre, so I am there. Great post.
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