{"id":1458,"date":"2022-04-15T13:03:55","date_gmt":"2022-04-15T13:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/health\/diabetes\/lifestyle-changes-to-prevent-diabetes-heart-attacks-and-cancers.html"},"modified":"2024-10-04T08:42:52","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T12:42:52","slug":"lifestyle-changes-to-prevent-diabetes-heart-attacks-and-cancers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=1458","title":{"rendered":"Lifestyle Changes to Prevent and Treat Diabetes"},"content":{"rendered":"

A healthful plant-based diet can help to cure Type II diabetes if you already have it, or help to protect you from developing diabetes in the first place. People who eat the healthful plant-based foods — vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts and other seeds — are far better protected than those who eat the “unhealthful” plant-derived foods, such as refined grains, fried potatoes and sugar-added foods (Diabetologia<\/em>, April 8, 2022)<\/mirkin>.<\/p>\n

For this Diabetes Prevention Study from Harvard, researchers used data on 8,827 participants in three prospective studies: the Nurses\u2019 Health Study, the Nurses\u2019 Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The authors applied numbers to foods to rate diets on the basis of a food’s ability to help control blood sugar levels. The higher the healthful plant-based diet index score, the less likely a person was to develop diabetes. Foods were classified as:
\n\u2022 healthful plant-based foods, including whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, vegetable oils, and unsweetened tea and coffee
\n\u2022 unhealthful plant-based foods, including bakery products and other refined grains, fruit juices, potatoes, sugar-sweetened beverages, and any foods with added sugar
\n\u2022 animal-based foods, including animal fats, dairy, eggs, fish, meat and other animal products.<\/p>\n

An earlier study called the DIRECT trial<\/a> found that 46 percent of 149 diabetics who were not on insulin became non-diabetic through a one-year, plant-based weight-loss program (Lancet<\/em>, Feb 10, 2018;391(10120):541-551)<\/mirkin>. Those who lost 33 pounds or more were most likely to go into remission. Two years later, one third of those in remission kept the extra weight off and remained cured of their diabetes (Lancet Diabetes Endocrino<\/em>l, May 2019;7(5):344-355)<\/mirkin>.\u00a0 Diabetics in the DIRECT study, who followed a strict 800-calorie-per-day diet and lost a lot of weight, were also able to lower their high blood pressure (Diabetologia<\/em>, May 31, 2021:10.1007\/s00125-021-05471-x)<\/mirkin>. Many of these patients were able to stop taking all blood pressure medications, as long as they did not regain their lost weight and their blood pressure and blood tests for diabetes remained normal.<\/p>\n

Liver Fat More Important than Total Weight in Reversing Diabetes<\/strong>
\nResearchers found that weight loss reversed Type II diabetes in participants whose weight {body mass index or BMI) was in a moderate range (BMJ<\/em>, July 7, 2021;374:n1449)<\/mirkin>. The authors believe that lowering levels of fat around the liver is more important than just lowering body weight. The vast majority of diabetics are insulin-resistant, which means that their livers don\u2019t respond to insulin. When blood sugar levels rise, the pancreas releases insulin which lowers blood sugar by driving sugar from the bloodstream into the liver. However, if the liver is full of fat, it does not accept the sugar and drives blood sugar levels even higher to cause diabetes.<\/p>\n

Who Is At Risk for Diabetes?<\/strong>
\nAccording to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 29 million North Americans have diabetes, and at least 25 percent of these people do not know they have it. Another 86 million adults (one in three) have pre-diabetes<\/a> and thus are at high risk for dementia, heart attacks, cancers, nerve damage, blindness, deafness and the many other side effects of diabetes. People most likely to develop diabetes are those who:
\n\u2022 have a family history of diabetes
\n\u2022 are overweight
\n\u2022 store fat primarily in the belly, rather than the hips
\n\u2022 have small, narrow hips
\n\u2022 have triglycerides >150
\n\u2022 have low levels of the good HDL cholesterol (<40 mg\/dL)
\n\u2022 have a fasting blood sugar greater than 100 mg\/dL
\n\u2022 have a blood sugar over 145 mg\/dL two hours after eating
\n\u2022 have a HBA1c greater than 5.5 (HBA1c is a blood test that measures how much sugar is stuck on cells and predicts cell damage from high blood sugar levels)
\n\u2022 have a fatty liver (shown by abnormal liver blood tests and a sonogram of the liver)
\n\u2022 have small particle HDL and LDL cholesterol
\n\u2022 have high blood pressure
\n\u2022 smoke
\n\u2022 take more than one alcoholic drink a day or binge drink
\n\u2022 have small muscles
\n\u2022 do not exercise
\n\u2022 in men, a thick neck or male pattern baldness
\n\u2022 in women, excess hair on the face or body, or have diabetes during pregnancy<\/p>\n

Four types of drugs used to prevent heart attacks increase diabetes risk: statins, niacin, thiazide diuretics, and beta blockers (Am Heart J<\/em>, April, 2014:421-428). If you are taking any of these drugs, discuss this with your doctor.<\/p>\n

Lifestyle Changes to Prevent or Treat Diabetes<\/strong>
\nType II diabetes shortens lives by causing high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks, and many types of cancers (Circulation,<\/em> 2019;139:2228\u20132237)<\/mirkin>. If you have any of the risk factors for diabetes listed above, you should start a diabetes prevention program that includes:<\/p>\n

\u2022 avoid all sugared drinks including fruit juices
\n\u2022 severely restrict all sugar-added foods and other refined carbohydrates
\n\u2022 restrict fried foods
\n\u2022 avoid red meat (blocks insulin receptors)
\n\u2022 avoid processed meats
\n\u2022 avoid smoking and being around smokers
\n\u2022 avoid alcohol or take no more than one drink a day
\n\u2022 lose weight if overweight
\n\u2022 eat a wide variety of vegetables, fruits and other healthful plant-based foods
\n\u2022 keep hydroxy vitamin D above 30 ng\/mL
\n\u2022 exercise<\/p>\n

My Recommendations<\/strong>
\nIf your blood sugar level is greater than 145 mg\/dL one hour after you eat a meal, you are diabetic and can suffer all the serious side effects of that disease, even if your fasting blood sugar level is normal.
\n\u2022 If you have any of the signs of diabetes listed above, start the diet and lifestyle changes immediately. People who already have diabetes can become non-diabetic if they follow these lifestyle changes rigorously and permanently.
\n\u2022 Whatever your age and weight, you can help to protect yourself from developing diabetes by following these same rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A healthful plant-based diet can help to cure Type II diabetes if you already have it, or help to protect you from developing diabetes in the first place. People who eat the healthful plant-based foods — vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts and other seeds –are far better protected than those who eat the “unhealthful” plant-derived foods, such as refined grains, fried potatoes and sugar-added foods<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[74,170,414],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diabetes","tag-diabetes","tag-fasting-blood-sugar","tag-insulin-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8409,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/8409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}