The One Diet With 62% Lower Risk For Getting Diabetes – By Author Brenda Davis

Intro

thank you so much for for arriving early in the morning and being here and i’m really looking forward to uh just getting to know more people i’ve been so excited to get to know so many of you so uh looking forward to that and and this morning what we’re going to be talking about is uh kick diabetes essentials and that’s the title of actually my latest book and i’m excited about what i have to share with you this morning

Outline

so a very brief outline we’re going to talk about can diabetes be reversed then we’re going to going to delve into our plant-based diets effective in preventing and treating type 2 diabetes and i’ll share some of what i learned working in the marshall islands and then we’ll talk about what makes plant-based diets so effective for treating type 2 diabetes and then the practical piece so this is a a little longer piece the essential so the essential ingredients for reversing type 2 diabetes and i’ll tell you that i i’ve been one of the people involved in creating a continuing education program for physicians on diabetes through the american college of lifestyle medicine and a lot of what i’m going to share here today is part of that particular module for physicians so the first question

Can diabetes be reversed

can diabetes actually be reversed and the answer is yes type 2 diabetes can be reversed in most but not all individuals so you would say well i wonder if it can be reversed in my case and i can tell you that for most people it’s reversible for the only people for whom it’s not are people that have basically completely destroyed their beta cells over many many years so they might be people who have had diabetes for 30 or 40 years and and it’s been very severe their pancreas has been so overworked that the beta cells have conked out and and in those people it may not be reversible

American Diabetes Association

and in fact you know many um many doctors learned during medical school that type 2 diabetes was a progressive irreversible disease and so many people still believe that but in fact even the american diabetes association created a consensus statement on diabetes reversal and released it in 2009 so we’ve known this for many years that diabetes is reversible and in this particular statement they had three requirements for complete remission or reversal of this disease so the patient has to be off of course all their diabetes medications they have to have normal glycemic measures like a normal a1c and a normal fasting glucose and in this particular definition both of these must be maintained for at least a year and it’s the third point that’s quite controversial in you know among the experts some would say oh three months is enough some will say six months but the the first two are consistent everyone agrees they must be off all their medications and they must have normal glycemic measures to have the the the diagnosis reversed

Lines of Evidence

so what are the lines of evidence for diabetes reversal well believe it or not one of the first lines of evidence was reversal in patients who had undergone bariatric surgery so bariatric surgeons were consistently witnessing the reversal of diabetes in fairly short order in their patients and it was it was really quite a a mystery but it was discovered that what was happening is the the fat the the um the excess fat that accumulates in the liver is one of the first things to go after you’ve had bariatric surgery and that is probably the biggest contributor to insulin resistance is the fat in the liver and then the same people that did the bariatric surgery at least some of the same groups like roy taylor’s group did the same type of thing but using a very low calorie diet instead of bariatric surgery to see if just diet alone would work so they used a diet that was about six to eight hundred calories and low and behold the disease reversed then the third line of evidence is is patients who adopt a healthy lifestyle and get back to a healthy body weight and most often this is done using a whole food plant-based diet

Are PlantBased Diets Effective

so let’s talk a little bit more about the plant-based diet so are plant-based diets effective in preventing type 2 diabetes well we have a few studies that have looked at this and this is the adventist health study this is the adventist health study 2 and and i actually have a little laser pointer now but you can see here that that non-vegetarians it’s a 7.6 percent of them have type 2 diabetes had type 2 diabetes in this particular cohort now what’s really interesting here is that these folks are all health conscious individuals they exercise the same amount they drink the same amount of alcohol smoke the same amount so they they’re health conscious about their diets they eat fairly you know high levels of fruits and vegetables compared to the general population and they die at about half the rates of the general population so 7.6 this is what i wanted to show you here in the general population 12 to 14 percent of americans have to have diabetes and and this is the real shocker 37 to 38 have pre-diabetes and this is of course adults which means 49 to 52 percent of american adults have either type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes it is absolutely shocking and it and and it’s scary because diabetes often leads to heart disease and amputations and diabetes and so on and i’m sorry and and and um um blindness and kidney failure and so forth so uh 6.1 percent of semi-vegetarians 4.8 percent of pesco vegetarians 3.2 percent of lacto-ovo vegetarians and only 2.9 of vegans with uh type two diabetes so you can see the huge difference so then they followed the people that didn’t have diabetes to see who would develop diabetes and compared to non-vegetarians uh lacto-ovo vegetarians had 38 percent lower risk and vegans had 62 percent lower risk of developing

PlantBased Diets and Diabetes

the disease now this study i discovered this morning i was absolutely stunned that i hadn’t seen it before i thought my eyes were failing me as i was looking at it about six o’clock this morning and epic oxford i’ve been waiting for years for epic oxford to release findings about diabetes and well they finally have uh compared to similar health conscious meat eaters the risk of developing diabetes was 53 percent lower among fish eaters that’s that’s people who are vegetarian plus fish and it was only 37 percent lower among vegetarians and vegans combined they didn’t separate the vegetarians and vegans so this was a real shock to me i did a double take when i looked at it because it’s not reflective of the other studies we’ve seen so why would people eating fish have lower risk well perhaps the vegetarians are eating a little more of this stuff that’s my guess they’re eating more refined carbohydrates in this particular cohort i don’t know that it’s a wild gas