The Types Of Foods That Can Reverse Chronic Diseases Like Diabetes – By Author Brenda Davis

we have a choice and when you make a good choice uh it’s unbelievable what happens and this is my i share this case study often because i i love it it’s uh it’s one that inspires me personally uh so much

this is andreas he received a rare cancer diagnosis at 36 years of age he went from being a food and wine aficionado extraordinaire to being a whole food plant-based diet devotee and his cancer went into remission but the real story here is what happened to the rest of his family

the the health changes they all saw were amazing because when andreas went on the plant-based diet the entire family said andreas whatever diet you’re doing we’re doing with you because we want to support you and always be able to eat as a family and that’s the part that i don’t see very often

i just thought it was so touching and what greater gift could you give to a loved one than than to support them in that way but the real story here is about his father carlos you see carlos had had type 2 diabetes since the 80s

he had had a serious heart attack he had one just before andreas was diagnosed he had hypertension high cholesterol peripheral artery disease early stage renal failure recurring gout and his prognosis was not good he was told he had progressive irreversible diseases um that he may as have as little as two years left he better get his affairs in order

um you know his kidneys were starting to fail things were not good he was being treated on 17 pills a day and 35 to 40 units of insulin and after less than a year on a whole food plant-based diet carlos was taking zero insulin and zero pills

um pretty remarkable you can see here is fasting glucose went down to 80 to 87 millimoles or milligrams per deciliter a1c 5.1 blood pressure 115 over 70. he couldn’t achieve that on two medications

he they did pet scans his his arteries opened up his peripheral artery disease disappeared his kidney function normalized he didn’t get one single refer further recurrence of gout he was getting six or seven or eight uh episodes a year um and seven years later he’s still free of these diseases and these medications

and here’s his cardiovascular disease reports you can see he had very severe heart disease he had an inferior wall infarct superimposed with ischemia he had hypokinesis he had a reduced ejection fraction look at this that was 2005. look at 2017 no evidence of abnormal cardiac activity no evidence of ischemia normal chamber size normal ejection fraction

it’s unbelievable but this is what is possible not everyone is willing to make the necessary lifestyle changes or the kinds of lifestyle changes that carlos made but every single person has a right to know that lifestyle changes are a safe and highly effective treatment option

and you know i often meet physicians who say oh well i believe you but my patients would never do that and what i say in response is how do you know how can they do that if you don’t inform them your job as a physician is not to decide for your patient what they will or will not do but rather to lay the options out on the table

if you don’t lay it out as an option how can they possibly choose it and so i think we really need to get with the program you know the diet goal is simple it is diabetes reversal and nothing less that’s what we’re after

so in order to in order to accomplish this task we have to overcome insulin resistance which means producing weight loss and overweight patients it means overcoming lipotoxicity and inflammation and oxidative stress and dysbiosis it means restoring nutritional health

and so what are the essential ingredients for diabetes reversal well essential ingredient number one is whole plant foods we want 10 or more servings of non-starchy vegetables and fruits each day and a wide range of them

what we know is that the more vegetables and fruits people seem to eat the lower the diabetes risk for every serving risk was reduced by 13 percent for green vegetables green leafy vegetables 10 percent for other vegetables 7 percent for fruits imagine if we had 10 servings of green leafy vegetables our our or even 10 servings of other vegetables 10 times 10 you know nothing we’d be out of the woods

practical pointers here we want people to eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables to be exposed to the widest variety of phytonutrients they can possibly be exposed to we want to make dark greens a daily staple at least three times a day or at least three cups a day and preferably more

eat a giant salad um six or eight cups of greens in that salad uh and and we want to include berries because they have the highest fiber and antioxidants and the lowest sugar of all fruits

so overall we want to select unprocessed or minimally processed choices unprocessed like fresh fruits and vegetables minimally processed like frozen plain fruits and vegetables we want to moderate processed foods like unsweetened juices or canned fruits and vegetables

the the exception would be green juices without a lot of sweetness i would say that would be a reasonable option to increase antioxidant status of the individual we want to completely avoid the highly processed choices like sweetened fruit-based desserts and deep-fried vegetables

we want a lot of legumes for people with diabetes three or more servings a day would be optimal and we’re talking about a half a cup in a serving legumes lower diabetes risk there was a study of 65 almost 65 000 women that found 38 lower risk in the highest versus lowest quintile of legume intake

and the reason i think it wasn’t higher is because the lowest versus the highest they were both low so people that eat more i would expect to have an even better result it was 47 percent lower in the highest versus lowest quintile of soybean intake which i thought was quite interesting

practical pointers here include at least one of those servings preferably more as whole legumes beans or lentils or sprouted lentils something like that feature legumes at every meal

some people say well how do i eat it at breakfast well in the marshall islands one of the things we always served at breakfast was beans and greens and they loved it so you can do beans and greens with onions but the other thing that i do when i cook my grain for breakfast so i love kamut berries organic camus berries organic spelt berries i like the big chewy grains i just they’re very sadiating to me

but i mix them with lentils and i cook the lentils with my whole grain so if you’re cooking barley or oat groats or whatever throw some lentils in and i stick to whole grain intact grains but i’ll tell you more about that later so throw legumes on your salads throw them in your soups

and and if you’re eating pasta eat legume pasta like what they have out in the hallway there so you can get lentil-based pastas or chickpea-based pastas a select unprocessed or minimally processed like beans lentils peas or tofu tempeh or the bean pasta

moderately processed would be like veggie meats ready tea candor frozen bean dishes and highly processed would be things like deep fried tofu salty bean-based snacks like bean chips and crackers for example