Sunday, February 26, 2017

McDougall Advanced Seminar September 2016



John McDougall spoke about current practices in diabetes treatment, a topic I have recently studied and given presentations about. Diabetes drugs and monitoring devices are a huge business, one of the major profit sources for the medical industry. In recent years many of these products have increased dramatically in price as pharmaceutical companies try to increase profits. The strength of big pharma’s relationship to government has prevented control of unjustifiable prices in the United States.

The following is a combination of my findings and McDougall’s:

 Diabetes prevention and treatment are among the greatest tragedies of modern medicine. As we have developed brilliant diagnostic tools and surgical techniques we have failed in the management of chronic diseases, especially diabetes. Diabetes is typically divided into type 1, a disease of insufficient insulin production and type 2, a disease of insulin resistance where cells cannot effectively use insulin. Recently, more people have developed a combination of the two types in which there is less than optimal insulin production plus insulin resistance, a condition sometimes referred to as type 1.5 diabetes. All types have increased blood sugar plus very high rates of premature death, many vascular diseases, cancer and dementia. This is a terrible disease.

 When insulin was discovered in the early 1920’s people with type 1 diabetes were no longer doomed to early death due to high blood sugar. In that era type 2 diabetes was much less common (the western diet was not as bad as it is now) and not understood as a separate disease. A few years after insulin became available doctors were shocked that their diabetic patients were still dying prematurely just as before insulin was available- only a few years later in life. Even with glucose (blood sugar) lowering, diabetes of both types predisposes to aggressive vascular disease in large vessels (heart attacks, strokes, amputations) and small vessels (kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy.) Elliot Joslin, a famous diabetologist of the early 20th century, said that diabetic patients formerly died of too much blood sugar but now died of too much fat in the blood which caused fatal forms of vascular disease. We’ve known this for 90 years but little has been done to effectively fix the problem, and diabetics are still dying prematurely and suffering from heart attacks, strokes, amputations, kidney failure, blindness and neuropathy. The assumption that control of blood sugar with insulin and oral drugs would prevent these diabetes complications has turned out to be false. In fact, all of the drug treatments for diabetes have major side effects which often over-shadow the advantage of their blood sugar lowering. Multiple reviews have concluded that there is little advantage to intensive blood sugar monitoring and treatment. Intensive monitoring fills the patient’s life, preventing joy in day to day activities. Intensive treatment often leads to episodes of hypoglycemia (too low blood sugar) which are dangerous, even fatal.

A major multi-university study in 1970 concluded that diabetic patients would be just as well off if they had no treatment at all! Little has changed since then. Oral drugs are more sophisticated and much, much more expensive but offer little benefit. 
Since this area is such a huge, profitable business the medical industry does not acknowledge this proven fact, and most doctors are trained to give these drugs in large quantities. Type 1 diabetes will always require insulin; type 2 diabetes is curable by diet alone. Some patients with type 1.5 diabetes will require small doses of insulin even on a healthy whole food plant based diet. McDougall emphasizes that he gives no one oral diabetes drugs since, with a healthy diet, their glucose lowering effect is not necessary and they may lead to dangerous hypoglycemia and other serious side effects.

 First line oral therapy is usually metformin, chosen because it has the least side effects. But multiple reviews of this drug have failed to show increased longevity and there is only questionable minimal improvement in some complication rates. Other common drugs, sulfonylureas and Avandia, have increased rates of cardiovascular disease and other serious side effects.
Avandia is still heavily marketed and prescribed in spite of a $3 billion fine for poor reporting of results, and there are over 50,000 lawsuits pending due to serious complications from this drughttps://www.drugwatch.com/avandia/lawsuit.php
You can imagine the profits made by these drugs if they are still selling one with this track record. A few new drugs are reported to offer a very small decrease in cardiovascular disease but with serious drug side effects and at great expense. Drugs are approved by the FDA and heavily prescribed if they lower blood sugar, but the problem with diabetes is premature death, terrible vascular complications, increased cancer and dementia rates which drugs do not help. Only a whole food plant based diet allows diabetics good health and longevity!


 The frequency of diabetic vascular complications is much lower in those on a whole food plant based diet. Isidore Snapper, a famous physician-researcher of the mid 20th century, was chief of medicine at the Rockefeller Institute hospital in Beijing (then called Peiping.) He wrote that, none of the patients in his large diabetes clinic had any complication of the disease and concluded that their diet of rice and vegetables with little animal products or vegetable oils (they were too poor to afford these foods) protected them from the ravages of diabetes which most western civilization patients suffer. Ironically, the mainstay of their diet was white rice, a relatively low nutrient food which is frequently vilified as a cause of health issues. Vascular disease and all its sequelae are the result of too much animal product food and refined vegetable oils, not carbohydrates. Refined grains (wheat, rice) and sugars including honey and agave are unhealthy foods but do not cause diabetes or diabetic complications. If combined with animal products and refined oils they will add to the problem. Experimental animals and people fed sugar don’t become diabetic; those fed a high fat diet do.

John McDougall also spoke on “Does Sugar Feed Cancer:”

 Proponents of low carb diets claim that sugar is the major culprit in the development and progression of cancer. The scientific literature contradicts this.
 A review by a national study group concluded that high fat diets are the problem in cancer and that there is not good evidence that carbohydrates promote cancer. A possible mechanism is the slowing of blood flow caused by a high fat meal. (Vegetable oils like olive oil cause even more slowing than than animal product fat.) A typical American high fat meal leads to a 20% decrease in the amount of oxygen delivered to body tissues for several hours, often up until the next high fat meal. The theory that low oxygen levels promote the development and progression of cancer was proposed by the Nobel winning biologist, Otto Warburg, and later confirmed in cell cultures and experimental animals.  Clinical studies have confirmed that a whole food plant based diet (which will be low fat) significantly increases longevity in people with known cancer and the American Cancer Society now states this in its patient information literature.

Kevin Hall, the lead researcher on obesity at the NIH, discussed his findings:

 Drastic diets change the perception of what you need to eat and so participants in THE BIGGEST LOSER TV series all are long term failures. They revert quickly to normal eating habits and back towards previous weight. Most think they are still dieting since the effort not to eat even more is very high. Very severe calorie restriction plus heavy exercise always fails because of this reprogramming of appetite levels.

 A modest number of those on true low fat or true low carb diets do succeed at long term weight control but it’s currently not possible to predict who will succeed on either. Hall mentions other issues like longevity, cardiovascular disease and cancer due to diet but doesn’t discuss them. As he points out, weight is a marker for health and is not the bottom line. Of course, this is where a whole food plant based diet shines, with overwhelming evidence that it is good at avoiding/treating many diseases regardless of the relative value of different diets for weight loss.

 Ironically one of his studies was partially funded by the Taubes group to help prove the carb-insulin model of insulin secretion. Proponents of low carb diets have claimed that carbohydrates cause insulin secretion (true) and therefore lead to promotion of obesity and poor health (totally false.) In metabolic ward studies (research subjects live in the research lab where all their food intake and activity are monitored) Hall’s studies showed that a low fat diet resulted in more body fat loss than a low carb diet which led to loss of more muscle tissue, not fat- exactly the opposite of what Taubes and other low carb advocates have been claiming. It’s a devastating study for this movement since it destroys the major scientific basis of their diet. In addition to being bad for health (CV, auto-immune, cancer, overall longevity) the low carb diet is also bad for fat loss versus muscle loss. In spite of this research, none of them have retracted their dangerous advocacy of high fat and protein diets. Even worse, the popular press parrots their advice like gospel.



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