What Do Your Results Mean?
You add the first four glucose readings( at fasting, thirty-minute, one-hour and two-hour intervals) of your GTT together. This is called your glucose-tolerance sum. If the total( in mg %) is below 500, you are normal. If the total( in mg %) is above 800, you are considered diabetic. The gray area, between 500 and 800 mg %, is called impaired glucose tolerance, and nearly half of the significantly obese fall into that area. The closer your total approaches the 800 mg % mark, the more probable it is that you will eventually be classified as a true Type II diabetic. But there is still some good news for you: Even if you are well into the diabetic range and are heavy, normalizing your weight by permanently controlling your carbohydrate intake can get you within-and keep you in-the normal range for life.
Clearly these lab results could show you whether you have diabetes, but more likely they will show whether you ' re on the road toward it. If you have a pre-diabetic finding and especially a weight problem, you have an urgent reason to follow a controlled carb eating plan-in other words, to do Atkins-with diligence.
What Is the Nutritional Answer to Diabetes?
Earlier in this chapter I pointed out that I have yet to see a study that showed that a high carbohydrate level in a diet is more helpful to diabetics than is Atkins. But I didn ' t tell you why. Even though the controlled carbohydrate approach was the standard diabetic therapy until 1950, the ADA abandoned it without ever doing a single test comparing it with a controlled carbohydrate eating plan that followed the Atkins approach.
Most studies that have been conducted were done with diets too high in carbohydrates to be consistent with the controlled carbohydrate approach that is Atkins.
Here is a small sample of the research done over the last seven or eight years. In the mid- 1990s, researchers began to compare the effects of high monounsaturated-fat diets with the effects of high-carbohydrate diets in diabetic patients. A study by Dr. Abhimanyu Garg at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center showed that compared with the high-fat diet, the high-carbohydrate diet increased risk factors for heart disease-in the form of triglyceride levels and VLDL( very-low density lipoprotein) cholesterol levels-by twenty-four and twentythree percent respectively. The high-carb diet also increased glucose and insulin levels by ten and twelve percent. The numbers are less impressive than we usually see in our clinical practice because, in the high-fat diet studied, the level of carbohydrate consumed wasn ' t low enough to trigger lipolysis.
In a somewhat similar Australian study, researchers noted that " the currently recommended high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet " produces unfavorable effects on both glucose levels and cholesterol levels in people with mild and severe cases of diabetes. By 1996, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York were testing a high-ketogenic, very low-calorie diet in comparison with a low-ketogenic, very low-calorie diet for diabetics. The high-ketogenic diet turned out to be considerably more effective in controlling blood-sugar levels.
All these studies indicate the superiority of almost any form of carbohydrate control over regimens comprising up to fifty-five percent carbohydrate foods. In Chapter 27, I ' m going to show you in detail how formidable the evidence has become to indicate that the control of carbohydrates is not only heart-safe but also heart-protective. This is crucial to the diabetes
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