question, for diabetes is a major risk factor for heart disease. Indeed, it ' s fair to say that if you have diabetes, you may also have heart disease. The damage done to the cardiovascular system by high insulin levels over decades is tremendous. Combine that damage with the health problems of being overweight and having high blood pressure, and you have what has become a new buzzword in medicine: Syndrome X. Turn to Chapter 27 for a thorough discussion.
The study closest to evaluating the effects of a controlled carbohydrate approach such as Atkins to diabetes control was done at Sansum Medical Research Foundation. There, diabetic subjects were put on a dietary regimen that contained only twenty-five percent carbohydrate for eight weeks. They were then switched to a regimen that contained fifty-five percent carbohydrate for another eight weeks. On the controlled carbohydrate segment, the subjects ' glucose values improved, their diastolic blood pressure went down and they lost weight. When they were placed on the high-carbohydrate segment, one of the indicators for diabetes got worse and none of the improvements seen on the controlled carbohydrate segment occurred.
Appropriate research in which the level of carbohydrate intake results in lipolysis, as compared to a higher intake of carbohydrates, is finally in progress( although not yet published). When these studies are published, the evidence that the standard dietary approach to diabetes should be changed will undoubtedly be compelling. The fact that by controlling carbohydrate intake one controls glucose and insulin is hardly surprising. When you add to this the fact that a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach is outstandingly effective at decreasing the risk factors for heart disease, the medical world needs only to exert common sense and a little courage to overturn the standard clinical approach that has been so harmful to so many people for so many decades.
Can the Course of Diabetes Be Reversed?
If you want to know why I am so certain that the comparison testing will prove Atkins to be so effective, it is because in our clinical practice we have treated over five thousand Type II diabetics. Of those taking insulin-stimulating drugs( sulfonylurea) we were able to get the vast majority off those drugs. And of Type II diabetics taking insulin, more than half were able to cease their injections. Here is one of thousands of exciting case histories.
Janet Drake credits doing Atkins with saving her life and her leg. Only 47 years old, she had been diabetic for seventeen years. When she got a blister on one toe, it turned into cellulitis, with a red line extending up her leg to her knee. One of the doctors at the hospital where she then worked as a nurse warned her that she might have to have the toe or the whole leg amputated if she didn ' t get her blood sugar down fast. Janet knew that her glucose level was around 290, far too high despite the fact that she gave herself insulin injections two or three times a day and had been prescribed both Glucophage and Glyburide, oral medications that help control diabetes.
The next day she went to see her eye doctor because she had been having headaches. He told her about an earlier edition of this book. Janet went directly to the mall, bought the book, came home, put her foot in a tub of Epsom salts and water and started to read.
" I started doing Atkins that day at lunch," she recalls. " By Friday my foot was healed, my headaches were gone and my blood sugar was down to 190. I dropped 16 pounds by the end of the second week. A week later my blood-sugar level was consistently 150 and my doctor took me off insulin. When I had lost 30 pounds, I was able to stop the oral medications as well."
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