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Dr. McDougall's Response to:
This article reads like a multimillion dollar sales promotion
for the pharmaceutical industries by telling diabetics that they
are being inadequately treated by their doctors who are focusing
only on medications to lower their blood sugar. To make matters
right, primary medical attention must be shifted to the addition
of even more drugs. She quotes an expert, ‘"We already have the
miracle pills' — statins and blood pressure medications…"
Kolata overlooked the scientifically established and
well-accepted fact that type-2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and
high blood pressure are all three due to eating the rich Western
diet, and the obvious treatment used by responsible physicians
would be to correct the patient's diet. There is an epidemic of
diseases of over-nutrition—worldwide more than 1.1 billion
people are overweight and 312 million obese, 197 million have
diabetes, 1 billion have hypertension, and 18 million people die
of heart disease annually. Over the last two decades, there has
been a 10-fold increase in the incidence of type-2 diabetes in
children in the USA, because of the rapidly growing numbers who
are obese from an escalating exposure to rich foods, compounded
by a lack of exercise.
The few references to diet she makes in this article are
focused on the importance of counting carbohydrates, as if these
were the "evil calories" that caused diabetes. The truth is
populations who consume diets highest in carbohydrates, like the
people of rural Japan eating rice, Peru eating potatoes, and
Mexico eating corn are essentially free of type-2 diabetes—and
hypertension, obesity, and high cholesterol. When these people
migrate to the USA or Europe and eat fewer carbohydrates and
more fat, they lose their immunity to these illnesses. Commonly,
patients at our live-in clinic with type-2 diabetes will stop
taking 30 to 120 units of insulin and a bag full of
"anti-diabetic pills" daily, and their blood sugars will become
normal in as little as 7 days, as a result of eating a diet
based on whole plant foods with a little exercise. They also
lose weight, reduce their cholesterol, and their blood pressure
comes down.
Any well-read scientist or science writer would understand
the benefits of carbohydrate. As far back as the 1920s
experiments showed carbohydrates make the body's insulin work
more efficiently, while fat paralyzes insulin's actions. A
recent thorough review of the use of high carbohydrate diets in
the treatment of type-2 diabetes, published in the September
2003 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
reported improvements in blood sugars in diabetics, with 39%
stopping insulin and 71% stopping diabetic pills after three
weeks of therapy.
To her credit, Kolata did point out several things: blood
sugar control with medications is difficult and expensive and
has not been proven to save lives. With further study she can
learn that the benefits from medications to treat cholesterol
and high-blood pressure are also of limited value, especially
when compared to those seen after a change in diet and
lifestyle. Kolata writes that diabetes has little to do with an
out-of-control diet and sedentary lifestyle and with the
resulting overweight. Furthermore, she believes patients are
unable to control their disease, no matter what they do.
Essentially they are trapped by genetics. Their only hope is to
buy drugs. Fortunately, she is wrong. I believe people, if given
the chance, would choose the most effective, least toxic, and
most economical therapies—those focused on non-profit lifestyle
medicine. Unfortunately, "cash is king," and the drug companies
rule.
To learn more about diabetes,
see my Hot Topics, diabetes.»
John McDougall, MD
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