Diabetes: The Blame Game

Let’s not mince words around here: There are people and agencies to blame for the epidemic of type 2 diabetes and, to a lesser extent, type 1 diabetes. It’s a dark conversation that may make you suspicious of your neighbors, but it is part of succeeding in a world filled with misinformation.

The boom in the numbers of Americans, as well as people in other parts of the world, who are diabetic is not due to a flaw in genetics. It is not due to an infectious agent. We cannot blame bad luck. Type 2 diabetes is a man-made phenomenon, a situation created by a number of factors that include bad diet, food additives, pharmaceutical agents, inactivity, and over-exposure to antibiotics, all man-made activities. So let’s assign blame to the people and agencies that have created and/or worsened this situation. They include:

• U.S. Dietary Guidelines—Cutting fat and cholesterol and increasing consumption of “healthy whole grains” shifts the diet towards one that causes insulin resistance, weight gain, and thereby type 2 diabetes (as well as type 1 diabetes due to increased exposure to the gliadin protein of wheat and related grains that provokes the autoimmune attack on the pancreas).
   
• Doctors, dietitians, and the healthcare system—Who, without thoroughly considering the implications, embraced dietary guidelines and false mantras such as “move more, eat less,” or “everything in moderation.” They also allowed industry, such as soft drink, breakfast cereal, and snack food manufacturers to influence the message. Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Nabisco, and many others are therefore major players in crafting dietary advice.
   
• Fill in the blank: American ——— Association—Yes: groups that purport to prevent disease and support research are part of the problem, dispensing advice that causes diabetes or makes it worse, advice that increases reliance on pharmaceutical agents to control blood glucose and other aspects of the disease such as hypertension, hypertriglyceridemia, and fatty liver.
   
• Food manufacturers—Sometimes it’s intentional, such as heavy marketing to lower socioeconomic groups or to children. Sometimes it’s inadvertent, such as reliance on food additives including emulsifying agents (e.g., polysorbate 80, carboxymethylcellulose, carrageenan), preservatives (e.g., sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate), synthetic sweeteners (e.g., aspartame, saccharine, sucralose) that are major disrupters of the gastrointestinal microbiome that, in turn, leads to weight gain, inflammation, insulin resistance, and thereby type 2 diabetes.
   
• Pharmaceutical industry—The closer you adhere to conventional dietary advice, the more you need to rely on pharmaceuticals to lose weight, reduce blood sugar, reduce cardiovascular risk and deal with all the other health disruptions that result. Pharmaceutical companies are therefore vocal supporters of the dietary status quo, as it maintains a many-billions-of-dollars per year flow of revenue into their pockets, an irresistible motivation.

The average person going about their day-to-day business is therefor inundated with false messaging, unhealthy products, destructive health advice. People are concerned with making a living, paying bills, maintaining a safe home, educating their children, and all the other concerns that dominate the day-to-day thinking of most people. Most of us don’t have the time or energy to carefully consider dietary issues, and therefore rely on doctors, dietitians, and the advice of agencies that appear to put the public’s interests first. Yet, look around you: What happens to people who accept dietary guidelines, buy foods labeled “Endorsed by the American Heart Association,” “Low in fat and cholesterol,” “Part of a healthy diet” and all the other familiar marketing mantras? All you need to do is visit your nearest big box store and observe average people: overweight, obese, limping, navigating in motorized scooters, filling their prescriptions at the pharmacy counter.

What we tend not to see are the millions of people who are blind, are on dialysis for kidney failure, have died of heart attacks or sudden cardiac death, have undergone limb amputations, all due to this man-made disease. And don’t forget that the average type 2 diabetic not only dies 10 years earlier than non-diabetics, but has the last few years of life dominated by reliance on medications, procedures, hospitalizations, amputations, etc., a life of misery, all created by misinformation and misguided profit motives.

A good start to undoing this mess would therefore involve:

• Rejecting dietary guidelines—Never reduce fat, never reduce cholesterol, and banish “healthy whole grains”
   
• Recognizing that the majority of people and agencies who dispense dietary advice do so out of ignorance or greed. You should give as much weight to their advice as to the Internet scammer trying to extract money out of your bank account. The health or diet advice provided, for instance, by your local healthcare system is nothing more than repackaged conventional information. They don’t want to stick their necks out and contradict the teachings of their doctors, dietitians, and others. They are all simply echo chambers of misinformation.
   
• Avoiding processed foods—and choosing foods least corrupted by industry such as eggs, meats, poultry, extra-virgin olive oil, avocados, etc., foods that require no labels or lists of added ingredients.
   
• Avoid doctors who dispense pharmaceuticals for every situation—and gravitate towards practitioners who stop and think, understand that nutrition and microbiome issues are paramount and can minimize or eliminate reliance on pharmaceuticals and medical procedures.

The above would be a good start. If you’ve been following my conversations, you also recognize that there are a number of steps you can take to reduce or minimize insulin resistance and inflammation, return to normal body weight and fat distribution, and thereby no longer be a type 2 diabetic.