The Trail Out of Diabetes, Blood Pressure, Heart Disease & Obesity
In many cases, there may be a way to prevent future damage to your life from your diagnosis.
It is NOT an “easy way out,” however.
If you possess some grit, determination, and self-discipline, if you are very upset with your diagnosis, and if you want a do-over on what the rest of your life may hold in store: read on.
I’ve found that diabetes, blood pressure, and heart disease can be confusing for many of my patients. These diagnoses can be terrifying, but at the same time, you may not have many (or any) symptoms directly related to the diseases. Often, patients have seemingly-unrelated symptoms that are making them miserable (joint pain, allergies, digestive problems, etc.), but the “pre-diabetes” or “high blood pressure” or “heart disease” aren’t directly producing much obvious trouble.
Here are the basic facts you must know if you would prefer to live a long and active life without fear of disease.
For these diseases, medical treatment is limited to drugs to try to manage the disease process. There is no “cure.” If you’ve asked, your doctor will have told you that your only option is drug management and dietary changes to help you live as long as possible, but that the diseases are life-long.
I have worked with these cases for 27 years, and my experience has been extremely positive. Most patients respond very well to lifestyle changes and support to assist their bodies to heal themselves. Diabetes lab tests may become healthy, blood pressure and cholesterol drugs may no longer be needed; the weight comes off, etc. I don’t treat the disease. Instead, I support the body’s self-healing processes to help it overcome stress and heal itself.
These diseases continuously cause damage to your body, so the sooner you begin the process of recovery, the more successful you are likely to be.
To be successful, you’ll have to be dedicated and willing to go the long-haul. Helping your body to heal from these conditions isn’t easy or quick.
Understanding the Causes
These diseases carry a stigma of a poor or unhealthy lifestyle. Your doctor may even “blame” you for getting sick. “It’s all that extra weight I’ve been telling you to get rid of that’s causing your diabetes.”
No one will blame you for getting the flu or a cold. But with chronic illness, there’s an element of personal responsibility. You ate too much junk food, failed to exercise, drank too much alcohol, and now look what’s happened to you.
The truth is that this “personal responsibility” is mostly fiction. We live in a world where most of the available food is disease-causing. We’re bombarded nonstop with food-fiction designed to entice us into eating destructive foods and eating volumes more than we should. Our government supports and condones the sale of these foods, which are deliberately designed to be biologically addictive.
Chronic disease is supposed to be “non-communicable” in that it’s not passed on by bacteria or virus from one person to another. The science on this is quite a different story. You’re much more likely to be overweight if your family and friends are overweight.(1) Where you live is one of the most statistically important factors in whether you have a chronic disease, even more important than your genetics.(2) Culture plays a huge role in chronic disease, as is evidenced by comparing chronic disease in Europe vs. the US. Europeans have dramatically less heart disease, for example than Americans.
Non-communicable chronic diseases are, it turns out, highly infectious.
What Happens
The single most significant cause of chronic disease is our “industrial diet.” Our food is loaded with processed grains, sugars, starches, and refined fats. As you continue to eat quicky-absorbed sugars and bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes, the systems in your body designed to handle sugar begin to fail.
Most of the food you eat is broken down by your body into sugars. These sugars are moved into your cells by the hormone insulin. Insulin moves the sugar out of your blood and into your cells, where they produce your energy. If this system is overloaded by the high sugar and carbohydrate content of your diet, over a long period, you’ll develop “insulin resistance.” Now your cells require more insulin to absorb the same amount of sugar. As the insulin resistance increases, it eventually requires more insulin than your pancreas can manufacture to absorb your sugar. At this point, the sugar begins to build up in your bloodstream, causing inflammation, kidney stress, nervous system damage, weight gain, and many more chronic problems.
The first sign that you have a problem is not your blood sugar; it’s a high level of insulin. High insulin will make your body deteriorate. Insulin resistance leads to premature aging, along with heart disease, stroke, cancer, and dementia. High insulin causes weight gain in the belly area, unhealthy appetite, high cholesterol, low HDL, high triglycerides, thickening of the blood, and increased risk of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and depression.
The Solution
Undoing the dietary causes of these diseases is a significant part of recovering from them. However, if you’ve tried to do this in the past, you may know the difficulty involved. You’ll need a plan, a program, and a team to work with to be successful with permanent diet and lifestyle changes.
Changing your diet is essential, but only about 30% of what you’ll need to do to recover.
The rest of your healing will depend on accurate information and testing to be effective. Despite the uniformity of medical treatment for these diseases, each person develops similar symptoms from different sources. To be successful, you will need to do a treatment program that is individualized and based on accurate testing.
Clinical nutrition is essential in helping your body to heal and rebuild damaged tissue. Cells are made of nutrition (food), so providing the exact “replacement parts” needed in the required quality and quantity is a vital requirement for healing.
A major reason your body can’t heal from a chronic condition is excessive stress. It’s like cutting your finger and not bandaging it; the dirt gets in the cut, and infection sets in, which prevents healing. The bandage reduces the stress on the wound so that the body can heal normally. In your body, stress from bacteria, virus, fungus, toxins, allergies, metals, etc. can prevent healing from occurring, even when clinical nutrition is used. These stressors must be identified with testing and labs, then natural means of reducing the stress can be used (acupressure, homeopathy, supplements, herbs, etc.)
References:
[1] Christakis NA, Fowler JH. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. N Engl J Med. 2007 Jul 26;357(4):370-9.
[2] Graham GN. Why your zip code matters more than your genetic code: Promoting healthy outcomes from mother to child. Breastfeed Med. 2016 Oct;11:396-7.
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