Type 2 Diabetes:
Are Dietary Carbs the Cause?

What is type 2 diabetes?

It is a disorder relating to how the body metabolizes glucose in the blood. To get technical--and surely this is an oversimplification--but what happens in type 2 diabetics is that their ability to transfer glucose into cells that need energy degrades over time.

In healthy patients, insulin efficiently moves blood sugar into cells.

In patients with Type 2 diabetes, cells lose their reactivity to insulin; thus, they can't get enough energy to carry out their work effectively. Since starving cells under-function, tissue damage occurs. And depending on the nature of this tissue damage, other health problems result (e.g. kidney disease, blindness, etc).

Diabetes mellitus and obesity often appear to coexist in populations.

Obese diabetics seem to find themselves paradoxically in a state of being both overweight and undernourished. They have too much adipose tissue, but their other tissues can't get the energy they desperately need to carry out vital functions.

Are we in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes?

Undoubtedly. Conservative estimates suggest that more than 17 million Americans have some form of it. Millions more may have undiagnosed diabetes. The condition is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., and it costs our healthcare system tens of billions of dollars annually.

What constitutes a healthy diet for patients with type-2 diabetes?

Experts disagree. Carbohydrate restriction may work best. Dr. Bernstein, author of Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution and an emeritus director of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, advocates a very carb restricted diet for most diabetics, for instance.

Diabetes Facts, Alternative treatments of Diabetes