The American Diabetes Association website claims that “People with diabetes can eat the same foods the family enjoys.” Furthermore, “It takes some planning but you can fit your favorite foods into your meal plan and still manage your blood glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol.”
WTF?
The huge nonprofit organization from which many diabetics and their families get most of their information, the group in which most patients put their trust, the body to which the American public looks for the most recent medical advancements in the field of diabetes—the ADA itself— is propagating the dangerous myth that someone with a disease from which many victims will suffer heart attack, blindness, and amputations, can eat “the same foods the family enjoys”?!
Of course, the goal of the ADA is to help people live with diabetes—not to get over it all together. However, adult onset diabetes is far from incurable, even though the mainstream medical establishment would have you believe otherwise. And it’s not because doctors (or the ADA) are the bad guys. It’s probably more related to the fact that drug reps (pushing insulin and metformin) wine and dine medical professionals as a part of their marketing budget. In fact, the medical group for which one of my clients works is treated to lunches daily by Big Pharma!
Doctors are very busy mavens, so pharmaceutical companies graciously provide them with their very own latest scientific research. Unfortunately, research funded by drug companies is five times more likely to find a beneficial result than independently-funded research (Overdosed America, John Abramson), so the info our doctors receive might be more than a tiny bit skewed.
My friends, there is no money in healthy eating (well, except the millions you and our government could save on medical care). Both medical professionals and drug companies will justify their costly medications with spurious rationales like, “Patients won’t make lifestyle changes to lose weight, so we’re doing them a favor by providing medications as an option.”
I wonder, what if meds weren’t an option? What if your doctor handed you this Rx: eat three to five fruits, lots of veggies (esp. green leaves), beans, and seeds, and move your body lots throughout the day?
Then the doc would send you to her nutrient-dense eating specialist who would take plenty of time showing you exactly what to eat (and not eat). More importantly, you’d be enrolled in a weekly group in which you would learn the psychology of permanent weight loss. You’d have daily phone chats with your own coach who would teach you how to stick to a nutrient-dense diet for the long haul. (I’m available!) If all that happened, you’d have a great doctor.
You’d have a doctor who knows that type II diabetes is highly reversible—so reversible, in fact, that she would insist that you monitor your blood sugar closely if you’re on medication, because most likely within just a few days on this nutrient-dense healthy eating plan, you’d be overmedicated!
This is a doctor who doesn’t want to manage your diabetes; she wants you to get over it for good, and pick up tons of other health and self-esteem benefits along the way.
Can you eat “the same foods the family enjoys” on this nutritarian diet? Maybe the real question should be, Do you want to eat what your family eats and enhance the disease process in your body or do you want to live long, happy, and healthy?
It’s one or the other—you can’t have both (unless your family has already forsworn cakes, cookies, bagels, baked chicken, low-fat cheese, potato chips, pasta, olive oil, steak and taters, green eggs and ham, and Ben and Jerry’s).
Would you tell a person with lung cancer that it’s okay if they smoke a little bit, along with the rest of the family? Then why would you give a diabetic permission to eat “your favorite foods”? I’ll tell you one reason: the nutritionists and medical professionals who come up with these very permissive dietary guidelines are addicted to bad food themselves. They know they couldn’t follow a nutrient-dense food plan so they don’t think the general public would do it either.
Diabetics who follow ADA recommendations to a T will not find themselves improving much, and they sure won’t have a complete reversal of the disease. They’ll take the prescribed meds, which may help stabilize their blood sugar, giving them the very false impression that all is well under the hood. Meanwhile, the disease process—caused largely by the American dietary lifestyle—continues unchecked.
The only way diabetics can eat their favorite foods is by increasing their prescribed medications.
Diabetes is not a party, as the happy people on diabetes.org would insinuate. In fact, it is the leading cause of nontraumatic lower–limb amputations, the leading cause of kidney failure, and the leading cause of new cases of blindness among adults. Oh, and diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.
But the good news is that you can reverse your health destiny with a nutrient-dense diet. Sign up for a free 30-minute session with one of our coaches to find out how!
