How to beat diabetes, without the drugs

What you need to know:

Before I talk about the nutritional alternative, I want to reiterate that diabetes is not a permanent disease, it’s simply a physiological response, and physiological responses can be changed.

People with diabetes actually don’t need medication. The end. This is where you start drafting an email to me saying that I haven’t done my research, it can’t possibly be true, and that if, by some stretch of imagination, it were true, then people would be doing it to save themselves a lifetime on medication, not to mention the heart disease and other ailments that invariably follow. But I have done my research, and with the world market for diabetes drugs believed to be $55.3bn in 2017 (up from $35.6bn in 2012), you can see why no one wants to talk about this. Before I talk this seemingly magic solution for the 700,000-plus Kenyan adults and 25,000 children suffering from diabetes, I want to explain very clearly what diabetes is. Its official name is diabetes mellitus, the term ‘diabetes’ meaning excessive urination, and the word ‘mellitus’ meaning honey. When one is literally urinating out sugar, there’s an important sequence of events that isn’t working as it should in the body.

After being diagnosed with gestational diabetes in all three of my pregnancies, I adopted the mantra “three meals a day, with nothing in between” other than water. This not only improves the body’s sensitivity to insulin, but to leptin and ghrelin too. Leptin and ghrelin are the hormones that regulate appetite and are found in our fat. Leptin is the hormone that tells us when we’re full, so when leptin levels are out of balance, we don’t feel satisfied after a meal. On the flip side, ghrelin tells us when we are hungry. If your hormones are balanced, when ghrelin levels increase, you eat, and then, as you become fuller and more satisfied, your leptin levels increase and you stop eating. When you are leptin-resistant, you’re likely to feel hungry after meals and spend the day craving carbohydrates and/or sugar. In order to allow your body to reset itself and become more sensitive to these hormones, it’s important to go long periods of time without eating. Not getting enough sleep also affects these two hormones adversely. But haven’t we all been told to snack in order to balance our blood sugar? Well, by eating more regularly, your body becomes dependent on sugar rather than stored fat for energy. Furthermore, every time you eat, you’re increasing inflammation in the body due to the insulin that is released. So stick to the three meals. It works.

And with that, enter exhibit A: the gorillas at Cleveland Metropark Zoo in the US. We know that wild gorillas don’t get diabetes, but the captive ones, with their daily ‘nutritional cookies’ filled with starch and sugar, do. When the diets of the gorillas in the zoo were changed to include greens, seeds, berries, bamboo, the gorillas lost 30 kilogrammes and reversed diabetes and heart disease. So, how do we go about recalibrating the body in humans? Well, the good news is that it can take as little as eight weeks, assuming you’re willing to do the work. And the work involves, in part, learning a little bit about easily digestible carbohydrates, something that many dietitians will encourage diabetics to eat. What we now know is that foods like bread, rice, pasta and potatoes are rapidly absorbed in the body. This creates an instant spike in blood sugar levels, which then go on to crash, not only making you hungry again, but also eventually causing your body to stop listening to insulin, the hormone that regulates our blood sugar. It’s exactly this insulin resistance that contributes to the build-up of fat in the liver and pancreas, which in turn causes all the problems associated with diabetes.

So if we want to cut down on these carbs, what exactly does that look like? Well, ideally we want about 100 grammes a day, and the picture shows you exactly what you can get for about 20 grammes. Starchy vegetables like white potato, corn and cooked carrots also fall into this category. So, we want to get most of our carbs from fibrous (broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, green leafies) and salad vegetables (bell peppers, cucumbers, celery, tomato). Nuts and seeds, low-glycaemic fruits (berries, apples, plums, watermelon), and small amounts of beans and legumes can also count. Once you get used to doing this, you can experiment with lowering the amount of carbohydrate you eat even more. Ultimately, you want to be down to less than 50 grammes a day, for optimal blood sugar control. Fewer carbs forces the body to burn fat faster too. Next up, protein. To my mind, protein is truly a wonderfood, because it makes you feel full after you’ve eaten it (it’s high on the satiety index). Despite this, don’t overdo it. I find that a good amount of protein for the average person is about 100 grammes of animal protein per meal. Good sources of quality protein include beef, pork, free-range poultry, seafood, nuts and seeds, low-glycaemic beans and legumes, and non-GMO soya.

How to beat diabetes, without the drugs

What you need to know:

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