Adult onset type 2 diabetes (NIDDM) (Part 3)
Click here for an excellent essay on reversing diabetic retinopathy with diet.
And here are some excellent, brief videos with references:
The best way to prevent diabetic blindness is to prevent or reverse diabetes in the first place. See, for example:
- Lifestyle Medicine Is the Standard of Care for Prediabetes
- How to Prevent Prediabetes from Turning into Diabetes
- Plant-Based Diets and Diabetes
- How Not to Die from Diabetes
Why wouldn’t a diet of white rice make diabetes worse? See If White Rice Is Linked to Diabetes, What About China?
For more on the nitty gritty on what is the actual cause of type 2 diabetes, see:
- What Causes Insulin Resistance?
- The Spillover Effect Links Obesity to Diabetes
- Lipotoxicity: How Saturated Fat Raises Blood Sugar
- Diabetes as a Disease of Fat Toxicity
- What Causes Diabetes?
And see here for a pretty exhaustive article on type 2 diabetes and the vegan diet.
If you want to lose weight here is a lovely article by Dr McMacken who helps patients with weight loss using a plant-based diet as well as another article on why she recommends a ‘High-Carb’ diet for her patients with diabetes.
Bariatric surgery has been shown to be highly effective at producing weight loss and controlling (or even reversing) type 2 diabetes. It was always assumed that it was the surgery itself which resulted in these effects. However, part of the surgical protocol is to put patients on a low calorie diet around the time of their surgery. In a fascinating study a group of diabetic patients who were candidates for surgery were initially just put the 10 day surgical diet (which was usually part of the surgery). Three months later, they had the surgery (which also included another 10 days of dieting). When the results of diet alone were compared to diet plus surgery, the diet only group had BETTER improvements in liver glucose output. The researchers concluded that the diet which was followed during surgery which was the main contributor to the improvement in glucose metabolism seen after bariatric surgery. This study is nicely explained in this video (subsequent video here) – for more information see here. A beautiful video explaining diet and diabetes by Dr N Barnard is here.
