The Diabesity Prescription
By Dr. Mark Hyman
“After 4 Years Of Suffering from
Diabetes, this 58-year old Woman from
the Midwest Now Lives A Normal,
Happy, Hassle-free Life… (Again)”
Recent Advances Published in The New England Journal of Medicine Reveal the Science to Reversing Diabetes…and the New Program That Makes it Available to You Right Now
After years of hassle, frustration and pain managing her type II diabetes, my patient Janet finally uncovered the underlying causes of her diabetes and the chronic conditions associated with her insulin resistance, which made her sick and overweight.
What follows is not just her story of survival, but also of a remarkable new science that can arm you with the same tools to prevent diabetes. They are the steps you can take RIGHT NOW to rebalance your body’s 7 key systems and permanently reverse your diabetes, just like Janet did.
To return to a normal, happy, active, joy-filled life like Janet did, you need to identify which of your body’s 7 key systems are imbalanced and to restore them to health…but identifying precisely WHICH of those systems are out of balance is the key.
Here’s how Janet did it…
“Diabetes Sucks!”
Those were the first words out of Janet’s mouth when I met her in my office. I was a little surprised, but soon I completely understood her frustration.
At the age of 56, Janet was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
After several years of deprivation, eating like a rabbit and “sticking” herself with a blood sugar measurement device several times a day, Janet was frustrated when her doctor said she’d “have this disease forever.”
Tired of just treating her symptoms with medication, Janet wanted to learn if there was another way to eliminate her diabetes.
Janet is not an isolated case — anyone with type 2 diabetes will tell you that diabetes management is a ridiculous daily hassle full of frustration…almost like a prison sentence.
The past few years had been roads lined with hard, frustrating lessons, mostly because Janet, like most with diabetes, was following outdated conventional medical thinking.
When Janet was first diagnosed, her A1c (a common blood sugar test) was frightfully high at 10.1. And shortly after her diabetes became really scary…
One morning, Janet’s frustration turned to panic when she woke up and found her left hand and right foot numb. The pain, she said, felt like “static electricity.”
Everyone with diabetes fears neuropathy (nerve damage) and knows it may lead to amputation. However, what most people miss is that diabetes ALSO exponentially increases your risk for developing dementia, cancer and stroke.
The threat of amputation was too much for Janet…she knew something HAD to change.
That’s when Janet came to see me — discouraged, depressed and afraid to eat anything.
She Just Wanted Her Normal Life Back
After a few simple tests, I discovered that Janet was at high risk for a heart attack because the ratio of her triglycerides to HDL (“good” cholesterol) was very high. This is very common in diabetics — and those on the path to developing diabetes — because triglycerides typically rise and HDL decreases with diabetes.
After running a C-reactive protein test, I also discovered Janet had hidden inflammation in her body. This explained why she looked 10 years older than she really was, since hidden inflammation causes premature aging.
Janet also had a fatty liver from too many years of consuming excessive amounts of flour products and soda.
The condition of Janet’s liver was no different than what happens with the French delicacy fois gras (which means “fatty liver” in French). What’s fascinating is that fois gras is made by force-feeding ducks starchy carbohydrates (corn), which turns to sugar.
That excessive sugar turned to fat in her liver, creating problems with detoxification. This led to increased toxins in her body and to insulin resistance, which explained her lack of energy and trouble concentrating during the day.
Finally, I noted that Janet had carpal tunnel syndrome, dry skin and a sluggish thyroid.
Interestingly, Janet had visited three different doctors during the previous 18 months and the only thing she had to show for it was a cabinet full of pills and 10 more unwanted pounds.
Janet’s Doctors Were All Asking the Wrong Questions
The question should not have been what “disease” Janet had or what drugs she needed to manage the symptoms of that disease. Rather, the questions I helped Janet answer were: Which systems in her body were imbalanced, causing her to experience the symptoms of diabetes, and how could those systems be put back into balance?
What is Functional Medicine?
The new fields of systems biology and functional medicine have been highlighted in major medical journals like The New England Journal of Medicine. But most doctors don’t have the time or the interest to read about them, so these advances mostly go unnoticed.
This is also the same science that’s been working its way around the halls of Capitol Hill with my recent efforts to work with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin to help get our nation focused on fixing the underlying CAUSES of our health problems and not just focus on papering over the symptoms.
This methodology for reversing diabetes — for finding the true underlying biological reasons why you are sick — is known as functional medicine and is grounded in a whole new scientific field called systems biology.
I told Janet that if she did everything I suggested she would lose weight and feel better and most, if not all, of her symptoms would go away. She left my office somewhat skeptical but enthusiastic and determined.
Three months later, Janet had lost 18 pounds and had enough energy to play ball with her 7-year-old grandson without losing her breath. Her legs were no longer swollen and she was able to go dancing with her husband without breaking into an embarrassing sweat.
After eight months, her A1c had dropped consistently below 6 (down from 10.1 when I met her), all her cravings were gone, her HDL and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides were normal (without medication) and she had lost a total of 28 pounds.
Ten months later Janet and her husband went on a 12 day Hawaiian vacation to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary — Janet was feeling so good she brought her dancing shoes and bought a new swimsuit!
After years of fear, frustration and deprivation, Janet finally found balance and health and took pleasure in food again.
Her thyroid returned to normal and all of her chronic ailments disappeared, but most importantly…
Her Diabetes Was Reversed And She Felt 20 Years Younger!
Like Janet, you probably want to turn back the clock, reclaim a normal life and regain the energy and vitality you once had…or if you haven’t developed full-blown type 2 diabetes yet, you want to avoid that ticking time bomb at all costs.
You want to live free from the bondage of logging your food, testing your blood sugar three times a day and worrying about major health problems like heart disease, stroke, dementia, kidney failure, blindness and neuropathy.
The good news is that you CAN turn back the clock and you don’t have to suffer or starve to make that happen. In a few moments you’ll learn exactly how that’s possible with a brand-new program.
But you cannot transform your health and reverse your diabetes simply by treating the symptoms and continuing to do what you’re currently doing.
Uncover the REAL Underlying Causes of Your Diabetes
There is a new scientific roadmap your doctor isn’t telling you about. It allows you to treat the real underlying causes of diabetes rather than simply suppressing symptoms with medications.
It’s called functional medicine and is grounded in a new scientific field called systems biology. Systems biology seeks to understand how systems in the body are related and interconnected as a network, rather than simply a series of organs and body parts that have no relationship to one another.
Conventional medicine doesn’t view the body as a connected whole. That’s why you go to a cardiologist if your blood pressure is too high, or a gastroenterologist for digestive problems or a neurologist for neuropathy. You’ll never see all three doctors discussing how the three problems are all caused by the same source.
That’s because conventional medicine is the medicine of WHAT. It describes what you have and then matches the drug to the disease. But describing WHAT you have doesn’t tell us anything about the cause or how to treat it.
Functional medicine is the medicine of WHY. It provides a roadmap for understanding the root causes of diabetes.
Diabesity – A New Name
What you may not know is that diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome are really all the same problem – something I call diabesity.
Diabesity is the condition of metabolic imbalance and disease that ranges all the way from mild blood sugar imbalance to full-blown type 2 diabetes.
Whether you’ve got a little extra weight around the middle or have been diagnosed with insulin resistance or even type 2 diabetes, the fundamental underlying biological causes of ALL of these conditions are the same.
Why Current Treatments Are Misguided
Our current approach to diabesity focuses on treating the symptoms or risk factors of the disease rather than the causes. All of our attention is on treatments that lower blood sugar (diabetes drugs and insulin), lower high blood pressure (anti-hypertensive drugs), improve cholesterol (statins), and thin the blood (aspirin).
But we never ever ask the most important question:
“Why is your blood sugar, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol too high and why is your blood too sticky and likely to clot?”
Put another way: What are the underlying causes of diabesity?
Answering that question must be your focus if you want to reverse diabesity.
Type 2 Diabetes is Reversible
Evidence from scientific literature and my success treating patients clearly show that type 2 diabetes is reversible. (Type 1 diabetes is not reversible.)
This is especially true if it is caught early and treated with an aggressive approach to lifestyle intervention, nutritional support, and OCCASIONALLY medications.
In a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Walter Willett, MD, PhD, from the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated that 91 percent of all type 2 diabetes could be prevented through aggressive changes in diet and lifestyle.
In truth, diabetes and elevated blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol are simply symptoms that result from problems with your diet, lifestyle and environmental toxins interacting with your unique genetic susceptibilities.
Using medication or surgery to treat imbalanced blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other complications of diabetes is like mopping the floor while the sink is overflowing.
Contrary to what your doctor may tell you, this problem is completely reversible. You are not damned to develop type 2 diabetes, and if you have it, you are not cursed with it for life.
Within just six weeks you can discover how to reverse diabesity AND experience:
More energy
Improved metabolism, which leads to automatic weight loss
Clearer skin
Better mood
Sharper mind and clearer concentration
Freedom from medication and its side effects
And most importantly, a return to a happy, vibrant life
Diabesity is Almost Entirely Induced by the Choices We Make, NOT the Genes We Inherit…
Some genes may make you more likely to develop diabesity, but those genes are only activated by:
Diabesity Is NOT Genetic
If you believe that your diabesity is genetic OR you are doomed to develop it consider the following …
From 1983 to 2008, the number of people in the world with diabetes increased from 35 million to 240 million, or 7-fold. This COULD NOT happen with a purely genetic or inherited disorder, unless our genome mutated overnight!
We’ve been led to believe that if we have a family history of this “genetic disorder” it is essentially a condition over which we have no control.
The truth is quite different.
Poor diet
Sedentary lifestyle
Stress
Environmental toxins
Searching for the diabetes gene and the magic bullet to treat it only removes our focus from the most important target, which is addressing the modifiable lifestyle and environmental factors that are driving this epidemic in the first place. These are:
How we eat
How much we exercise
How we manage stress
Environmental toxins
Our toxic food environment
Addressing these underlying causes is exactly what Janet did and it’s what The Diabesity Prescription will help you do.
By fixing the fundamental causes of the problem — NOT with insulin and other medications as conventional medicine teaches us — you can permanently reverse your diabesity.
A New Program to Correct All Underlying Causes of Diabesity In Just 6 Weeks
How Janet Reversed Her Diabesity
To heal from diabesity, you must rebalance the 7 key systems in your body that are at the root of health and illness, including diabesity.
Through the Diabesity Prescription you’ll uncover:
Step 1: Which of the 7 key systems in your body are out of balance…
Step 2: How these imbalances lead to insulin resistance and other diabesity problems…
Step 3: How to rebalance each of the 7 key systems.
The fundamental causes are imbalances in the 7 key biological systems of the body, which result in insulin resistance, problems with blood sugar control and all the other associated complications.
Understanding these 7 basic systems, how they get out of balance, and how to get them back in balance, is exactly what this new program called The Diabesity Prescription is designed to do.
This is the medicine of the future and the process involves two simple principles:
Get rid of the bad stuff.
Add the good stuff.
That’s it.
Your body’s amazing healing powers of regeneration and repair appear if you simply find and remove what doesn’t agree with you, and then provide the missing ingredients you need to thrive.
When you follow The Diabesity Prescription and rebalance the 7 key systems in your body for just six weeks, you can experience:
Weight loss
Improved energy
Better mental clarity
Better memory
Reduced joint pain
Improvement in blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c
Lower blood pressure
Lower triglycerides, higher HDL and lower LDL cholesterol
Reduced inflammation and C-reactive protein
Improved kidney function (if you have protein in your urine or reduced kidney function)
Improvement in neuropathy (if you have it)
And many other good “side effects”
Rebalance the 7 Keys And Treat the REAL Causes of Diabesity
If you’ve been led to believe that diet and exercise will reverse diabesity, then you understand only a small portion of what you really need to do to permanently eliminate your condition.
Here are the 7 key systems you need to rebalance to reverse diabesity.
Key # 1: Optimize Nutrition
The most powerful tool you have to transform your health is your fork!
Use it well and you will thrive. Choose poorly and you will suffer.
A major factor in our diabesity epidemic is our nutrient-poor, calorie-rich diet. It has led to a nation of overfed but undernourished people. In fact, we consume so few nutrients that we now have an epidemic of nutritional deficiencies that promote the development of diabetes and other chronic illnesses.
These deficiencies include vitamin D, chromium, magnesium, zinc, biotin, omega-3 fats, antioxidants such alpha lipoic acid and fiber.
When you are deficient in these nutrients your biochemical machinery grinds to a halt resulting in imbalanced insulin and blood sugar.
One key to reversing your diabesity lies in the quality and type of food you eat, not necessarily the calories you consume or the ratio of protein, fat and carbohydrates in your diet.
Before medical school, I studied nutrition at Cornell University. There, I learned the science of nutrigenomics, which explains that everything you put in your mouth washes over your DNA and sends various messages to the rest of your body.
These messages can be good (“eliminate toxins,” “burn belly fat,” kill bacteria”) or bad (“make more LDL cholesterol,” “increase inflammation,” “decrease brain function”).
So food doesn’t just taste good…it is actually information that talks to your genes, instructing them to create either health or disease.
That’s why the nutrigenomics meal plan inside The Diabesity Prescription is an optimal program to prevent and treat diabesity. It contains what your body was meant to eat — fresh, unadulterated plant foods that are rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals, omega-3s and phytonutrients.
These delicious recipes and supplements will create optimal gene expression to help your body repair itself, reverse your diabesity and erase many common chronic ailments.
To make it as easy as possible, inside the Diabesity Prescription, you will find:
Six-week nutrigenomic eating plan (gourmet meals designed to provide the nutritional support to reverse diabesity)
Snacks for eliminating sugar cravings
Six-week shopping lists so you know exactly what to buy
You’ll be amazed that you can eat delicious foods that not only control your cravings but also:
Stabilize your blood sugar and insulin levels
Normalize blood pressure by balancing your salt/potassium ratio
Eliminate acid reflux and heartburn
Eliminate food cravings by infusing your body with critical amino acids that come from these healthy amounts protein.
Improve your joints and strengthen your heart by reducing the acidity and inflammation in your body.
But even with a perfect diet, depleted soil, storage and transportation, genetic alterations of traditional heirloom species, and increased stress from a toxic environment make it impossible for us to get the vitamins and minerals we need to function optimally.
That’s why you’ll need to supplement your diet with critical vitamins and minerals to help:
Control appetite and blood sugar. (Lower your insulin response after each meal by 50% simply by adding a certain inexpensive fiber from a Japanese root.)
Lower cholesterol by raising HDL and lowering LDL.
Improve fasting insulin and lipid parameters. (A new class of herbal supplements is necessary for turning on and off signals related to insulin resistance and diabesity.)
Repair your insulin sensitivity. (One powerful nutrient clears glucose from the blood by 50% and helps correct diabetic nerve damage.)
I’ll outline precisely how you need to eat and what supplements you need to take to reverse diabesity. But this isn’t the only factor that influences your health… the next key is balancing your hormones.
Key #2: Balance Your Hormones
Does your mood swing up and down with your blood sugar? Has your sex drive left town, or your hair stopped growing on your head and instead ended up on your face?
These are signs of serious hormonal balance. Most Americans are living out of harmony with our natural biological rhythms, and the messenger molecules in our body—especially our hormones—have gone haywire.
All your hormones are interconnected in one big web and interact with each other like a musical symphony. When this symphony plays out of tune, problems develop.
Insulin is a hormone, and The Diabesity Prescription focuses on treating the underlying causes of insulin imbalance because this is a driving factor in our diabesity epidemic.
But for optimal health, you must balance ALL of your hormones, including insulin, thyroid, your sex hormones, and your adrenal or stress hormones.
Let’s look at how each of these major hormonal imbalances can contribute to diabesity.
Thyroid Hormone: Your Master Metabolism Hormone
Your thyroid controls your metabolism. If it works slowly, your metabolism will slow and diabesity will increase. Undiagnosed thyroid disease worsens insulin resistance, which leads to more weight gain and diabetes, as well as elevated cholesterol.
Unfortunately, half of thyroid disease cases are undiagnosed.
If you suspect you have a thyroid problem, the self-assessment quiz and other tools in the program will help you tease out the problems and provide direction for therapy.
Stress Hormones: The Dangers of Chronic Stress
Stress hormones play a critical role in creating and worsening diabesity. Chronic stress increases the production of cortisol (the main stress hormone) by your adrenal glands. This promotes the accumulation of belly fat that we see so commonly in patients with insulin resistance or diabetes.
Burning off cortisol through specific exercise and relaxation techniques provided inside the program will help:
Lower blood sugar and cholesterol
Transform your mood and reduce depression
Improve your memory and decrease dementia risk
Prevent muscle deterioration
Improve sleep (People who don’t sleep well gain weight and get sick more often)
Sex Hormones: Men Becoming Women and Women Becoming Men?
Too much insulin has a VERY negative effect on your sex hormones. If you are a man, it makes you more feminine. If you are a woman, it makes you more masculine.
For women, insulin resistance leads to hair growth on the face and body, hair loss on the head, acne and irregular menstrual cycles. It can also be an unrecognized cause of infertility.
In men, insulin resistance leads to low levels of testosterone, poor sex drive and sexual function, decreased muscle mass and more belly fat.
Over time, diabetic men become more like women because insulin creates higher levels of estrogen, leading to:
Soft skin
Loss of body hair
Increased breast size
All of these problems are related to increasing insulin resistance, and they are completely reversible through diet and lifestyle treatment. In The Diabesity Prescription you will learn how to rebalance ALL of your hormones with just a few special hormone-balancing foods and supplements.
By getting the symphony of your hormones back in tune you can reverse diabesity, feel more energized, lose weight, and even improve your sex life.
Key #3: Cool Off Inflammation
Is your body attacking itself like a rebel army bent on destroying its own country?
That’s exactly what happens when you have hidden inflammation in your body.
I’m talking about chronic, smoldering inflammation that slowly destroys our organs and our ability to function properly because our system is overacting to too much sugar, food allergies, chronic infections, toxins, or chronic stress or simply because we’re too lazy to get off the couch.
Left unchecked, uncontrolled inflammation is at the root of all chronic illness, including heart disease, obesity, dementia, depression, cancer and autism.
Mounting research shows us that systemic inflammation also plays an important role in diabesity. In fact, people with high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP, a marker of systemic inflammation) in their blood have a 1,700% increased risk of diabetes.
Hidden causes of inflammation
Too much sugar
Food allergies
Chronic infections
Toxins
Chronic stress
Sedentary lifestyle
Inflammation may even kill you. One study of generally “healthy” elderly people found that those with the highest levels of CRP and interleukin 6 were 260% more likely to die during the next four years.
The source of inflammation varies from person to person, but the goal of The Diabesity Prescription is to uncover through a simple quiz how inflamed you are and what causes it.
Cooling off inflammation improves insulin resistance and reduces your risk of dementia, cancer and heart attack. It is essential for overcoming diabesity and addressing virtually every other health-related issue.
Key #4: Fix Your Gut
You have three pounds of bacteria in your gut, which thrive on what you feed them.
If you feed them good food, the good bugs, which control digestion and metabolism, will grow.
If you feed them junk or kill them altogether by taking too many antibiotics, the bad bugs will grow and produce toxins, which triggers inflammation, insulin resistance and weight gain.
A damaged gut will block any good nutrition you feed your body from being properly absorbed and used in your body.
The Diabesity Prescription will show you exactly how to fix your gut to promote good bacteria and speed your metabolism.
Doing so effectively treats diabesity and may also help resolve common digestive complaints like heartburn, constipation, and irritable bowel.
Key #5: Enhance Detoxification
Scientists have recently discovered something unexpected: toxins make you fat and cause diabetes. This should be headline news, but it isn’t because there aren’t any drugs to treat it.
People with diabesity have lower levels of glutathione — the body’s main detoxifier and antioxidant — than healthy people. That means environmental toxins interfere with blood sugar and cholesterol metabolism and cause insulin resistance.
In fact, a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that bisphenol A, a petrochemical that lines water bottles and canned food containers increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and abnormal liver function.
Government data show that people with the highest levels of pollutants in their blood have a dramatically higher risk for diabetes.
Even studies of Vietnam veterans found those exposed to Agent Orange (dioxin) had a much higher risk of diabetes.
Such research opens up a new area of potential treatment for diabetes and obesity. In fact, limiting your toxic exposures is so important that it’s one of the main steps in The Diabesity Prescription.
The health of your body and the health of our planet are linked. Going “green” is essential for both.
Eliminating toxins may also be what allows you to:
Eliminate congestion and reduce allergic symptoms
Regain more energy
Eliminate canker sores and bad breath
Eliminate body odor
Key #6: Boost Energy Metabolism
Ultimately everything comes down to energy. We need it, we want it, we lose it, and we try to get it back until finally we can’t make energy anymore. That’s called death!
People with diabesity don’t produce energy in their mitochondria (the body’s energy-producing factories) as well as healthy people.That explains why you are tired all the time and why you need help burning calories and fat.
After abusing your mitochondria for years through too many calorie-rich, high-sugar, anti-oxidant poor foods, plus toxins, infections and stress, the biggest problem you run into is a process called oxidative stress.
Oxidation, the same process that turns an apple brown, is what causes skin wrinkling, premature aging and cell and tissue damage. Unchecked, oxidative stress turns on genes that increase insulin resistance and inflammation.
The single most important biological phenomenon that causes aging is loss of the ability to produce energy in the mitochondria and the development of insulin resistance. In fact, the “disease” of aging is really a disease of accelerated insulin resistance. If we fix that, we can reverse the aging process.
Through the Diabesity Prescription, you’ll determine if this key is out of balance and what you can do to boost your mitochondrial function, which may:
Increase energy (especially at the end of the day)
Develop softer, clearer skin
Speed your metabolism and increase fat burning
By using The Diabesity Prescription to improve mitochondrial function you may lose weight and improve your cellular metabolism. This promises not only to help you reverse diabesity but to feel fully energized and vibrantly healthy.
Key #7: Calm Your Mind
Stress makes you fat and relaxing makes you then! Let me explain…
Acute stress doesn’t just cause your blood sugar to skyrocket. Your levels of insulin, cortisol (the main stress hormone), and inflammatory compounds called cytokines also increase.This drives the relentless metabolic dysfunction that leads to a vicious cycle of weight gain, insulin resistance and diabesity.
Chronic stress also makes you depressed, which has been linked to diabetes.
When you learn how to reduce stress and cortisol, you’ll balance blood sugar and may lose weight, plus:
Feel more alert and focused
Experience a stable mood
Improve your memory
Increase your attention
Wipe out headaches
Create optimal brain function
Recent studies show that diabetics have a four-fold risk of Alzheimer’s, and patients with pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome have a dramatically increased risk of pre-dementia or mild cognitive impairment.
You don’t even have to have full-blown diabetes to have brain damage and memory loss from high insulin levels and insulin resistance. Alzheimer’s disease is now being called type 3 diabetes.
Remember, relaxing is as important as sleeping, or eating. Not doing it will kill you. So if you think you don’t have time to relax, ask yourself this question: Do you want to relax for thirty minutes a day, or be dead twenty-four hours a day?
Think about it.
You can finally reverse diabesity by rebalancing these 7 keys — simply by following The Diabesity Prescription.