Making Connections

Blair Ballard

Introduction

            The past three weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to study diabetes, a disease which I knew very little about. Perhaps I’m just lucky to never have anyone close to me that has suffered from this disease. However, after doing a fair amount of research, I felt extremely foolish for never putting in the time to get to know exactly what this disease is and how prevalent it is in our modern day society. As stated in the statement from the Economic Cost of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2012 by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), we spend nearly 250 billion dollars on diabetes per year in the United States alone. This is a staggering amount of money and it surpasses the amount of money the United States spends on cancer each year. Clearly, I should be giving more attention to this disease. While researching the vast scope of this disease, I came to understand that diabetes may have a hand in many different topics on health today. Here are the three I decided to go into more detail with.

Type III Diabetes?

            It seems like we always separate the brain from the body when talking about things within the body—we have brain diseases and we have body diseases. Recently, there have been studies that suggest otherwise. Dr. Mark Hyman is very strong advocate for the idea that diabetes, a metabolic disorder, is directly related to the brain disorder, Alzheimer’s. While still in its infancy, this idea is gaining traction worldwide.  According to Hyman, high blood sugar causes inflammation, which then causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance leads to weight gain and then more inflammation occurs. The inflammation in the brain causes neural tissue atrophy, which over time can cause memory loss (Hyman, 2016). In another study, beta-amyloid protein levels were discovered to be much higher in type 2 diabetes patients. This protein was toxic to neural cells in high concentration and is likely responsible for some deterioration in the brain (Taverna, et al. 2013). This is an interesting development for both diabetes and Alzheimer’s research. For quite a while, we considered these diseases mutually exclusive. In fact, we rarely ever consider linkages between nervous system diseases and bodily diseases. 

            Sometimes, I think we do not give our brains enough credit. Our minds and bodies work together so much more than we realize and it seems like sometimes that fact gets lost in translation. We make drugs for our body with no regard to what it does to our brain and vice versa. In our Healthcare system, prescribing drugs has become a sickness. We have drugs that do everything and it seems that any ailment can or will soon be cured by popping a pill. This is done with little or no care for the side effects of that drug. The chemicals that we are developing to put into our bodies are becoming more and more complex and we are spending trillions of dollars to make more and more of them. Pharmaceutical companies are becoming some of the richest companies in the world and there is always a new drug advertised on TV. Those TV commercials usually spend half of the time describing what the drug does to you and the other half describing the side effects of the drug. Not to say that the research being done is a waste—some of the drugs truly are miracle drugs—however, I believe most of these drugs only treat the symptoms. What we really need is something that truly cures the disease naturally and doesn’t require putting complex drugs into our bodies.

            Recently, a chiropractor in Salt Lake County has claimed to find a way to reverse diabetes without the use of drugs. All he needs is to come up with a plan to change his patients diets along with several natural adjustments and patients diabetes can clear up in less than six months. He went to chiropractic school to learn how to adjust spines and address peoples’ health needs. Now, his entire livelihood is based around diabetic patients and helping them reverse the disease without medication (May, 2012). I personally want to see more money spent on treatments like this. When our body is sick, there has to be a way to get better without ingesting something that our body cannot even make by itself. This may sound completely insane to most people, but that is only because we are raised on the idea that we could always take medicine to get better. This does not mean pharmaceuticals have to go away, but rather that we need to reduce our modern day obsession with quick fixes. As it is right now, people can live vastly unhealthy lives and still pop enough pills to keep them alive 20 years longer than they would without medicine. Where is the accountability in that? I don’t think it is fair to force the younger generation to pay for our medical bills just because we did not remain accountable for our own health.

Conflict of Interest

            While we traditionally think of diabetes being an issue with having far too much glucose in the blood, we may be ignoring the fact that elevated levels of insulin are also present in the body as well. Generally, doctors combat high blood sugar by increasing a hyperglycemic patient’s insulin levels. However, some studies suggest that elevating the insulin levels in the blood is doing more harm than good. Patients require greater amounts of insulin as they continue treatment in order to account for increasing blood sugar levels in their bodies. Unfortunately, the increased dosages are being found to cause more severe hyperglycemia as well as leading to increased mortality and risk of cancer (Lebovitz, 2011). In that sense, insulin treatment is making diabetics feel better now, but the side effects are proving to be more harmful than beneficial in the long run.

In the Ted Talk with Sarah Hallberg, she talks about how we could be looking at diabetes treatment incorrectly. She says that we focus much more on treating the disease instead of actually reversing and curing it. The way we currently treat the disease is really only by managing the symptoms. Hallberg, a diabetes doctor, considers the current treatments and ADA recommendations to be ineffective. Currently, the ADA recommends that diabetics eat 45-60 grams of carbohydrates per meal (Carbohydrate Counting, 2015). That’s about 2 slices of whole wheat bread per meal. While that may not sound like a lot, that is actually 40-50% of the average person’s recommended caloric intake (How Many Calories Should You Eat, 2005). So, carbohydrates, which are generally our primary source of glucose, are being recommended by medical professionals to be a huge chunk of our daily intake for energy. While I’m no doctor, it seems strange that we are basically telling diabetic patients with already elevated blood sugar levels to intake more blood sugars. In Hallberg’s study, she took two groups of people who had diabetes and compared the amount of insulin they required for six months. One group, changed their diet to low carb high fat diets which made it so their bodies were getting glucose from foods with unsaturated fats in them. The other group maintained their ADA recommended diets with 40% of their daily intake being carbohydrates. After six months, each group was asked how many units of insulin they were using per week. The low carb group all decreased the amount of insulin they required. The group going by ADA guidelines had to increase their insulin intake each day over the six months (Hallberg, 2015). By the time the low carb group was done with the study, many did not even need insulin anymore. The perceived monetary savings for each person was over two-thousand dollars per year!

In addition, medications for diabetes seem to throw patients into a vicious, expensive cycle of treatment that is ultimately ineffective. Insulin and other treatment cost diabetes patients between 54 and 130 thousand dollars over the patient’s lifetime depending on their type and the amount of time they’ve been diabetic (How Many Calories Should We Eat, 2005).  Seeing that and knowing that diabetes is costing our countries’ citizens a quarter trillion dollars per year, it’s not hard to be suspicious about what might be going on behind the scenes. Pharmaceutical companies, even the ADA may be under question here. I’m sure that at least a few people are comfortable with keeping the current state of affairs in place. The ADA states that diabetes is a progressive disease in which insulin loses its effectiveness over time (Diabetes Myths, 2015). Is it possible that this could be false? After all, a progressive disease represents a steady income for a medication supplier. It’s difficult to find honest information and it’s scary to think that large companies could be keeping people sick to make a profit.

Should Athletes Go Against the Grain?

            With all of the debate going on about diets to improve or reverse diabetes, many have questioned how it could be applied to other aspects of health. A good example of this is how low carb, high fat diets have transferred over to competitive athletics. If burning natural fats can be more efficient and healthy for diabetic patients, what would such a diet do for athletes looking for any type of edge they could get? With the Olympics not far in the rear view, I was curious to find what the stance of our own U.S. team trainers is. As it appears, our USA swimming team has tried to do a low carb diet in the past, but they have found that when training is intense and highly anaerobic, low carb diets result in poor results for the athlete. Carbohydrates are required for quick access energy that is available in situations requiring maximum effort by the athlete (Castle, 2015). Several other studies confirmed the idea that, for most performance athletes, cutting carbs is not a good idea. That does not mean that low carb diets are not for all athletes.

A recent trend for ultra-endurance athletes, such as triathletes or ultra-marathoners, has been to try these low carb diets in order to put their bodies into a state of ketosis. After switching their diet to eating less than 50 grams of carbs per day, an athlete can change the basic function of their metabolism to breaking down ketone bodies to provide energy rather than carbohydrates (Murphy, 2016). Essentially, the liver begins producing the ketone bodies that would otherwise not be available to the body. When the body relies on carbohydrates to power it, it can only store about 2,500 calories of fuel. That is not a problem for most athletes who do high intensity / low volume workouts. However, when the body is in a state of ketosis, it can access all the fuel stored in adipose tissue throughout the body. On a lean athlete, his or her body fat likely contains some 20 to 30 thousand calories (Mercola, 2016). That would be more than enough to run 100 miles or participate in a full triathlon.

Therefore, the debate regarding carbs in athletes comes down to the activity they are performing. Clearly, athletes looking to jump higher, throw something farther, or do a lap faster than their competitors should not consider low carb diets. Carbohydrates are far too important to athletes that are looking to do high intensity training. In fact, some of the world’s best athletes consume obscene amounts of carbohydrates in excess of 5 thousand calories a day (Drenon, 2016). Conversely, athletes that are looking for an edge in extreme endurance events should certainly consider low-carb diets. Zack Bitter, an American ultra-runner, set the world record for running 100 miles on a track in 11 hours and 40 minute and he is a ketone-adapted runner (Murphy, 2016). Another group that swears by low carb diets is U.S. Special Forces. They claim that these diets improve their cognitive function and allow them to spend hours and even days in the field while maintaining focus and awareness (Murphy, 2016).

While it is cool to hear about athletes and Special Forces, how does this relate to diabetes? I think it is important to understand that carbohydrates are not inherently bad for us. They provide most of the people on this earth with the energy they need to accomplish everything in their lives. They are cheap and easy to acquire so even poverty-stricken areas can benefit from them. I think that most of the time, the benefits they provide greatly outweigh the detriments we have studied. I think it is important that, while they can be very beneficial to us, we have to use them in moderation. As with most things, too much of a good thing is usually bad. It is also easy to point the finger at other outside sources for causing diabetes. We blame genetics, medications, or physical disabilities for causing diabetes. In some cases, these things really might be causing diabetes, but I truly believe that a majority of diabetes can be prevented if we simply take better care of ourselves. Everyone knows you need to watch what you eat. Everyone knows that you need to exercise. We could lower that 250 billion dollars a year spent on diabetes and repurpose that money somewhere else worthwhile if we would just eat well and get off the couch a few times a day. Diabetes is not going anywhere anytime soon, but we could certainly cut down on the epidemic it has become.

             

Works Cited

TEDxTalks, and Sarah Hallberg, Dr. "Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Starts with Ignoring the Guidelines | Sarah Hallberg | TEDxPurdueU." YouTube. YouTube, 04 May 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

"Carbohydrate Counting." American Diabetes Association. N.p., 11 Mar. 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

Castle, Jill. "High Fat/Ketogenic Diet: Love It or Lose It?" USA Swimming. N.p., 10 Mar. 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

"Diabetes Myths." American Diabetes Association. N.p., Aug. 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Drenon, Brandon. "This Olympian's Diet Allows Him a 12-pack with No Hangover." New York Post. N.p., 19 Sept. 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

"Economic Costs of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2012. Diabetes Care 2013;36:1033-1046." Diabetes Care 36.6 (2013): 1797. Web.

"How Many Calories Should You Eat? Based on Gender, Age, and Activity Level." WebMD. WebMD, 2005. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Lebovitz, Harold. "Pathogenesis of Type 2 Diabetes." Medscape. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Mark Hyman. "Type 3 Diabetes: The Connection between Alzheimer's and Metabolic Syndrome." YouTube. YouTube, 10 Feb. 2016. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

May, Heather. "Do Chiropractors Know 'secret' Ways to Reverse Diabetes?" The Salt Lake Tribune. N.p., 14 Mar. 2012. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Mercola, Dr. "Why Low-Carb Diets May Be Ideal for Most People." Mercola.com. N.p., 31 Jan. 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Murphy, T.J. "Is the High-Fat, Low-Carb Ketogenic Diet Right for You?" Outside. N.p., 16 Sept. 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Taverna, Mara, Tobias Straub, Harald Hampel, Dan Rajescu, and Stefan Lichtenthaler. "A New Sandwich Immunoassay for Detection of the α-Secretase Cleaved, Soluble Amyloid-β Protein Precursor in Cerebrospinal Fluid and Serum." - IOS Press. IOS Press Content, Oct. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

TEDxTalks, and Sarah Hallberg, Dr. "Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Starts with Ignoring the Guidelines | Sarah Hallberg | TEDxPurdueU." YouTube. YouTube, 04 May 2015. Web