In the past couple of weeks I've done blog posts related to blood sugar issues. Did one on kind of a new thought process around blood sugar and Type 2 Diabetes. Not so new to us. We talked about that in the blog post. And then I did one a little while back on Intermittent versus Episodic Fasting. After listening to what I say today you might want to go back and review those blog posts because they're applicable to this.
[Testing insulin resistance blog video]
[Intermittent & Episodic Fasting]
Today I'm talking ... I'm back to holding paper again. If you go back, I don't know a year or so, I did the newscaster thing like this where I hold paper. Anyway, talking about a case report in the British Medical Journal. This was back in 2018. The title so that if you want to pull it up you can, title of the article in the British Medical Journal was “Therapeutic Use of Intermittent Fasting for People With Type 2 Diabetes as an Alternative to Insulin”. Jason Fung, F-U-N-G, was one of the authors. He also wrote the book The Obesity Code and co-wrote the book The Complete Guide to Fasting. Definitely worth checking out those resources. I've given those books out here on this before so you guys are probably familiar with hearing those.
All right, so why am I talking about this? Couple of reasons. First of all I've talked about research a lot lately too. The problems with medical research, some of the issues we run into with research and marketing kind of going back and forth and it's difficult to tell the difference quite often. This is a different kind of study. It's a case study so it's not a randomized control trial. There's no placebo involved. There's no control group to match with the experimental group. This is somebody reporting. Had three or four or five patients, whatever it is, in this case it was three, that went through this treatment. They all had similar results. I'm throwing it out there so that people know that when you do this type of treatment, you can get these kinds of results.
Now, hopefully this spurs more research. More people look into it. More people publish data like this, case report data. For some medical people they'll look at this and say the study is too messy. It doesn't do them any good. For clinicians like me it means a lot, so I want to go through this real briefly. Very small sample size. Usually a problem in medical research but again this is a case report so they had three patients, all males, go through this treatment. They were aged 40 to 67 for three people so little bit of variation in age. And let's see, they were able to reverse insulin resistance, discontinue insulin medications while maintaining lower blood glucose levels, following some Intermittent Fasting guidelines.
They didn't all do Intermittent Fasting exactly the same way. They didn't all start out on the same medications. They were different ages. But they had similar underlying pathology. Now, for medical research you would want these people to be controlled. Tighter age range, similar percentage of body fat, on the same medications. You're looking to control all the variables you possibly can.
But in a practice like mine, and probably in almost every practice, I don't get patients that come in every day with exactly the same issues and exactly the same medications, with all those other variables tightly controlled. I get people from all walks of life who may have Type 2 Diabetes and may be overweight and they also might have gout or they might be on medications, they might not be on medications. I've got to figure out how to handle or how to help all of these patients even though they may not all be the same.
Some medical research where everything is tightly controlled is great for testing one particular variable. We're just going to switch this medication. We're just going to switch this particular macro in the diet. But a case study like this is more real world for people like me. We took seemingly three patients that could come in in the same week. We did a similar but not identical treatment on all three. And all three saw great results. That's valuable to clinicians running a practice like mine.
Now, all three of these men were taking numerous drugs in addition to insulin. When you look at Type 2 Diabetes and someone gets to the point where they become insulin dependent, that Type 2 Diabetes has gone way down the road. Now, some doctors feel that you become insulin dependent as a Type 2 Diabetic because you lose your ability to make insulin. Like you finally burn out the pancreas and it says, "I give up. I'm not making insulin anymore," and then you become a Type I Diabetic. Others believe that you get to the point where you've maxed out the amount of insulin you can make and you just need more. It's not that you lost the ability to make it, you just maxed out and it's still not enough. The insulin resistance is still so great. Interesting this article answers that question a little bit. At least in these three people.
Now, I mentioned they didn't the Intermittent Fasting a little bit differently. Two of them, and this isn't completely clear, this is a summary of the article. Two of them did fasting on alternate days. They would fast for a day, eat for a day, fast for a day, eat for a day and that's how they went through the study. Presumably every other day for the duration of the study. The other subject fasted three days a week together. While they were fasting, they were allowed to have tea, coffee, water, broth, same thing I do when I fast people, and eat one very low calorie meal in the evening. Technically not even really fasting.
These results are even with what I would call moderate fasting or 90% fasting, something like that. Solid fasting would probably get you even better results. Now, I also think it's interesting that prior to doing this they put them all through a nutritional education course and a course on how changing your diet can effect blood sugar and diabetes and medications and blood pressure and that kind of thing. They taught them first and it was a six hour course that they did on healthy eating and all of that. I'm guessing this was not following the Certified Diabetic Educator curriculum that we have here in the United States because that would basically be low fat, high carb, just take enough insulin, which they were doing prior to this.
Anyway, all three patients followed this for 10 months and then they were reassessed for fasting blood sugar, A1C, weight and waste circumference. As a result they discontinued all their medications. All but one I think with their medications. They were all able to stop insulin. One of them stopped insulin in just five days. The rest, the other two stopped insulin within the first month. And these were insulin injections. They stopped their diabetic drugs. One of the patients only got off three of the four drugs he was taking. And they all lost somewhere between 10 and 20% of their body weight. Not of just their body fat but of their body weight. If they were 250, 300 pound person they lost anywhere from 10 to 20% of that over a 10 month period of time.
That's a dramatic change for these people. That's with moderate fasting, not like solid fasting. That's not a ketogenic diet. That's not that level of intervention. It's what I would consider one level back from that. And they still got results that dramatic, 10 to 20% of their body weight was gone and they were off almost all of their medications. They were off their insulin within the first week to a month. That is a sign that the way we treat diabetes in the United States now ... I'm going to be nice and say it's ill informed, it's inappropriate. I can be mean and say it's malpractice. But putting people on medications for year after year after year and increasing those medications year after year when you can get results like this with Intermittent or Episodic Fasting and changing the diet and getting them to eat real foods, getting the sugar out of there, when you do things like that and have results like these, how appropriate is it to keep treating people in the traditional way?
Again, I've mentioned before, I have a hard time even considering Type 2 Diabetes as a real disease. I think it's our body's way to compensate. When you go back to the blog post on a new way to treat blood sugar I talk about this. That if you expose someone to a bunch of sugar, they're body reacts by making more insulin. They're insulin preceptors protect the cells by turning down the sensitivity. It's a productive mechanism. It's predictable. You take that sugar out of the diet, they make a lot less insulin, the insulin receptors re-sensitize and they go back to normal. Kind of like if I punch myself in the leg I get a bruise right? If I quit breathing I get weak.
Is it a disease? Is it a compensatory mechanism that we've just stimulated too much? I think so. Anyway, I really want you guys to consider, if you are currently being treated for Type 2 Diabetes or elevated blood sugar, high A1C, in a more traditional manner. You're taking the medication that increases your insulin receptor activity or you're taking the medication that increases the amount of insulin you produce or you're taking insulin and you're diabetic educator has said, "Within reason eat what you want. Just watch your blood sugar. Make sure you take enough insulin or enough medication to counteract it," I think that's working on the wrong side of the equation.
I can tell you from experience with patients in my office, when we have patients who's A1Cs are high, that would qualify at being Type 2 Diabetics. Some of them are medicated, some of them are not. Some of them we find it and we're the ones that teach them about this. No one else has seen it and put them medication yet. When we fast them, I've had I don't know, five or six people in the past eight or nine months we've done this with, we either fast them three days a week or we fast them intermittently like you only eat two meals a day. We don't even do like an 8, 16 on these people if we're being aggressive. We make it like a 6, 18, something like that. And really get them fasting considerably more. We see results almost identical. Male and female. Probably from their late 20s up into their late 60s we've done the same kind of work. And we see that they drop sometimes 15, 18, 20, 25 pounds over the course of the first six weeks of this.
And when we retest their blood at say the 90 day mark, we're seeing A1Cs drop from the mid eights down to the upper fives. We're seeing people who cannot take their medication anymore because their blood sugar gets too low. They have to keep peeling back layers of their medication. I don't take them off their medication. They've been instructed by their doctor already, their prescribing doctor, that if their blood sugar gets too low don't take it that day. As we are fasting them and changing their lifestyle, if their blood sugar gets too low they follow the directions of their prescribing doctor and they don't take their medication.
We see this in our office. I have other colleagues that I know see this in their offices. We talk to each other at seminars and gatherings and we get on the phone and compare notes about patients. There's a mastermind group locally here that I'm part of recently and we talk about these things so I know other doctors are seeing the same things. Now we've got some research on it. I've seen it. My colleagues around here have seen it. At some point there is enough anecdotal evidence or case study level evidence that says we probably should change the way we treat these patients. We should be honest with them and say that in most cases you're doing this to yourself. Unwittingly most likely but you're doing this to yourself.
Don't listen to the government telling you how to eat. Listen to someone who understands nutrition. Someone who's been trained in nutrition. Therapeutically using nutrition. Change your diet. Change your lifestyle. And your body will stop doing this to you. Inflammation goes down, blood sugar goes down, need for medication goes down, blood pressure goes down. Risks of things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and heart disease drop dramatically when you intervene in these methods, with these methods.
Anyway, I wanted to bring you yet another blog post about blood sugar because again, it will bankrupt our country if we don't do something about this. Pass this around to your friends. If you have family members that have blood sugar issues, pass this around. Feel free to call the office. Go to my website, drkrupka.com and you can click where it has a spot just under the header where you can put in your email address and choose a topic you want to learn about. Pick a topic that's of interest to you. You'll get to a series of emails over the next couple of weeks teaching you about a functional medicine approach to the topic you choose. Take advantage of that free information from you.
Subscribe to the blog. If you're looking at this, a snip of this on Facebook or in an announcement about this on Facebook, go to the blog. The upper right corner. Put your email address in there and you'll be notified from here on out when I post a new blog post. Take advantage of the free education I have available to you. Pass this around, like I said, to people posted on your timeline. Let people see this and let's get people educated and start making some major changes.
Thank you for watching today. I appreciate your time. And until next time as I always say, eat for your health, train for performance, and live the life you love today. Thanks again.
50% Complete
Subscribe to the blog so you never miss a new post!