By Brad Lemley
Type 2 diabetes is curable.
Conventional medicine refuses to recognize this fact. It treats the disease as chronic and progressive. Physicians are trained to address symptoms and slow complications — not cure.
But Eric Westman, MD, is not a typical physician.
Way back in 1998, this prominent obesity specialist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, came to three revolutionary conclusions about Type 2 diabetes:
• It is highly curable for virtually every person who has it
• The cure is entirely natural
• And this cure for Type 2 diabetes is also the best cure for obesity, and probably Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular illness and many of the other “diseases of civilization” that research has shown are at least partially driven by uncontrolled high blood sugar.
This was not an idle speculation. Dr. Westman did not quickly forget about it to pursue a typical, lucrative physician’s career based on treating these illnesses with drugs and surgery.
“These lifestyle changes are the opposite of what many people have heard all their lives.”
Instead, he dedicated his life to teaching his simple, safe, inexpensive cure to thousands of diabetic and/or obese patients, achieving “complete remissions” — doctor-speak for cures — in 98 percent of them.
Their average weight loss: one–two pounds a week, 50–100 pounds a year.
“Lifestyle change is so powerful,” he told me. “And what I recommend is, in many cases, just the opposite of what many people have heard all their lives.”
In fact, “The heart of it boils down to one page of text. That’s it,” he says, waving at a small booklet that he gives patients.
I spent a couple of days with Dr. Westman at his clinic and became convinced that he’s absolutely right.
In fact, in a sane medical system, any physician who put a Type 2 diabetic patient on drugs or recommended hazardous stomach-stapling surgery without first pointing out Dr. Westman’s safe, cheap cure would be liable for malpractice.
“I was a Type 2 diabetic. I could barely get out of bed,” says Tammy Buchanan Gentry, one of his patients and a low-carb support group leader in Roxboro, North Carolina, who has sent many patients Dr. Westman’s way.
Eric Westman, MD, at his Duke University clinic: “This method is so powerful… it needs to go out to many, many more people.”
“I was on 500 milligrams of metformin [the most common diabetes medication] and blood pressure drugs as well.” She smiles. “As of last week, I’ve lost 121 pounds. Dr. Westman has completely taken me off of all medication. And it’s easy. He has saved a lot of people’s lives, including mine.”
A Worldwide Plague
Diabetes is a disease in which insulin — the hormone that keeps blood sugar levels safely low — stops doing its job. That happens either because the pancreas (exhausted by chronic overproduction) makes too little of it and/or the body “refuses” to let it pull enough sugar out of the blood and push it into the cells, a condition known as insulin resistance.
Uncontrolled, chronically high blood sugar boosts the risk of death as it clogs arteries, scars kidneys, scorches retinas and renders limbs necrotic — in other words, dead and requiring amputation.
It has two basic forms. Type 1 is usually caused by an autoimmune disease that attacks the pancreas and must be treated with insulin injections.
But Type 2, accounting for over 90 percent of diabetes cases, is caused by chronic overconsumption of foods that boost blood sugar, especially carbohydrates, combined with genetic susceptibility and sedentary lifestyles.
“It’s vital not to succumb to the popular notion that the causes of Type 2 are “mysterious,” a lie that helps to boost drug sales.”
(It’s vital not to succumb to the popular notion that the causes of Type 2 are “mysterious,” a lie that helps to boost drug sales. More on that below.)
Largely driven by incidence of Type 2, diabetes is quite simply ravaging the world. Since 1980, reported cases have nearly quadrupled globally — from 108 million to 422 million.1
The Centers for Disease Control says that in this country:
• More than 29 million Americans have diabetes; 86 million have prediabetes — altogether, this comprises about one in three Americans
• Without major changes, as many as one in three Americans could have full-blown diabetes by 2050
• Diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2013 (and may be underreported)
• Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, lower-limb amputations and adult-onset blindness
• More than 20 percent of health care spending is for people with diagnosed diabetes.2
In short, Type 2 diabetes is the plague of our times.
Dr. Westman Encounters the “Dangerous” Solution
Soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, Westman headed down his “radical” path to a cure by employing an all-too-rare tactic: listening to his patients.
“You can learn a lot from them,” he says in his spartan office, waving in the general direction of his waiting room.
So when, back in 1995, two of his patients lost weight on a low-carb diet, he paid attention. They had followed the precepts of New Diet Revolution by Dr. Robert Atkins. “That was really the only low-carb book back then,” Dr. Westman says.
“I told them, ‘It’s bad for you,’” Dr. Westman recalls with a rueful smile. “‘You’re eating too much fat. You’ll have cholesterol trouble.’ That’s what I’d been taught, right?”
“To date, Dr. Westman has published over 50 journal articles on the astounding success he’s had treating thousands of obese and diabetic patients.”
But on a whim, he checked their blood chemistry, “and both of them had great numbers. If it had been just one of them, it would have been fishy. But both had better cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, everything.”
Dr. Westman called Dr. Atkins. “I said, ‘Where is your research?’ He said, ‘I’ve been doing this for 30 years with thousands of patients. I’ve seen it work. That’s my research!’”
Dr. Westman, trained in gathering statistics from clinical trials, offered to run a study that might help persuade other doctors that the low-carb approach worked.
In a 2008 study, five patients, each represented here by a different color, lowered their insulin from as much as 500 units daily to zero over seven weeks of following Dr. Westman’s low-carb protocol.
“Dr. Atkins asked me to come to New York and see him. That’s where it all started.”
The Research Is In
To date, Dr. Westman has published over 50 journal articles on the astounding success he’s had treating thousands of obese and diabetic patients with a low-carbohydrate diet.
In 2008, for example, he carefully tracked five Type 2 diabetics through the process, tracking their progression from insulin dependence to complete cure.
In 2015, he and 21 other researchers summed it all up in a landmark journal article called “Dietary Carbohydrate Restriction as the First Approach in Diabetes Management.” In that paper, he wrote:
By reducing the carbohydrate in the diet, we have been able to taper patients off as much as 150 units of insulin per day in eight days, with marked improvement in glycemic control — even normalization of glycemic parameters.
“Normalization of glycemic parameters” is researcher-speak for “cure.”
Results like this reveal that there’s nothing “mysterious” about the cause or cure for Type 2 diabetes.
A sign taped to the wall of Dr. Westman’s examination room.
The cause is carbohydrate overconsumption.
The cure is carbohydrate restriction.
“The best thing about this approach is that hunger goes away in just a few days,” says Dr. Westman. “Many of my patients have been constantly hungry for basically their whole lives. But when you do this, it usually takes only a day or two for the hunger to go away.”
And what about exercise?
“People come to me so frustrated, saying that they are exercising more and more, and it’s not working,” Dr. Westman says. “Studies confirm that exercising may be good for you in some ways, but it does not help you lose weight, because it makes you more hungry. The key to losing weight and getting off of diabetes medication is carb restriction.”
How Much Carbohydrate Should You Consume?
Because his method is so powerful, if you’re currently taking diabetes medication, you should not jump headfirst into an unsupervised very-low-carb diet such as Dr. Westman recommends.
“It’s vital to taper off the medication as you adopt the diet, or your blood sugar can go too low for safety,” he says.
Helping patients do that is precisely what Dr. Westman aims to do with his HEALcare clinics. These are special clinical programs — led by physicians around the world, with more signing on each month — that use Westman’s insights to assess patients, design custom diet programs and provide follow-up care to make sure patients stick with it.
As seen on Page 6, the HEALcare diet is quite restrictive.
“Especially if you have prediabetes or you’re on medication for diabetes, or if you have a couple of hundred pounds to lose, you have to stay really strict,” he says.
Indeed. Dr. Westman’s program requires that you remain under 20 grams of carbohydrate daily. To do this, you must consume absolutely zero sugar, grains or potatoes — even fruit is out, due to its sugar content. Instead, your diet must be almost entirely meat, fish, eggs and aboveground vegetables such as broccoli or lettuce.
By following such a diet, you are put firmly into a state called ketosis, in which the body switches from burning carbohydrate for fuel to burning fat (ketones are what fat becomes when the body breaks it down into fuel-sized chunks).
Almost immediately, weight starts dropping and blood sugar begins to normalize. In less than two months, 98 percent of patients are in full remission and off all medication, Dr. Westman says.
In other words — cured.
What About the Rest of Us?
Keep in mind that Dr. Westman has created a medical intervention for people who are very ill. The lesson for the rest of us — who have perhaps 40 or fewer pounds to lose and whose blood sugar is just a bit higher than optimal — is that the key to keeping both obesity and its closely related cousin Type 2 diabetes at bay is reducing carbohydrates.
Not protein. Not fat. Carbs.
So any distance that you dial back from the typical American consumption of roughly 400 grams of carbs daily is helpful. Whether your ideal daily amount is under 20 grams, under 50 grams or under 100 grams depends on several variables.
“Studies confirm that exercising may be good for you in some ways, but it does not help you lose weight, because it makes you more hungry.”
“The younger you are, the more active you are, and if you are male, you can have more carbs,” Dr. Westman says. “It’s not fair, but that’s how it works.”
Dr. Westman practices what he preaches, eating fewer than 20 grams of carbs daily for the last 16 years. Though he was never diabetic or significantly overweight, “I just like it. It keeps my weight where I want it to be, and my blood work is fantastic.”
And he says if he can do it, anyone can. “When I was a kid, I was a candy addict. I would actually steal money from my mom’s purse to get candy. But now, I can be faced with any carb — candy, cake, bread, chips, whatever — and it just doesn’t appeal to me. That happens to people who do this all the time. This is hard at first, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.”
Resources
There are several paths to take toward a lower-carb lifestyle:
• The simplest is to keep track of your daily carbohydrate consumption, with the goal of keeping it below a certain number of grams. If you are neither diabetic nor more than 50 pounds overweight, a daily upper limit of 100 grams is a good place to start. Read carb counts on packaged food, and use the figures at Carb-Counter.org or the app MyFitnessPal to fill in the rest. With a little experience, you’ll become adept at estimating carb grams just by glancing at a plate of food
• Or if you really want to get serious about it, adhere to Dr. Westman’s list of approved foods, which is somewhat more restrictive than my recommended diet and is appropriate for people who are significantly overweight or on the diabetic spectrum
• Finally, if you want a disciplined program that involves an intake interview, training and accountability, I highly recommend Dr. Westman’s HEALcare program. As the program literature states, “You’ll receive personalized, expert-guided diet and nutrition support plus medical supervision until meds can be eliminated. HEALcare is designed to help you stop being a ‘patient’ and enjoy a healthy, normal life.” For more information, click here.
“If you are neither diabetic nor more than 50 pounds overweight, a daily upper limit of 100 grams is a good place to start.”
Bottom Line
It cannot be said too often: Type 2 diabetes can be easily and quickly cured via natural, safe dietary change in most people. Never let the drug pushers of Big Pharma or the carb pushers of Big Food tell you otherwise.
Citations
- Global report on diabetes, World Health Organization, Geneva, 2016
- Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/aag/diabetes.htm. Accessed November 28, 2016
