I showed this to my husband who is a retired doctor as well as a diabetic. He says this "normalizing blood sugar" thing is an interesting concept and was massively tried over 50 years ago. He was involved in some of the research. It was abandoned because in a large population, it was impossible to make the theory work. Most people simply find it totally impractical to test their blood sugar to this extent. So this is not new news, it is a protocol that has been already tried on large populations and has not worked. Now some can make it work, but doctors and researchers are looking for some way to control blood sugar successfully on large populations. This obviously doesn't work for that because it is totally impractical for large populations. It is kind of the same thing as CPAP. You have to be really dedicated to make it work - it simply does not work for the majority of people. Not because the theory does not work, but it is simply not practical and most people will not do it.
Wow! This makes me very, very sad. What you are saying is that your husband agrees in his own words that “some can make it work”, but not everybody. Nothing works for everybody. Certainly not the standard treatment for diabetes, or we would see vast improvement and there would be a rush to treat people like McGrumpy because he could really benefit from preventing the inevitable. But his doctor knows that’s not true with the standard treatments that doctor has to offer. So he/she doesn’t even bother.
The statistics for standard diabetes treatments are dismal. People get sicker, they may have short term improvement (anything is an improvement over the way people eat before they get the diabetes diagnosis), but the long term stats are terrible. For one thing, the standard guidelines instruct diabetics to eat more carbohydrates than even the recommended daily allowance, when carbohydrate intolerance is the hallmark of this disease (“let’s treat the alcoholic with alcohol—there’s a great idea”). Then they prescribe a host of drugs that reduce but do not normalize blood sugars, and together with the horrible diet patients experience wild excursions from high to low blood sugars—most people do not find this treatment sustainable in the long term so they go back to eating their terrible diets and taking more and more medication to try, unsuccessfully, to treat this disease. I’ve seen it over and over again. Doctors blame these patients for their failure to stick to treatments that DO NOT WORK FOR A LARGE POPULATION. Yet they are prescribed thousands of times a day as the only option for newly diagnosed diabetics.
The reality is that using a blood sugar meter to guide what one eats works VERY WELL for many who are supported to try this approach and for the long term. People who are motivated and have support can and do sustain this approach in the long term. Unlike when your husband was doing his study (this approach, by the way, is more than 100 years old—it wasn’t new even when your husband was studying it) now there is a proliferation of groups on the internet of people who teach and support each other to “eat to the meter” and successfully control their blood sugars—at the very least tens of thousands of people who have had success in stopping the progression and in many cases reversing their diabetes—not just Bernstein’s approach but many successful variations on the theme.
So what you are saying is that doctors don’t bother even telling their patients that this is an option because it “doesn’t work for large populations”??? It doesn’t have to work for “large populations” it only has to work for individuals who are concerned enough about their own health to use it. Eventually 1+1+1+ . . . = a large population.
You could say the same thing about CPAP. The failure rate is at least 50%, not because CPAP doesn’t work, but because people don’t receive adequate support for the therapy and too many people give up. So in essence, “it doesn’t work for a large population”. How would you like it if you were diagnosed with severe sleep apnea, but the doctor didn’t bother telling you about CPAP because “too many people fail at this therapy”? Did that doctor give you informed consent if he/she failed to tell you about a viable treatment option?
If your husband treated diabetics, he surely prescribed statins. Evidence is mounting that statins DO NOT WORK FOR A LARGE POPULATION. Women for example, get no real benefit from statins for primary prevention (before they’ve had a heart attack or stroke), the number of men who need to be treated with statins for 5 years before any one person derives any benefit is a few hundred, but all risk sometimes serious side effects. Yet, I’ll bet your husband routinely prescribed statins including to women, and never explained to them that they don’t really work to reduce cardiovascular risk in women. And I’m guessing he probably didn’t offer them any alternatives except paying lip service to diet and exercise (low cholesterol diets do not work to reduce risk, the evidence is clear).
Every person I’ve met who has been smart enough to understand and implement what Dr. Bernstein and others who suggest limiting carbohydrates and replacing them with fat has experienced normalization of blood sugars, reduction or reversal of diabetes complications, beneficial weight loss and marked improvement in quality of life. Is it hard? HELL YES, it’s tedious and frustrating and takes a lot of time and energy. It’s hard to figure out what to eat sometimes—especially when away from home. It’s hard to resist that ice cream or brownie or cupcake. I miss pasta and slurping noodles in my soup. It’s hard to cook from scratch all the time and schlep my food with me to work and on trips.
But I don’t think it is anywhere near as hard as losing my feet to amputation, my brain to stroke and dementia, my vision to retinopathy, etc. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as coming up with the money to pay for an ever growing arsenal of drugs that fail to prevent those side effects in the long run. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as being morbidly obese and so sick I could barely walk across a room. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as being dead.
So I could care less if it works “for a large population”. It works for me, and nearly anybody else who gives it an honest try.
