Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [30]
Let me emphasize that this grim scenario does not have to occur. If an unhealthy diet is the cause, a better diet can provide the answer to this problem.
KF: How can we avoid it?
NB: The key is to help our body’s insulin to work normally. So long as your body’s insulin can escort glucose into the cells normally, diabetes will not occur. The resistance to insulin that leads to diabetes appears to be caused by a buildup of fat inside the muscle cells and also inside the liver. Let me draw an analogy: I arrive home from work one day and put my key in my front door lock. But I notice the key does not turn properly, and the door does not open. Peering inside the lock, I see that someone has jammed chewing gum into the lock. Now, if the insulin “key” cannot open up the cell to glucose, there is something interfering with it. It’s not chewing gum, of course. The problem is fat. In the same way that chewing gum in a lock makes it hard to open your front door, fat particles inside muscle cells interfere with insulin’s efforts to open the cell to glucose. This fat comes from beef, chicken, fish, cooking oils, dairy products, etc. The answer is to avoid these fatty foods. People who avoid all animal products obviously get no animal fat at all, they appear to have much less fat buildup inside their cells, and their risk of diabetes is extremely low. Minimizing oils helps, too.
And we can go beyond prevention. When people who already have diabetes adopt a low-fat vegan diet, their condition often improves dramatically. In our research, funded by the U.S. government, we found that a vegan diet is more effective than the current traditional diabetes diet, and is much safer than a low-carb diet.
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“When people who already have diabetes adopt a low-fat vegan diet, their condition often improves dramatically.”—Dr. Neal Barnard
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KF: What about the claim that a vegetarian diet has too many starches, which raises blood sugar?
NB: Starchy foods, such as whole grains, beans, and vegetables, are healthful foods, and the body is designed to use the glucose that they hold. In type 2 diabetes, the body has lost some of this ability. But the answer is not to avoid starches but to restore the body’s ability to use them. After all, cultures whose diets are traditionally high in carbohydrate—Japan, China, Latin America—have had very low diabetes rates until meat, cheese, and other fatty foods displace their healthy carbohydrate-rich diets; only then does diabetes become more common.
The Atkins fad unfortunately left many people imagining that carbohydrate (that is, starch) is somehow risky. That notion is as unscientific as suggesting that water or oxygen is dangerous. The body needs all these things for good health.
A similarly persistent but misguided idea is the blood-type diet approach. A popular book on this subject said that people with type A blood should follow a vegetarian diet but that people with type O blood should not. Unfortunately many readers with type O blood followed this advice, which turned out to be quite wrong. The fact is, people with type O blood do as well as everyone else on a plant-based diet. A vegan diet is helpful and effective, regardless of blood type.
KF: Let me diverge for just a moment and ask you about soy, since it seems to be a hot-button issue. The word on the street is that soy products can have hormonal effects. If a woman is at high risk for breast cancer, is soy a bad idea?
NB: Many studies have looked at this question, and the results are consistent. Women who include soy products in their routine are less likely than other women to develop breast cancer. In January 2008, researchers at the University of Southern California quantified the benefit on the basis of the most rigorously controlled studies to date: Women averaging one cup of soy milk or about one-half