Ancient Low-Carb Diet For Diabetes

Do you think that the low-carbohydrate diet for peopel with type 2 diabetes is a new invention? It’s not. There’s long-time experience of the positive effects.

What Does the Research Say About Low-Carb Diets for Diabetics?

A study by Duke University Medical Center researchers found that after 24 weeks on either a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet or a low-glycemic reduced-calorie diet, obese people with type 2 diabetes fared better on the low-carb regimen. Those following the low-carb ketogenic diet:

• Had greater improvements in hemoglobin A1C (a measure of blood sugar control)
• Were more likely to reduce or eliminate their use of diabetes medications (95 percent of the low-carb study participants did so)
• Lost more weight

Cutting carbohydrates from your diet has a double benefit for diabetics in that it not only causes your blood sugar levels to go down, it also helps you lose weight, which is also beneficial for blood sugar control.

A ketogenic diet, which is high in fat and very low in carbohydrates, is often used to help control seizures in people with epilepsy and also sometimes as a weight loss tool.

Normally when you eat, the carbohydrates you consume are turned into glucose, but when your diet is very low in carbs and high in fat, your body will burn fat for fuel instead. This leads to the production of ketones, which replace glucose as the energy source. Since glucose is not highly metabolized on a ketogenic diet, it essentially blocks the damaging high glucose metabolism.

A similar study by Swedish researchers also revealed that obese people with type 2 diabetes had improvements in blood sugar and weight loss while following a low-carb diet. Further, those who were insulin-dependent were able to cut their daily dosage in half. As with the previous study, the benefits were derived from a diet in which carbohydrates were very limited, in this case to just 20 percent of their total calorie intake.

Even after 44 months, a follow-up study revealed lasting results.

Yes, Your Diet Can Reverse Diabetes!

Acceptance is growing among the mainstream medical community that type 2 diabetes is reversible. One of the primary ways to achieving this is by modifying your diet, and specifically by modifying your diet to limit carbohydrates.

Despite this, the American Diabetes Association generally does not recommend very low carbohydrate diets, not because they aren't effective but because they believe most people will not stick with them in the long run. It does take some adjusting to cut most carbs from your daily meals, but a primary motivation for doing so is the potential to cureyour disease. If you need motivation, remember that staying away from carbs may mean that you can also eliminate insulin, diabetes drugs and even diabetes from your life entirely.

All Carbs are Not Created Equal

When you start out limiting carbs from your diet, it's important to know which carbs need to be eliminated. You're still going to be eating some -- perhaps 20 percent of your food intake or more will be from carbs -- so you've got to choose them wisely.

In the Swedish study noted above, carbohydrate consumption was limited to vegetables and salads. Refined and starchy carbs like bread, pasta, potatoes, cereal and rice were avoided, and this is a very good model to follow.

If you have type 2 diabetes, it's very important that you avoid refined carbohydrates, which are found in bread, pasta, cereal, cookies, candy, cakes, soft drinks and desserts, as these have been clearly linked to obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. In fact, research has shown that the more refined carbohydrates you eat, the more likely you are to develop type 2 diabetes.

So what types of carbs should you eat?

The kind in fresh, non-starchy vegetables. These are the carbs that will actually help lower your risk of diabetes. One study even found that eating green leafy veggies like broccoli, kale, spinach, sprouts and cabbage each day lowers your risk of type 2 diabetes by 14 percent.

At the Functional Endocrinology Center of Colorado, we generally recommend that patients eat four times the amount of vegetables as protein, as this allows you to easily incorporate plenty of health-boosting veggies into your meals without worrying about measuring portion sizes.

The key to remember is that as you incorporate healthy carbs from non-starchy vegetables in your diet, you need to reduce those from other sources like bread, pasta, sugar, rice, cereal and white potatoes.

"Diabetic cookery; recipes and menus" - A cookbook for people with type 2 diabetes from 1917 - Ancient Low-Carb Diet For Diabetes

In the past, before we were afraid of fat and before there were modern drugs to lower blood sugar, the dietary advice was different from today’s. At that time diet was all that was available to help people with type 2 diabetes.

Here are pictures from a cookbook for people with type 2 diabetes from 1917. You can read the entire book for free online - Ancient Low-Carb. Below is an image of pages 12-13, where there’s a summary on what they should and should not eat.

Let’s start with what people with type 2 diabetes were not to eat a hundred years ago.


Strictly forbidden foods

The title of the page is “Foods Strictly Forbidden”. It starts with sugar and “Farinaceous Foods and Starches”, in other words flours and starches. Examples follow:

• Bread
• Cookies
• Rice
• Pasta
• Sweet drinks
• etc.

These absolutely forbidden foods are now a part of the recommended diabetes-diet according to the Swedish Plate Model. These foods now take up the largest part of the diabetes-plate. This, while we get more and more people with type 2 diabetes, who need more and more drugs and get sicker and sicker. Hardly a coincidence.

Especially valuable foods

Here’s the list of recommended nutrient-dense diabetes foods: Butter, olive oil, cheese, meat, fish, eggs…

This sounds familiar. If we just add generous amounts of vegetables this will be low-carb foods. This is the advice I gave my patients with type 2 diabetes in my work as a family physician.

This is the advice that people with type 2 diabetes received a hundred years ago. Even in Sweden, with the high fat-Petrén diet that included fatty pork cuts, butter and green cabbage. And when they start eating this way today the same thing happens as it did in the past. Their blood sugar levels improve dramatically from day one. This makes sense, as they avoid eating what raises blood sugar.

Most overweight people will then gradually lose a substantial amount of weight and will be able to do well with less medication.

Watch Now

Get ready because I am going to show you the lifestyle ingredients and dishes you need to reverse your diabetes in a matter of days.

I am also going to share with you my story on how I discovered the secrets of this groundbreaking ingenious Myanmar cuisine. A tribe that has one of the lowest diabetic rates in the world.

I will show you that reversing your diabetes can be done without pills, insulin shots and boring restrictive diets.