Jason Fung, MD

Dr. Jason Fung is a Canadian nephrologist. He’s a world-leading expert on intermittent fasting and low carb, especially for treating people with type 2 diabetes. He has written three best-selling health books and he co-founded the Intensive Dietary Management program.

Dr. Fung has his own websites at idm.health and thefastingmethod.com.

Dr. Fung graduated from the University of Toronto and completed his residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Summary

Dr. Fung doesn’t see Diabetes as a chronic disease that most inevitably progress but as something that can be reversed. He sees high blood sugar as a symptom of insulin resistance..not the disease itself. He notes that prescribing insulin actually masks the disease analogous to treating the fever and not the infection. Also, giving a person insulin will most likely cause them to gain weight.

Dr. Fung is an advocate of fasting as a way to get rid of the extra glucose and even fat. He notes that fasting is practiced by many major religions and has numerous benefits.

Editorial

Dr. Fung’s advice feels on point. Giving a person insulin maybe required as a stop gap measure to reduce the chance of organ damage but it does not treat the underlying root causes of the disease. 

Like others he recommends getting rid of processed sugars and carbohydrates..which are easily converted to sugar.

Fasting is a natural way to allow your body to use up excess insulin.  However, Dr. Fung doesn’t seem to address what is causing the insulin resistance in the first place … just that it is the problem.  

Excerpts

Diabetes itself is actually quite reversible… and that’s what needs to be understood

This is not a disease that needs to progress but if you go to the Diabetes Associations….they all put out there that this is a chronic disease. They tell people essentially that you have diabetes you’ll have it for the rest of your life…but that’s simply not true

The disease is actually reversible but If you don’t know how to reverse it then you’re just going to get worse and the thing is that the drugs don’t actually do anything for the disease.

If you have very high insulin resistance it’s going to cause high blood sugar …but that’s the symptom of the disease. So the treatments that we give are are all targeted at blood sugar right that doesn’t make any sense.

An analogy – if you have a leg infection you need to treat the bacteria with antibiotics but that infection can give you a fever …but that fever is not the disease. if you start treating that fever as if it the disease then that leg wound is going to Fester because you’re treating the symptoms of the disease and ignoring the disease. 

Fasting is actually the most efficient and the most effective weight lower insulin …there’s really no drug that does that

Literally billions of people around the world fast on a regular basis through their entire lives right so the Muslims the Hindus the Buddhists the Catholics almost every major religion in the world prescribes fasting not because it’s super harmful because it’s very beneficial and what they what happens during the fast is that your insulin levels go down. Perfect!