About the Speaker

Dr. Sarah Hallberg is a triple board certified physician ( Internal, Obesity and Lipidology Medicine) specializing in supervised weight loss. She is the medical director ai Indiana University Health and and adjunct clinical assistant professor at IU’s School of Medicine. She is also the Medical Director at Virta Health.

Summary

She provides compelling evidence that a person can be “cured” of Type 2 Diabetes primarily by trading carbohydrates for fat. She believes that ADA (American Diabetes Association) guidelines regarding carbs are off. She sees diabetes as a state of carbohydrate toxicity. Carbs cause a dramatic spike in glucose / insulin requirement compared to other macro-nutrients such as protein and fat.

She believes that there’s a lot of money to be made from keeping you sick and that we should stop using medicine to treat food.

Editorial

Doctor Halberg’s talk is an eye opener! Our high carb and low fat diets coupled with processed sugars have put insulin on a roller coaster of sorts. The chart of macro-nutrients and glucose/insulin responses was very insightful.  I’m throwing my box cereals away and seeing if there are high protein versions on the market (there are).  First there were the four food groups…then food pyramid. Now what? 

Key excerpts:

Obesity is a disease, it’s not something created by lack of character. It’s a hormonal disease, and there are many hormones involved. And one of the main ones is a hormone called insulin.

Almost 50% of adult Americans now have diabetes or pre-diabetes. That is almost 120 million of us.

Everything you eat is either a carbohydrate, a protein or a fat, and they all have very different effect on glucose and therefore insulin levels, as you can see on the graph.

So when we eat carbohydrates, our insulin and glucose are going to spike up fast. And with proteins it looks a lot better. But take a look at what happens when we eat fat. Essentially nothing, a flat line.

Seriously! Our minimum daily requirement for carbohydrates is zero. We have essential amino acids, those are proteins, essential fatty acids, but, nope, no essential carbs.

We got this notion that low fat was the way to go decades ago. But a recent study just came out showing that there was zero randomized control evidence to recommend to Americans to remove the fat from our diet. And that’s how the carbs got added in. It was essentially a huge experiment on millions of people, and it failed miserably.

Don’t be fooled, there’s a lot of money to be made from keeping you sick. And what we see is, with these specialty guideline panels, they are stacked with conflict of interest.

So, the solution to the diabetes epidemic in my clinic is exceedingly clear: Stop using medicine to treat food. And for a disease whose root cause is carbohydrates, take away the carbohydrates, or at least cut them, so we can remember what we used to know.