Summary

Dr. Barnard believes that it is the Intramyocellular lipids or the fat inside your muscle cells that  interfere  with insulin signalling.  He believes that we are natural herbivores and that eating meat and animal fat is the root cause here. 

The National Institute of Health gave his research team a grant to test the premise of eating a diet not devoid of carbohydrates but without meat and animal fats. One patient in particular with a genetic history of the disease lost 60 pounds and no longer had diabetic symptoms. 

Editorial

While other clinicians are touting excess carbs as a key factor, Dr Barnard points to cultures such as the Japanese that eat plenty of noodles but have a comparatively  low incidence of diabetes.   Dr. Barnard’s insight is to look at what is causing insulin resistance at the cellular level and he makes a compelling case for Intracellular fat as being a primary culprit. 

Essentially, Dr. Barnard is advocating for a vegetarian or vegan diet. The concept is that this diet can be tasty and will ultimately reduce intracellular fat which is a root cause of insulin resistance.  

Excerpts:

And I have to say my father really was frustrated because patients were given diets that they did not like. What we would say is, or what they would say, is diabetes is a condition where it’s too much sugar in your blood, so don’t eat anything that turns to sugar, so don’t eat bread, don’t eat fruit, don’t eat pasta, rice, sweet potatoes, don’t eat regular potatoes, beans, don’t eat carrots; all these things had to be limited and while you are at it, cut calories, and that’s what people had to adhere to, that’s gets old by Wednesday.

But there are two scientific discoveries that really turned all this around.

And the first one was taking the widest possible lens. If you look around the world, at those countries that have the least diabetes, like Japan, for example, they weren’t following anything like the diet we were given to diabetic patients.

They weren’t saying, “I’m not going to eat rice, I won’t eat noodles,” they eat this kind of food all the time, it’s front and center on their plate.

And the second discovery came from looking inside the cell, especially the muscle cell. And the reason we look at muscle cells in particular is that’s where glucose is going, that’s where blood sugar is going, that’s the fuel that powers your movement.

Do you know about a person who’s running a marathon? What are they doing in the weeks leading up for it? They’re carbo-loading. So they’re eating pasta, they’re eating bread to try to get that glucose into the cell for energy.

And [insulin] is the key that makes that happen. But the reason it doesn’t happen it’s not that there’s chewing gum inside the cell. What there is, is fat. Fat, little globules of fat. I have to say, doctors hate words like “fat”,it has one syllable. So we want to call it intramyocellular lipid. ‘Intra’ means’ inside’, ‘myo’ means ‘muscle’, ‘cellular’ means ‘cellular’ ‘lipid’ means ‘fat’. Intramyocellular lipid is fat inside your muscle cells, and that is what interferes with insulin’s ability to work like a key to signal glucose coming in.

Americans today eat more than a million animals per hour. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that one of three kids born in the year 2000 and in the years since is going to get diabetes at some point in their life.

And you see the truth of it, turn on the television: half the commercials are for burgers, chicken wings, snack foods, the other half of the commercials are for medicines to undue the effects of all the foods that we’re eating.

The National Institute of Health gave my research team a grant and said, “Let’s test something completely different.

Instead of limiting breads and all these kinds of things, if fat is the issue, what if we have a diet that has effectively no fat in it?” Well, where does fat come from?

It comes from two sources: animal products, animal fat, and vegetable oils. So we brought in 99 people, and we asked them to do two things: to really eat a bounty of food and not worrying about quantity, we’re not counting calories here, we’re not counting carb grams or anything like that.

What  we’re doing instead, is we’re setting the animal products aside keeping the vegetable oils low. Very simple.

One of our participants was a man named Vance, and Vance’s father was dead by age 30. Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed with diabetes, he was in his late 30s when he came to see us.

And he said, “This is not hard!” Unlike every other diet he’d been on, we didn’t care how many carbs he ate, or how many calories, or how many portions. If he was having chilli, not a meat chilli, would be a bean chilli, chunky vegetable chilli. If he was having spaghetti, instead of a meat topping, it would be topped with artichoke hearts and wild mushrooms, and chunky tomato sauce.

So that kind of thing; very, very easy. Over the course of about a year, he lost 60 pounds, his blood sugar came down and down, and down, and one day his doctor sat him down and said,

“Vance, I know you’ve had family members die of this disease.” But he said, “I look at your blood tests; you don’t have it anymore.” And can you imagine what that feels like to have family members who felt

there’s this absolutely one way street and have this disease just turn around. And when I asked Vance’s permission to tell you about his story, he said, “Make sure you tell everybody that my erectile dysfunction went away too.”