Animals, being vegan, etc.

Nope, because you still don't know the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.Common sense is that if you had type 1 diabetes and asked your doctor to reduce your insulin, they would tell you to take the amount your body needs. Less insulin is not winning at type 1 diabetes. I have no idea whether veganism can cure anything, it certainly cannot cure type 1 diabetes, which "The scientifically proven system for reversing diabetes without drugs" would imply. Cutting out meat and dairy will not magically kick-start back to life the islets of Langerhans which the body's immune system has killed and it won't arrest the 24/7 attack on the pancreas that type 1 diabetes is. It is an extremely stupid assertion to suggest that a type 1 diabetic should take less insulin. In any case, the consumption of meat has makes bugger all difference in how much insulin people need to take, as it's used to metabolise carbohydrates. In fact, if your diet replaces meat with plant based foods - carbohydrates - your insulin requirements will rise. Some people with type 2 diabetes also take insulin, in which case getting their health back to a point where they don't need to is a good idea, but suggesting that a type 1 diabetic should be reducing their intake is complete bollocks. Your body needs exactly as much as it needs, not more, not less. I'm assuming you know that before insulin was sythesised that type 1 diabetes was 100% fatal?

Very true. But he does sell a fuck ton of books
http://www.nealbarnard.org/books/

I really enjoyed the OP, but then I had to comb through the endless garbage to find the posts which actually responded to the points raised in the OP. That was a poop experience, let me tell you.

It's a bit more complicated than what you say about replacing meat with carbohydrates means greater insulin need. The presence of fat in the bloodstream is quite a hitherto ignored factor in the way we talk about diabeties - the main effect of which is the pancreas struggling more to function because of the thicker blood impeding circulation. That's definitely true and you didn't mention it so it would be worth following this strand. You can find a fair few rather long seminars of his for free on Youtube, posted by himself in some cases..the content of which is not guilty of mystification , advertising or any other behaviour snake oil salesman get up to. Releasing 12 books in your professional life since 1990 makes someone a con artist? Science discloses new information as time goes on; his own personal professional familiarity with both regular and exceptional cases would develop over time, presumably sometimes prompting the need to correct or clarify things printed in earlier books. Free and informative lectures on youtube, no repeat products, 12 books over the course of 23 years, and most importantly good results is not the resumé of a snake oil fraudster. Hopefully you realise how reactionary it is to think that.

There are, as I think we would all agree, a whole bunch of shitpots out there that prey on people's health problems, body image etc. Obviously you have the corporate ones - Slimfast, fat binders, mainstream vitamin products etc. The vegan/raw food advocates often fall into a sort of self help/positive thinking/new age mystic category which I find particularly offensive. The thing is though, that amongst the dross there is almost certainly some valuable info, and I would rather give the benefit of the doubt than write something off completely.
I was diagnosed type 1 just over a year ago but took to using insulin like a duck to water and have had almost perfect control of my BG from day one. So, reducing my insulin requirements is not something I've given much thought to. The problem that I have is that I'm ALWAYS hungry, crave sweet things and am overweight. I want a diet that will help with these issues and will also be helpful for my primary and my other secondary illnesses. A bit more energy would be good too. I try not too eat a lot of fruit because of the sugar content but think that I may experiment with larger amounts even if that means more insulin. The truth is I've never eaten fruit and though 'aw, that's made me feel like shit'. That's happened plenty of times with all other food though.

Again, you are talking about type 2 diabetes. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are completely different things. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, you need a faulty gene to get it. It is completely incurable it cannot be "reversed without drugs." Type 1 and type 2 both involve the pancreas. Alzheimer's and epilepsy both involve the brain, but they're not the same either. In type 1 the pancreas is not "struggling to function because of the thicker blood impeding circulation," it's not functioning because the beta cells which produce insulin are dead. In type 1 diabetes the pancreas produces no, or a negligible amounts of insulin. In type 1 diabetes you need to inject the right amount of insulin not because you have too much fat in your bloodstream but because you are not making any insulin yourself. You are not going to get that pancreas working again. Not with any diet. It's actually a very simple concept - they are two totally different conditions. The thing is, type 1 diabetes is very controllable and the modern insulins are excellent - providing you do it properly and suggesting that somehow aiming to reduce your insulin intake as a type 1 diabetic belies not only an ignorance about the condition but can be very dangerous thing for a type 1 diabetic to do. How much insulin you take is not a signifier of how good or bad you are at diabetes, it's just how much your body needs. In the words of this man
http://www.otago.ac.nz/dsm/people/expertise/profile/index.html?id=721

Too fucking right I'm being reactionary about this. I'm reacting to a decade of people with a glancing, day-time TV knowledge of type 2 diabetes, having read an article, talked to Auntie Flossie with type 2, watched Dr OZ or a youtube channel and decided they can throw around hinkey advice about some miracle therapy for type 1 diabetes. It is not reversible. It is, however very manageable and the miracle therapy is insulin.

Webby: the reason why you feel hungry all the time is that you're not producing amylin, which would have been co-secreted with insulin. It's the hormone which tells your brain that you're full. You can take sythesised amylin, but you can work around it without it by tricking your brain a bit. I know it sounds counterintuitive if you're really hungry but it helps if you eat smaller meals and snack on slow carbs in between, it helps with the cravings and stabilising the blood sugar levels. Adding some protein helps.

Thanks Fleurnoire. I already eat smaller meals and graze on oatcakes, nuts and small portions of fruit etc but I still end up consuming a lot of calories without ever feeling satisfied for more than about 5 minutes. I really crave sweet stuff as well and regularly succumb to the dubious delights of chocolate etc - these don't make me feel full either.
I'm a bit overweight(6'2'', 14 stone) which is shite, especially as I got used to weighing less than 11 stone before I was diagnosed, but the main problem is that feeling hungry all the time is such a fucking bore.

Come the revolution, I think I'll throw a massive tantrum if fleurnoire-et-rouge isn't elected to position of general coordinator for the international soviet for diabetes management.

An entirely sensible suggestion. Still, fuck that, let's have Raw Food Goddess Shazzie instead! It's all about love you know - I'm gonna love my pancreas back to life!
Let the light shine! http://www.shazzie.com/love/song/light_shines.mp3
Here's the words http://www.shazzie.com/love/song/ altogether now!

leomarinus wrote:

Fuck that. People can self-manage their own medical conditions. (With full access to current, relevant medical opinion.)

As for the hunger, Webby, it's always going to be with you but snacking is your friend (along with regular monitoring of your BS) but upping the protein content does help, as does having a drink(non-sugary) with it because fluids help fill your stomach. Unfortunately, if you've got a sweet tooth, snacking on chocolate etc will make it worse because it causes your BS to spike and drop. If it's any consolation, and I doubt that it is if you're a chocoholic, the less you eat of it, the less you crave. I did without dairy in my diet for a few years, which pretty much meant no chocolate and vegan cakes, with the best will in the world, can be a bit cacky, and I never really went back to wanting the sweet stuff much.

Even better!

I don't even remember saying anywhere that type 1 can be reversed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qae1KoPuFdc

Here in this video is a rare specimen, a type 1 diabetic and he eats thousands of calories of sweet fruit.

Is he lying?

Are you sure? There's only so far you can go with revolutionary zeal, rubber gloves and a mirror.

Kureigo-San:

I think it was Dr Neal Barnard

Does he specify type 2 in his title, or even often refer to the fact that type 1 is irreversible?
Was it not you who endorsed it by saying

?
If Dr Bernard had written a book called
"Eating a sensible, controlled, reduced fat diet, in conjunction with exercise will make everybody, regardless of whether or not they have diabetes, feel better" then it would be different. However, that's just common sense and wouldn't sell in a world where people want miracle fixes. And it wouldn't be adding to the mountains of miracle cures marketed at diabetics. In a world which habitually confuses the different types of diabetes, the best you can say it's misleading. Even suggesting that you can "reverse" type 2, is very dodgy ground. Managing it would be more accurate, but that doesn't sound so sexy. At the worst, it's dangerous, especially to newly diagnosed diabetics, (as evidenced in that video, which I'll come back to later,) especially in the places like the US where if you're not armed to the teeth with medical insurance, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes can very easily push you into poverty and where people habitually play russian roulette with their health in order to reduce their medical bills. But there again, Dr Barnard is a specialist in psychiatry and a lobbyist, so endocrinology is not his area of expertise. If he was, he might actually go out of his way to point this out. I'm not noticing it on his homepage.
http://www.nealbarnard.org/books/diabetes/

Perhaps it's worth pointing out that Barnard, his books and the organisation he fronts is not ideologically neutral. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (members of which who are actual physicians numbering less than 5%) is largely funded by Nanci Alexander, multimillionaire vegan activist and PETA (also largely bankrolled by Nanci, ) so there's an inherent bias in it's work anyway, given it's primary interest in animal welfare, that it recommends veganism as a cure for just about everything is one from the no shit Sherlock file. However, the PCRM concern for the welfare of animals in medical research does not extend any pressing concerns with dangerous medical experiments done on poor people in countries without acceptable standards of medical consent. They are associated with Henry J Heimlich (of the Heimlic maneuver fame) - in fact they have an award named for him - who has been trotting around the globe for the past few decades, injecting patient who have HIV/AIDS with malarial infected blood. At no point has any of his test subjects (who are incidentally denied anti-retroviral therapy) leapt up, miraculously cured by being infected with a disease which kills around a million people a year. In fact nobody except the PCRM and his local newspaper has anything positive to say about this.
http://www.circare.org/malariotherapy.htm
Heimlich and associates were last spotted doing this in Ethiopia, much to the surprise of the Ethiopian Health Ministry. But at least no animals are harmed the the pursuance of this research. So, I will pour scorn on something which comes out of an organisation who's primary concern is for animal rights but names an award for medicine and is associated with a man who has no compassion when it comes to infecting sick people with a deadly disease, with no credible oversight, in order to prove a dangerous theory which was discredited decades ago. I don't call that responsible medicine.

However, the PCRM do throw spectacular galas, in which celebrities turn up and give each other awards. Which is nice, if you like that sort of thing.

Still not getting the difference between type 1 and type 2? You can eat whatever you like with type 1 diabetes. That's why you take insulin, to cover the carbohydrates you consume. You count carbs not calories. I have absolutely no reason to believe he's lying. I do, however, have every reason to believe he's a complete idiot. 30 bananas a day's not going to be good for anyone, whether you produce your own insulin or inject it. For one thing it's likely to give you hyperkalemia (too much potassium.) Also, if you live off a raw fruit only diet, you're going to be deficient in fatty acids, amino acids, certain minerals. A young, fit active healthy man will feel fine on it, probably, but the long term deficiencies will add up. As for his idiocy? He says:
"Type 1 is a little tougher to reverse." Much tougher, an account of it being irreversible. Maybe Banana Man should be spending a little less time on the beach and a little more time informing himself about his own medical condition. Then he goes on to talk about someone Kirk/Kurt Someone or other, who he said reversed his type 1 diabetes. No he didn't, whoever he was. Banana Man says that Kirk (?) got an early diagnosis and fruit blahblahblah all better. Nope. That is what is known as the Honeymoon Period, and like all honeymoons, it doesn't last. An early diagnosis means that some beta cells are still working - they won't be for long - they will soon be completely destroyed. It often occurs when you start insulin therapy and you start getting low blood sugars. It's not the pancreas repairing itself, it's it's dying gasps. From wikipedia:

Whoever Kirk/Kurt is, he's either taking his insulin properly now or very sick.

Plasmatelly wrote:

Absolutely. However, I'm kind of hoping for a world where people can have access to decent medical care, without resorting to hokey crap and quackery because they can't afford to see a doctor.

Yep, I experienced this myself and actually had to cut my insulin out completely to avoid hypos. In my ignorance, the first time it happened I almost convinced myself that I had been wrongly diagnosed. Wishful thinking and after a second(and final) apparent remission I accepted my fate.
I looked up Amylin but couldn't really find much useful info - do you know if it is available on prescription in the UK and whether or not it's considered safe?

Hi fleurnoire - have you read Suckers by Rose Shapiro?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suckers:_How_alternative_medicine_makes_fools_of_us_all

Ok, I'll come out of the closet now. After tracking this thread I decided to be open minded and give a high carb low fat vegan diet a go. To tell you the truth, I was more motivated by my annoyance at the the meat headed attitude(see what I did there?) of a certain anti vegan poster than anyone else although UV and KS had quite an impact too.
So, within weeks of changing I had more energy, more enthusiasm and all round better health than I've had for many years. After about a month my insulin requirements started to reduce and I started to lose weight despite the fact that I now consume around 900 grams of carbs and 4000 calories per day, mostly from sweet fruit. I NEVER feel hungry simply because I eat whatever I want. Seven months down the line I have lost 11lbs in weight and my insulin requirement is around 60% of what it was before Christmas. My last A1C result was 26 which is in the low levels for a non diabetic person. My attitude towards animals has changed massively too but I don't want to reignite all the headbanging so I'll leave that stuff out for now.Frankly, this whole experience has been incredible. It is pretty expensive but well worth and it can be done much more cheaply with cooked carbs replacing a lot of the fruit.
The only downside has been watching vegan YouTube videos that unfortunately serve up a load of trite new age/self help mumbo jumbo alongside their excellent nutritional information.
I know that a lot of people will sneer and stick their fingers in their ears but I have no agenda here, this is simply my experience.

Fucking awesome, Webby. I'm glad you finally decided to share it! Quality knowledge shouldn't lose out to..well, the contents of this thread.

Makin' all kiiiiindsa gainz.

That's great Webby. I've heard so many stories like that, positive effects on health issues by going vegan. My partner actually became vegan because she saw first hand her auntie's arthritis - apparently she couldn't even walk down the shops - practically disappear through a vegan diet. Don't ask me the science, I have no idea, but it's incredible what diet can do. I've been vegan for over a year now and feel great. For the first time I feel the weight I should be if you know what I mean. I'm the opposite to you in that I've actually put on an extra half stone, which I've always wanted but never could do. And by eating healthy. Great stuff. My cooking has also go a lot more interesting too. I've always enjoyed it, but exploring different tastes and stuff is cool. I'm not saying you can't do this on a meat diet, but it probably did contribute to getting stuck in a culinary rut. And yeah, like you, my compassion for animals has grown with it.

I know what you mean about youtube. Thank Satan for this guy.

Thanks guys. I'd be interested to hear some debunking from the anti crew as well though.

So, I'm not too keen on vegan Nazis although I'm sure they're kind to their mothers, I positively embrace vegan black metallers, but I'm starting to worry about jazz - if I get wind of any vegan saxophonists it's straight to McDonalds for me.

There's nothing to debunk, and nothing to congratulate. In a food rich country like Britain, if you can choose what to eat, your diet should work for you. To be honest, Britain's media is obsessed with food, this thread isn't any different; beyond issues around availability and malnutrition - a real class issue in Britain - why would anyone care what someone eats?

How about Type 2 diabetes epidemic, heart disease, cancer, my 16 year old son being 2 stone overweight, etc. I'm sure there are plenty more.

Sorry Webby, but you found a diet that works for you - that's good. But you're only a couple of posts away from sounding like Jamie Oliver mate! There are class issues with food in Britain, but non of them have been raised in your post on your new veggie diet.

You should say specifically what class issues you're talking about if I'm to believe you're bringing them up for anything other than to scold Webby for succeeding.

KS - have a look in post 262. This isn't about scolding Webby.

I know that Libcom is a class struggle resource but there are loads of non class related threads that come up from time to time. Also, you asked me for reasons to care about what people eat that weren't class related and I gave you some. That said, whilst I have no figures to hand I'd take a pretty large bet that there are more incidents of obesity and related illness amongst the working class. If so then this is very relevant to class struggle.
The problem here I think is that lifestylers, hippies and nicey nicey middle class do-gooders have so put the backs up of many of the class conscious amongst us that the blinkers have gone on and they refuse to engage with anything like an open mind.
And now PT, the most important point - I would rather sound like Adolph Hitler than Jamie fucking Oliver so easy on the slander there comrade. I'm not angry, just little hurt. Sob.

Oh, that? I saw that but thought it was strange, as having a wider selection of food like in the UK options makes the average person's diet considerably worse. Without the education, which is trying to succeed here, there will continue to be diet related diseases. Especially for workers whose easiest and most common sense is something processed and fast on their lunch breaks etc. No one is necessarily saying that plants are the easiest thing to do, but it is what it is in the end.

Take it in jest mate! The quality of cheap food is a class issue. There's a large estate near me that has Greggs, take aways, BoozeBuster, pubs, bookies - but no fresh food (or vegetables). Is this because there is not enough demand? Very possibly. Whether this is because they need Jaimie to work his magic, I dont know.
I'm sure we agree there should only be one standard of food - the fact that there are variations is a class issue. Inexpensive food almost always means shit ready meals, take aways, monotony and malnutrition - again, class issues.
Obviously, not all working class people eat poor diets, but too many do. I appreciate that on Libcom, we talk about most things - but personal diet and identity are two topics that often tend, in my view, to trample roughshod over everyone else.

KS - there's so much wrong with that tone, maybe it's the way it's written or comes across -

Really? My experience is that choice is restricted for people with less funds. Good quality slow or fast food is more expensive - to assume that it is simply a choice thing, or ignorance is insulting. Maybe you should have a rethink.

Never a truer word said and this thread exemplifies your statement. The question is, which side of the debate did the most trampling? The answer to that is real easy. I for one can't be accused of being partisan - for the majority of this thread I was chowing down on meat and cheese whilst straining to hear the vegan voices through the cacophony of tub thumping and 'ner ner ner not listening'
Coming to this site with an open mind, I've changed my politics, changed aspects of my lifestyle and have now changed my diet and along with it my physical wellbeing and hope for a decent length life. What's not to like?