Is primal the answer for diverticulitis and type 2 diabetes page

[bubba070]

Hello all. I have been living primal now for about 4 months. I have lost about 30 Lbs and I feel great. I am sold and will never go back to my old ways.

I would like to suggest going primal to my mother but have not been doing this long enough and do not know enough to answer some of her questions. My mother is 66 years old, has diverticulitis, type 2 diabetes and I would guess that she could afford to lose at least 30 Lbs. She also has moderate arthritis throughout her body and cannot exercise as much as she should.

Would eating primal help her? I am a little hesitant to suggest it knowing her doctor might not agree.

[jammies]

It can be very scary to recommend a diet for someone else! Especially if they have other health conditions.

I have seen many, many people on this forum who had great success reversing Type 2 diabetes with a primal diet. Personally I have had amazing success improving arthritis and severe bowel issues as well. Diverticulitis patients may need to avoid nuts and seeds on the primal diet, but other than that I can't see how it could hurt.

I think that primal eating could very well improve her life dramatically and I really doubt that it could hurt her. If she is open, maybe get her a book or two or show her some websites and let her decide herself?

[Lewis]

Hello all. I have been living primal now for about 4 months. I have lost about 30 Lbs and I feel great. I am sold and will never go back to my old ways.

I would like to suggest going primal to my mother but have not been doing this long enough and do not know enough to answer some of her questions. My mother is 66 years old, has diverticulitis, type 2 diabetes and I would guess that she could afford to lose at least 30 Lbs. She also has moderate arthritis throughout her body and cannot exercise as much as she should.

Would eating primal help her? I am a little hesitant to suggest it knowing her doctor might not agree.

You really need to work with a doctor.

Effectively, the drugs used for diabetes are so strong that unless the person eats carbohydrate regularly they'll go hypoglycemic. This is probably one of the reasons why dietitians recommend high-carb diets to diabetes patients -- because the drugs would be in danger of killing the patient otherwise, and they know that. And why the drugs approach rather than a low-carb diet? Basically, because the pharmaceutical companies advertise these drugs at doctors, and most doctors assume that a pill is an answer to everything.

I'm not sure how to get this across in a forum post. I think one thing you could usefully do is to read this story:

Medicine for Magdalena – Checkup with Ron Rosedale | Me and My Diabetes

Anyway, you need to work with a doctor, because if someone who's diabetic starts to eat a low-carb paleo diet (of which the Primal Blueprint is an example), then the doctor needs to reduce the meds or they'll go hypoglycemic, which is dangerous.

If you can find an enlightened doctor and take a dietary approach, you might well be doing the best thing. A drug that flogs the pancreas in order to make it produce more insulin -- and, bear in mind, a diabetic's problem is not that he or she produces too little insulin, but rather that he or she has become resistant to its signal -- will eventually burn out the beta-cells in the pancreas. Irreversible damage. Your Type II diabetic then, effectively, becomes a Type I diabetic (i.e. an insulin dependent diabetic).

In the meanwhile, the high-carbohydrate diet will likely be wreaking other havoc on the patient's body. By the time anyone gets to be diabetic you can bet that they've also got some other issues going on. You mention two, including diverticultis.

There are host of digestive ailments which benefit enormously from a gluten free Paleo diet: IBS, Crohns, Celiac, diverticulitis…and ulcerative colitis. ...

Ulcerative Colitis

The current dogma seems to be that diverticultis needs "fiber". That seems to be suggested for many digestive conditions. By this they seem to mean insoluble cereal-fiber. Ouch! There seems little reason to be believe that that is, in fact, the case. There's also reason to believe it's contra-indicated: gluten, problematic anti-nutrients in grains, and insoluble fiber itself, could all be wreaking damage on the GI tract. On the other hand, it seems that a low-carb paleo diet can relieve many conditions of this sort, as Robb Wolf testifies there.

There are also many reports of people's gaining relief from the symptoms of both osteo- and rheumatoid- arthritis on low-carb paleo diets.

Something of a theme here, you notice. ... That's not surprising because all the conditions you've mentioned are likely caused by deviating quite a long way from our "ancestral diet". In other words, from the diet that our evolutionary history has fitted us to thrive on. By going back to that kind of diet, you can often reverse symptoms and clear up the underlying problems to some extent.

You probably want to research the area some more before deciding what advice to give. It might be useful to look at Dr. Rosedale's book. He's been treating diabetics with a low-carb diet for years, and is, I think, currently abroad advising in india, where they have even greater problems with the disease:

Amazon.com: The Rosedale Diet (9780060565732): Ron Rosedale, Carol Colman: Books

There's a Dr. Berstein who, I think, does something similar. I don't know his book:

Amazon.com: Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars (9780316182690): Richard K. Bernstein: Books

[primalprincess7]

so if they were on the medication and can't really eat low carb then they never lose weight? I am on metformin for PCOS and when I eat primal i get those symptoms so i eat more carbs but i want to lose weight! ugh...maybe i should lower the meds?

[Lewis]

so if they were on the medication and can't really eat low carb then they never lose weight?

I don't know about that. I've got a friend who's diabetic. He was fairly obese. When he first lost some toes, they rushed him into hosptial and, in a apnic, he did what the dcotors said and didn't drink for months and stuck to the diet they recommended. He did, in fact, lose a lot of weight. First time I'd ever seen him thin. Possibly he lost too much weight: he looked pretty ill, and had no energy to do anything.

Now he's become a bit blase and is back on the beer and sugar in his coffee and all the rest of it. He's back in outsize clothes.

I think it's not that you can't lose on a relatively high-carb (but low-glycemic index) diet; it's just that you probably lose a lot of lean mass as well as fat and feel like crap. Plus you probably go crazy for what you've been denying yourself and eat on the rebound.

But I guess at bottom the problems is the carbs. You really don't want either excess glucose in your bloodstream, glycating body tissue, or to have the excess pushed into stiorage as body fat. And, of course, there's the issue of the meds burning out the pancreas.

I am on metformin for PCOS and when I eat primal i get those symptoms so i eat more carbs but i want to lose weight! ugh...maybe i should lower the meds?

I don't know.

You might take a look at the new edition of Julia Ross's The Diet Cure, which has just come out. It's mostly about how to stop food cravings and mood swings, but they do deal with other problems at her clinic and I believe she has some chapters on women's issues. They seem to get very good success with people, even those with quite intractable problems like depression, alcoholism and drug-addiction, using food, targeted amino-acid supplementation and a minimum of medication.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Diet-Cure-...dp/0143120859/

[candiceshi]

Keep in mind, a diabetic's problem is not that he or she produces too little insulin, but rather that he or she has become resistant to its signal -- will eventually burn out the beta-cells in the pancreas.

[RobinNM]

so if they were on the medication and can't really eat low carb then they never lose weight? I am on metformin for PCOS and when I eat primal i get those symptoms so i eat more carbs but i want to lose weight! ugh...maybe i should lower the meds?

You will need to adjust your meds when switching to a primal way of eating/living because your carb load tends to become very low. Metformin decreases the amount of glucose you absorb from your food and decreases the amount of glucose made by the liver, that's why you get those symptoms when you eat primal. If you end up being low carb or very low carb, then you need to check your sugars fairly frequently and take the logs to your doc and adjust the meds. This may need to be done on a weekly basis for a while until your sugars level off.

[bubba070]

Thanks for the reply's. I will give the reading material suggested a try.

I also have had great success with a bowl disease. I was diagnosed with crohn's disease 10 years ago, I had a perforated bowl and had to have a few feet of my small and large intestine removed. Up until 4 months ago I was taking 11 pills a day. Within a week of changing my diet I started weaning myself off the pills and within a month I was pill free.

[primalprincess7]

good advice

[Artichoke]

Whoa.. I have type 2 diabetes and there's some very wrong info here.. Lewis states that diabetic drugs are so strong that patient taking them cannot low carb. NOT true.

A person with diabetes, be that Type 1 or Type 2 should involve his/her doctor and not just start messing with his/her medication, for safety's sake. Doctors may well be anti-low carb whether a patient has diabetes or not. It's up to you the patient to show him/her that you have done some research. Dr Richard Bernstein is great for Type 1s and Dr Charles V Clark in his book The Diabetes Solution shows how to do it for both types. It's up to you the patient to show your doctor that s/he can trust you.

Insulin is dose adjustable according to the amount of carbs eaten and insulin users will have been shown how to carb count and match carbs to dose when they start using insulin.

Oral medications are not so dose adjustable, you're given a fixed tablet.

Byetta and Victoza are a bit more flexible but your doctor may have prescribed a specific dose.

Because oral medications are not as adjustable, they cannot be really strong. A doctor will start a patient on say Metformin and then if that's not working add say Amaryl or Prandin etc. When these drugs are tested they have to show how much they reduce blood glucose by. An oral medication which could plummet blood glucose down like the elevator on the CN Tower wouldn't be passed as safe.

Type 1 - doesn't make insulin
Type 1.5 - doesn't make insulin, resistant to it
Type 2 - insulin resistant OR makes insulin but not enough OR both

Different drugs used for type 2s focus on different things. That's another reason why a doctor may try several drugs.

A blood glucose meter is indispensable because as you lower the amount of carbs you eat, your body starts to respond and you will then need to watch carefully to avoid hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and adjust drugs. After my first three months low carbing my HbA1c had dropped 6% and now, two years after starting low carb, my HbA1c comes back normal (but remember that's an average) and I've dropped several drugs with my doctor's permission.

I do still take Metformin to combat the dawn phenomenon natural BG rise. Once I get that natural rise down, my body copes with the small amount of carbs I eat in a normal fashion.

I know a lot of Type 2s online in the UK who low carb. It can and is being done. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, parsnips, rice and a lot of fruit could be out though, it depends whether they spike your blood sugar.

In New Zealand, low carb diets are used to treat Crohn's disease, in the US and UK childhood epilepsy and I've also heard of them being used in US for non alcoholic fatty liver disease.

If you read up, monitor your blood glucose and work with your doctor re: medication, then yes you can improve diabetes a lot. How much depends how far it has progressed and how much effort you put in.