Taming Type 2 Diabetes

Have you always heard that being overweight is a primary cause of type 2 diabetes?  Me, too, but now I’m learning that, at least according to some alternative practitioners, that is absolutely not the case.  What causes type 2 diabetes is bad fats.  These fats also cause weight gain, and that’s why there’s a correlation between excess weight and type 2 diabetes.

So how do the fats that make you fat cause diabetes?  I went to cancertutor.com and found the following explanation:

[One] lipid in a cell wall is cholesterol . . .  The cholesterol in each one of your cells forms a “hydrophobic” bond within the cell wall. Hydrophobic means “fear of water.” It’s a cute way to describe this function of our cells, but in our lives it simply describes the reason we don’t melt in a rainstorm or fall apart when we take a shower or bath. Our cells resist water. Without this resistance, we would be water-soluble and we’d all dissolve in a rainstorm.

Unfortunately, our modern diets contain an excess of man-made oils (i.e., trans fats or partially hydrogenated oils), which are so much like cholesterol that the body can’t tell them apart. When these “bad” oils get in the cell walls, they destroy the electrical charge and the cells begin to suffocate. Furthermore, these bad fats impair the processes that let nutrition into the cell and waste out. Finally, the cell walls “built” from man-made fats are more “rigid” and make it difficult for insulin to enter the cell.

So what can you do to lose weight, help cure your type 2 diabetes, and help prevent heart disease as an extra bonus?  You can remove trans-fats and partially hydrogenated oils from your diet. Instead of these “bad” fats and oils, use natural oils from organic plant and animal fats like flaxseed oil, olive oil, coconut oil, walnuts, even real butter. Aim to have more omega 3 in your diet than omega 6.

Keep in mind that in the natural course of things, curing your type 2 diabetes by avoiding the bad fats would take several years, however, you can help things along by flooding your body with good fats (especially water-soluable omega 3).

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this information comes from the field of alternative medicine.  Consuming the right oils is probably better for anyone than consuming the  bad ones, but before you attempt to “treat” yourself for anything, you should always consult with your own healthcare practioner.

Needless to say, there are multiple opinions on just about everything, and, in my next post, I’m going to look into a different explanation for the cause of type 2 diabetes.