IN 2015, WHEN Dr.
Sarah Hallberg stepped onto the stage at Purdue University to deliver a TEDx talk1 about reversing diabetes, few in the audience expected to hear what she was about to say: reversing type 2 diabetes starts with ignoring the guidelines.
Dr.
Hallberg is the medical director of Indiana University’s weight loss program, and she argued convincingly that the low-fat diet endorsed by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and countless medical organizations was almost exactly wrong.
These experts were hurting the very patients they hoped to help.
Instead, a simple dietary change had the potential to significantly improve diabetes and help weight-loss efforts.
Her lecture soon became an Internet sensation, quickly passing a million views, and she was featured on radio and television and on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Review.2 Her powerful message of hope had struck a chord.
And why?
Because it made sense.
So, what exactly are these guidelines that we should ignore?
THE LOW-FAT ERA
IN THE EARLY 2000s, the monumental task of recommending an optimal diet for type 2 diabetics was assigned to Dr.
Richard Kahn, then the chief medical and scientific officer of the ADA.
Like any good scientist, he began by reviewing the available published data. “When you look at the literature, whoa is it weak.
It is so weak,” he said.3 But that was not an answer the ADA could give.
People demanded dietary advice.
So, without any evidence to guide him one way or the other, Dr.
Kahn went with the generic advice given to the public at large: to eat a low-fat, high- carbohydrate diet. “It’s a diet for all America,” he reasoned.
Therefore, it should be good for type 2 diabetics, too.
And where did that advice come from?
In the U.S., the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs first released its Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1977.
Since 1980, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services have published a set of dietary guidelines every five years.
And in Canada, the federal government has been regularly publishing and updating a food guide since 1942.
The food pyramids published in these guides have been informing our food choices, and doctors’ recommendations, ever since.
And the foods at the base of the pyramid, the ones to be eaten preferentially, have been grains and other refined carbohydrates.
The “bread, rice, cereal, and pasta” group, of which we were supposed to eat six to eleven servings daily, comprise the exact foods that cause the greatest increase in blood glucose.
This is also the precise diet that has failed to halt the greatest obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics the world has ever seen.
But let’s talk specifically about type 2 diabetes by juxtaposing two incontrovertible facts: