"Reversing Diabetes with Surgery"
Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (RYGB)
is one of the most successful treatment strategies
for diabetes accompanying morbid obesity.
Long-term diabetes remission rates
of 83% have been reported.
These findings have led to the suggestion
that the surgery improves diabetes
by somehow altering digestive hormones,
but this interpretation ignores the fact
that they’re placed on a severely limited diet
for a week or two after the operation
just to recover from the major surgery.
And just severe caloric restriction alone
can improve diabetes.
So, is it the diet or the surgery?
We didn’t know…
until this study.
They put diabetics on the exact same post surgery diet,
with and without the actual surgery.
They found that their diabetes improved rapidly
on the surgery diet before they had the surgery.
In fact, the improvement in blood sugar control
was better on the diet alone than after the surgery.
Blood sugar control improved better
in the absence of surgery,
suggesting that the whole surgical-diabetes-reversal
is not due the surgery at all
but just the diet people had to go on
in the hospital during recovery.
So the clinical implication is that nonsurgical interventions
have the potential to resolve diabetes
as much as major organ rearranging surgery.
If you remember my video about
Diabetes as a Disease of Fat Toxicity,
you’ll understand what is occurring.
Type II diabetes can be understood
as a potentially reversible metabolic state
precipitated by the single cause
of chronic excess intra-organ fat.
Too much fat in the cells
of the liver, pancreas, and muscles.
Within seven days of eating like 600 calories a day
by either dietary intervention or bariatric surgery,
fasting glucose levels can normalize,
thanks to a fall in liver fat.
Here’s a CT scan showing a 35% reduction
in liver volume as all the fat is cleared out.Unbelievable!
Then the body starts pulling fat out of the pancreas,
and when the cause of diabetes goes away,
the diabetes goes away.
The insulin-producing beta-cells
of the pancreas had woken up!
Clearly, the b-cells are not permanently damaged
in Type 2 diabetes, but are merely inhibited.
They report reversal of diabetes
up to 28 years after diagnosis.
So diabetics motivated enough to starve themselves
can regain normal health.
This information should be available
to all people with type II diabetes
even though it is unlikely many will be motivated enough
to escape from the disease.
It’s not easy to not eat.
Diabetics should know
that if they don’t reverse their diabetes,
their future health is in jeopardy,
although the serious consequences must be balanced
against the difficulties and privations
associated with starvation diets.
For many people this may prove too high a price to pay.
It’s hard to voluntarily restrict food intake that much.
Ok, how about involuntary food restriction?
That’s what stomach stapling surgery is.
When you essentially remove someone’s stomach,
they’re forced into compulsory food restriction.
Of course major surgery carries major risks,
both during the operation and afterwards.
There can be bleeding, leakage, infections, erosions, herniation,
and severe nutritional deficiencies.
Surgery or starvation?
There’s got to be a better way,
and in fact there is.
Instead of changing the quantity of food eaten,
either voluntarily or involuntarily,
is it possible to reverse diabetes
by changing the quality of the food?
We’ll find out, next.