bodybuilding diet diabetes

today, i'd like to talk aboutturning around an epidemic. one hundred million americans right nowdo have either diabetes or pre-diabetes, and that puts themat risk for amputations, for heart disease, for blindness. and we're exportingthis epidemic overseas. the word "epidemic" comes from old greek: 'epi' means 'on', 'demos' means 'people', so an epidemic is something we study withsterile statistics, and maps, and graphs, but the truth is, it's something

that impinges directly on people,on living, breathing human-beings. but my story actually startsin the basement of a minneapolis hospital. the year before i went to medical school,i was the morgue attendant, or as i'd like to say,"the autopsy assistant". what that meant was, whenever anybody died,i would bring the body out of the cooler, and put the body onan examination table, and the pathologistwould come into the room. and one day, a person diedin a hospital of a massive heart attack.

probably from eating hospital food,but that's another story. (laughter) to examine the heart,you have to remove a section of ribs, and this is not done with great delicacy: you take what looks like a garden clipper, and you go crunch, crunch, crunch,through the ribs on this side, and crunch, crunch, crunch,through the ribs on this side. and the pathologist pulledthis big high wedge of ribs off the chest, set it on the table.

and he knew i was going to begoing to medical school, so he wanted to make surethat i saw everything. and he would say, "neal, look at this.these are the coronary arteries," - we call them coronarybecause they crown the heart - and he sliced one open,and he said, "look inside." with my gloved finger, i poked around,and it wasn't a wide open artery, it had what was sortof like chewing gum inside, except that it was hardlike a rock, and he said, "that's your bacon and eggs,neal, that's atherosclerosis."

and we looked at the carotid arteriesgoing to the brain, the arteries going to the legs,the arteries going to the kidneys. they all had this hardeningof the arteries, that's atherosclerosis. he said, "we see the beginnings of thisin two thirds of people by age 23, which happened to be the exact agethat i was at the time. so, anyway, he writes up his findings, "massive atherosclerosis,acute myocardial infarction," and he leaves the room. so, i picked up the ribsand put them back in the chest,

tried to make them fitright with the other ribs, and i sewed up the skin, and cleaned up, and then i went outand went up to the cafeteria, where turned outthey were serving ribs for lunch. now, let me tell you something,i knew about ribs. i grew up in fargo, north dakota,i come from a long line of cattle ranchers and i remember the smellof the cows out in the field, i remember the smell of the cowsin my grandpa's barn and driving a load of cattlewith my uncle to east saint louis,

to the national stockyards, and i remember the nationalstockyards hotel, two dollars a night, and the smell of that room. and i have to say, everyday in my life, it was roast beef,baked potatoes, and corn. except for special occasions, when it wasroast beef, baked potatoes, and peas. and that's the sort of the way we ate, but my father did not likethe cattle business, so he left, left the family farm,and he went to medical school.

and he spent his life at the fargo clinictreating diabetes, he became a diabetes expertfor the whole region. and i have to saymy father really was frustrated because patients were given dietsthat they did not like. what we would say is,or what they would say, is diabetes is a conditionwhere it's too much sugar in your blood, so don't eat anything that turns to sugar,so don't eat bread, don't eat fruit, don't eat pasta, rice, sweet potatoes, don't eat regular potatoes,beans, don't eat carrots;

all these things had to be limitedand while you are at it, cut calories, and that's what people had to adhere to,that's gets old by wednesday. patients were also given medicines,and they were given needles, and instructions on how to sticktheir fingers and how to inject insulin. and despite all of this,diabetes never got better, it always progressed, and it then became somethingthat we're exporting overseas. and when i got out of medical school,we had more medicines, and i think we had sharper needles,but to tell you the truth,

it was the same sort of result,we had unhappy patients, and we've never ever curedthis disease, it never turned around, it was always considereda progressive disease. but there are two scientific discoveriesthat really turned all this around. and the first one was takingthe widest possible lens. if you look around the world, at those countries that have the leastdiabetes, like japan, for example, they weren't following anything like the diet we were givento diabetic patients.

they weren't saying, "i'm not goingto eat rice, i won't eat noodles," they eat this kind of food all the time,it's front and center on their plate. and the second discoverycame from looking inside the cell, especially the muscle cell. and the reason we lookat muscle cells in particular is that's where glucose is going,that's where blood sugar is going, that's the fuel that powers your movement. do you know about a personwho's running a marathon? what are they doing in the weeks leadingup for it? they're carbo-loading.

so they're eating pasta,they're eating bread to try to get that glucoseinto the cell for energy. and that is the problem in diabetes, because glucose, glucose is there,outside the cell, trying get inside. in order to get in, it needs a key.and that key is insulin. now, what if i get home,and i'm getting up to my front door and take my key out of the pocket,i put it in the front door-- wait a minute, it's not working. and there's nothing wrongwith my key, but i look in the lock,

and while i was gone,somebody put chewing gum in my lock. so what am i going to do?crawling in and out the window? no. i'm going to clean out the lock. well, when a person has diabetes,their insulin key is not working. why would that be?why could insulin not signal? what supposed to happen is the glucoseis supposed to enter into the cell. and [insulin] is the keythat makes that happen. but the reason it doesn't happen it's not that there'schewing gum inside the cell.

what there is, is fat.fat, little globules of fat. i have to say, doctors hatewords like "fat",it has one syllable. so we want to call itintramyocellular lipid. 'intra' means' inside', 'myo' means'muscle', 'cellular' means 'cellular' 'lipid' means 'fat'. intramyocellular lipid is fatinside your muscle cells, and that is what interferes with insulin's ability to worklike a key to signal glucose coming in. in 2003,

the national institute of healthgave my research team a grant and said, "let's test somethingcompletely different. instead of limiting breadsand all these kinds of things, if fat is the issue, what if we havea diet that has effectively no fat in it?" well, where does fat come from? it comes from two sources: animal products, animal fat,and vegetable oils. so we brought in 99 people,and we asked them to do two things: to really eat a bounty of foodand not worrying about quantity,

we're not counting calories here, we're not counting carb gramsor anything like that. what we're doing instead, is we're setting the animal products asidekeeping the vegetable oils low. very simple. one of our participantswas a man named vance, and vance's father was dead by age 30. vance was 31 when he wasdiagnosed with diabetes, he was in his late 30swhen he came to see us.

and he said, "this is not hard!" unlike every other diet he'd been on,we didn't care how many carbs he ate, or how many calories,or how many portions. if he was having chilli,not a meat chilli, would be a bean chilli,chunky vegetable chilli. if he was having spaghetti,instead of a meat topping, it would be toppedwith artichoke hearts and wild mushrooms,and chunky tomato sauce. so that kind of thing; very, very easy.

over the courseof about a year, he lost 60 pounds, his blood sugar came downand down, and down, and one day his doctorsat him down and said, "vance, i know you've hadfamily members die of this disease." but he said, "i look at your blood tests;you don't have it anymore." and can you imagine what that feels liketo have family members who felt there's this absolutely one way streetand have this disease just turn around? and when i asked vance's permissionto tell you about his story, he said, "make sure you tell everybody thatmy erectile dysfunction went away too."

write that down. so, we published our findingsin peer-reviewed journals, the american diabetes association cites itand accepts this as an effective approach. and people around the worldstarted using this and i heard from a man in england, who wanted to let me knowabout his experience. he had had diabetes, tried all kinds of dietswithout a lot of success. and then he heard about our approach,tried it for several weeks,

went to the doctor,the doctor drew a number of blood tests. and he got home. the phone rang,"this is the doctor's office. could you come back right now? so he [goes], "good heavens!what's in my blood test? he races into his car,he's driving to doctor's office thinking what disease did they discoveron my blood test, what did they find ..." and he runs into. they say,"we need you to sit down.explain exactly what you've been doing."

all traces of his diabetes were gone. the doctor said,"your blood tests are better than mine, and i don't have diabetes,how is this possible?" the doctor explained to him, "we can neversay a person has been cured of diabetes because we all know that's not possible,but technically, it's not there. and the doctor was skeptical, he said, "come back in two months,i want to test you again." never came back. now, wait a minute.

diabetes is genetic, right? it runs in families. and there, in fact,are genes for diabetes, but this is an important thingto remember, genes are in two categories. certain genes are dictators, i'm talking about the genes that say,'blue eyes' or 'brown hair'. they are dictators,they give orders, you can't argue. but the genes for diabetes are committees.

they're making suggestions. and you can say, "wait a minute, i don't really thinki want to have diabetes." and, in fact, most disease genes,whether it's for heart disease, or diabetes, or hypertension,certain forms of cancer, even alzheimer's disease, they're not dictators, they're committees. and their activity depends onwhat we put into our bodies. so, what i'm saying is

that we're putting into our bodiesfoods that we're really not designed for. which raises the question:what foods are we really designed for? there are different waysof looking at this. and one is called the dental test.do you know the dental test? what you do is you waitfor your cat to yawn, and you look in your cat's mouthand what you notice is in its mouth are these very, very longprotruding canine teeth, and on each side of its mouth,it's just like a pitchfork that's really good for capturing pray,killing small animals,

and ripping the hide off the fleshand eating meat. so now look at your own mouth. what you discover is that your canine teethare no longer than your incisors. and that change occurredat least 3,5 million years ago. so our molars are really goodfor crunching on an apple, they're not so hot for handling roadkill. there's the bunny test.do you know the bunny test? you take a bunny,

and you put the bunnyin front of your cat what you discover, no matter how young your cat is,the cat has this irrepressible desire to capture, attack, kill,and swallow that bunny. now, you put the very same bunnyin front of a toddler or baby. (laughter) and what you discover isthe toddler say, "bunny, bunny!" they want to play and the babyis just absolutely delighted, the idea of killing and eating himwould never occur to him in a million years.

we're learning something here. do you know the box test?(laughter) you take a box that it was usedto carry electronic equipment, and you look around at the bottomand what you find is silica gel. and silica gel is thereto take moisture out of the box. and apparently, the manufacturersof silica gel have realized that human-beings are so indiscriminatein their eating habits, that they have to putthese words on it, "do not eat". so, here's how i put this together:

human-beings are naturally herbivores,but we're really easily thrown off track. the fact of the matter is,before the stone age, people would have beenjust terrible hunters, really. you know this is truebecause we're not very quick. a lion, a lion is quick, in the forest,a lion can easily catch a gazelle. a hawk or a falconcan easily catch a mouse. humans, we sort of catch cold.that's like it. (laughter) we don't really detect pray very well,we don't have sensitive noses.

if you look at the dog, a dog has a very highlydeveloped sense of smell, they can detect pray at long distances, which is why they are used in airports to detect bombs, and drugs,and that kind of things. and their sense of hearingfar outstrips ours, they are outfittedto be able to detect pray. now, human-beings, we havecute noses and we have cute ears, but we really are pathetic as hunters.

and if you're going to succeedas a carnivore, you need good sharp claws,good sharp teeth, you need to be very, very quick, and you need to have sensitive hearing,sensitive smell, sensitive vision. which actually raises the question: what is the most sensitive partof the human body? what do you think? well, i actually learned the answer. as i was coming here,i was at the airport.

and the tsa agent pulled me asideand said, "i got to do a pat down, and when i get to a sensitive partof your body, i'll use the back of my hand." and i realized that apparently, the most sensitive part of the human bodymust be our back side, i guess. so, anyway, what i take from thisis that meat eating began somehow. how did it begin? i put that question to richard leakey. - richard leakey,the famous paleoanthropologist -

and what he said was, "you know, human-beings as herbivores,you don't have to be quick, you don't have to beparticularly sharp or sensitive because you don't really haveto sneak up on a strawberry, it's just sitting, not doing anything. but to become carnivoresreally took some work. and it probably started as scavenging." in other words,a lion doesn't eat everything. when they walk awayfrom the little pile of bones they've left

there's a little meat there, and humans couldrelatively easily sneak in and cut some of that off and take it back. now, that requires havingsome tools to do that with. so once the stone age arrived, then we had the possibilityof actually doing that. and once we had arrowheads,and axes, and that sort of thing, then we were really on to something. meat eating really became a big thing.but, we have pre-stone age bodies.

to this day, when a person putsinto their body plant foods, their arteries open up again,their diabetes starts to get better, their weight starts to come off,their bodies start to recover. americans, unfortunately, arereally not on a diabetes reversal diet. americans today eat morethan a million animals per hour. and the centers for disease controland prevention say that one of three kids bornin the year 2000 and in the years since is going to get diabetesat some point in their life. and you see the truth of it,turn on the television:

half the commercials are for burgers,chicken wings, snack foods, the other half of the commercialsare for medicines to undue the effectsof all the foods that we're eating. so, that's where we are. and what if it happened that insteadof a hundred million americans having diabetes or pre-diabetes, what if all hundred millionhad diabetes itself? or more people than that?

all of them need medicines, and testing,and hospital care, and so forth. financially, it's a disaster. but, personally,the personal cost is just incalculable. i think we're startingto turn the corner: my family has promoted me for generationafter generation, after generation. however, in 2004, we reached the peakat 201,5 pounds of meat. that's what the average personconsumed in that year. and in the subsequent years,it's dropped and dropped,

and we're now under 190, and hopefully,that downward trend will continue. but to this day, doctors,dieticians, nurses will say, "diabetes is a one way street,it never goes away." but that was beforewe looked around the world and saw, you know, there aredietary patterns that are more helpful. and that was before we realizedthat looking inside the cell, we can understand how this occurs, and we can understandhow to reverse this process.

and it was before we realized that patients will make bigger changesthan we gave them credit for. so, families like mine, that have been selling meatfor generations, instead, maybe could sell carrots,asparagus, sweet potatoes, and beans, and hopefully, the autopsy roomwill more neglected than ever, because people are going to live longer,and look better, and maybe the hospital cafeteria,instead of serving ribs, could serve a bounty of helpful foods,

bodybuilding diet diabetes,

and instead of studying epidemics, maybe we could celebratea resurgence of health. thank you very much. (applause)