Special Report:How the Paleo Diet Helps with Type 2 Diabetes
Most people who get the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes are surprised. Once they know they have the condition, they’re told about meal plans, medications and a whole gamut of things they should and shouldn’t do.
Yet, despite all the treatment options for the disease, it continues to rise and millions of people are now struggling to deal with the condition. You don’t have to struggle with diabetes. There is a simple way to get your glucose numbers under control.
Understanding Diabetes and Traditional Diabetes Diets
There are quite a few misunderstandings and myths surrounding this disease. One misunderstanding is that diabetes is caused by eating too much sugar. This isn’t true.
A popular myth concerning eating and diabetes calls for diabetics to eliminate all sugar from their diets and this isn’t true either. When you have Type 2 diabetes, it means that your body does make insulin and it can even make enough to handle what you eat.
The food that you eat goes through a process where the body turns the food into fuel for various parts of your body. But the problem is that somewhere in your body, some signals get missed so your glucose doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go to do what it’s supposed to do.
Instead, it ends up in your blood – and that’s what makes high glucose levels something that can damage your health or lead to an early death. You can make enough insulin to take care of what you eat but if the body can’t get it where it needs to go, then you have a problem.
Short term high glucose levels don’t cause a lot of problems. But when your organs are continually subjected to high glucose levels, that’s when you can develop complications.
Traditional diabetes diets don’t work well to help keep glucose numbers within a healthy range. This is why most doctors prescribe diabetics with medications, some of which are designed to stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin.
Since the production of insulin isn’t the problem and the delivery system is, you’ll continue to struggle with your diabetes. If you want to live healthy with diabetes or even reverse the disease, you must address the root of the problem.
For those who’ve dealt with the disease for years, you can still have healthy glucose readings by foregoing the traditional diabetes diets and choosing one that’s more natural and more helpful for dealing with diabetes.
The paleo diet is one that has a focus on foods that are nature based. It’s sometimes referred to as the caveman diet. There are no specialty foods or items to buy when you decide to follow this diet.
You’ll eat nutritionally sound foods like meat and seafood, fruits and vegetables and even starches. The best thing about it is that you’ll begin to develop a taste for natural foods and processed foods will taste different to you.
The Difference a Paleo Diet Can Make in Diabetes Treatment
The reason that a paleo diet works effectively for this health condition is because the basis of the eating style addresses the core problem with Type 2 diabetes. That is the metabolic communication issue.
Remember that your body makes insulin but the communication between the making of it and getting it where it needs to go is broken. You might see this in your medical charts labeled as “insulin resistant.”
The difference that a paleo diet can make has been proven through studies using control groups of people who have Type 2 diabetes. This group was divided into two groups – those who follow traditional diabetes recommended eating plans and those who followed the paleo diet.
The results of the study found that the paleo diet showed the bigger health difference in diabetics than the traditional recommended diets did. The benefits of the paleo diet were greater as well.
By following the paleo diet, those who have diabetes were found to have lost more weight than the group not following the same diet. They also ended up having a better track record of blood sugar levels that were within a healthy range.
When cholesterol levels were checked, these were found to have significantly lowered. Those who had diabetes coupled with high blood pressure were found to have healthy blood pressure readings.
Thanks to the weight loss, the group also lost fat, both of which led to a lower BMI reading. Further studies revealed that fatty liver issues were helped as well as kidney problems linked to diabetes and obesity.
Because the paleo diet works at a metabolic level, it doesn’t simply address Type 2 diabetes. It addresses the problem that causes the diabetes in the first place. The paleo diet can not only give people with diabetes a much needed health boost, but can prevent long term complications caused by out of range glucose levels.
If you’re thinking that you can just follow a low fat diet and get the same results, you’d be wrong. Because eating low fat diets are exactly what doctors and diabetes organizations recommend.
At some point, you have to stop and ask yourself if people are following the low fat, low carb diets and are still struggling with high glucose, then what’s going wrong?
What’s wrong is found in the structure of a diabetic diet. The difference between the diabetic diet and the paleo diet is that the diabetic one promotes the eating of more carbs than the paleo diet does.
Not only that, but the diabetic diet bases its treatment on a one size fits all approach where the overall concept is that everyone who has Type 2 diabetes should eat the same way.
It’s not true. Some people with diabetes are active and they’re going to need a different amount of carbs. Some people aren’t active and they’re going to need to eat fewer carbs.
But if every diabetic is eating following the recommended diabetic diet, it stands to reason that the sedentary diabetic won’t see the same results or the same level of glucose control.
The Paleo Diet
When you follow a paleo diet, it means that you’re going to make better food choices. If you follow a diabetic diet, processed, frozen foods designed for portion control and calorie control are allowed.
Even though the foods aren’t healthy and don’t address the underlying issues, because these foods are recommended, diabetics do consume them. This eating plan is the first step to a long road of high glucose and complications.
The paleo diet focuses on foods that are closer to nature. In other words, if the cavemen could eat it, then you can too. That means that you can eat certain meats, seafood, fruits and vegetables and some starchy foods.
It’s not like you’ll be starving yourself on the paleo diet because you don’t have to stress yourself out counting calories or religiously hovering over your portion sizes.
You can eat things like ribs or have some eggs. You can eat tuna, you can have beef. You can eat chicken. In other words, you’ll be eating food that tastes great and is prepared in a healthy way.
Some foods aren’t recommended on the paleo diet. These are things such as dairy products, although eggs are acceptable. You’ll also refrain from certain types of cereals, from beans, from junk food and from certain types of alcohol.
The focus of the diet is on foods that are healthier for your body and work to help address conditions like diabetes, other endocrine issues and even inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.
When you follow this diet, it means that you won’t be eating foods that are full of preservatives and packed with chemicals that are bad for your health and can upset the balance in your digestive system.
It also means that you’ll gain an anti-inflammatory boost thanks to the more natural way of eating. Not only will you gain more in nutritional value, but you’ll end up feeling fuller when you eat which will cut down on the desire to snack on unhealthy food choices.
You’ll lose weight because you’ll be eating what your body needs. This is going to make you feel satisfied and pleased with the results of your efforts. It becomes second nature for you to make healthier choices.
Diabetes and the Paleo Diet: a Healthier Lifestyle
Because Type 2 diabetics still produce insulin, the answer isn’t to stimulate the production of more. When that kind of treatment is used, the pancreas will stop being able to produce more.
This is why most diabetics end up on ever increasing amounts of medications like metformin. The traditional methods of treating diabetes focuses on the food. These diets are formulated to cut out what some think of as “bad” foods for diabetics such as carbs.
But if carbs were the root cause of diabetes, then everyone who ate a diet higher in carbs than others would develop the disease. Diabetes occurs when someone has insulin resistance, not a carb problem.
Insulin resistance occurs because of the way that most people who get a Type 2 diagnosis choose to live their lives. In caveman times, the hunters didn’t sit around.
They worked to feed themselves, to guard their homes, and all the other tasks relating to their lives. There were no modern conveniences to make their lives easier.
The convenience of our lifestyles and the overabundance of foods the body doesn’t need is one of the biggest reasons why Type 2 diabetes continues to be a top health concern.
These numbers aren’t slowing down. Most people who have Type 2 diabetes aren’t as active as they should be. Being active is one of the ways that can help with insulin resistance because it enables the glucose to get where it’s needed.
Every time you’re active, you lower your glucose level and you improve how your body is able to deal with insulin resistance. Again, the signal problem is why someone with Type 2 diabetes struggles with the higher readings.
When you’re active, your body uses the glucose it stored for energy. Your muscles depend on this to work properly. So when your pancreas produces the insulin and sends it out throughout your body, if the stored glucose is already filled, then guess where that newly produced insulin gets rerouted to?
Right into the bloodstream. It might shock you to know that carbs aren’t evil as some diets want to convince you. It’s simply that most diabetics live lifestyles that are so inactive, few carbs are actually needed.
Core foods have remained the same for centuries. The only thing that has evolved are the way people live their lives. They’ve stopped hunting and gathering and have turned away from the healthier foods like you’ll find on the paleo diet.
Something else that contributes to insulin resistance is digestive issues. Your body’s digestive system is designed to process food, not chemicals, not preservatives.
So when you eat unnatural, processed foods, you throw your digestive system’s bacteria balance out of whack. When that happens, your body can’t process foods correctly.
When you eat foods that cause trouble in your digestive system, this can lead to problems with your sleep. Foods that are too heavy or that contain certain chemicals can disrupt your sleep.
A loss of sleep in turn only creates more insulin resistance. So you end up caught in a never ending cycle. What you eat affects every single part of your life. It affects your thoughts, your movements, your sleep and even your emotions.
Healthy eating, like is recommended on the paleo diet, helps to end the troubles that contribute to insulin resistance. Combining not being active enough with digestive troubles and throwing in a lack of the right amount of sleep and you have the recipe for an inflammation to develop.
Studies have shown that Type 2 diabetes does tie in to inflammatory diseases as well as auto-immune diseases. The paleo diet is the treatment for a lifestyle that can improve and in many cases, reverse Type 2 diabetes.
The diet improves insulin resistance. The foods you’ll eat on this diet give you more energy so that you feel like getting up and moving instead of being a couch potato.
The paleo diet is a lifestyle change that addresses issues like digestive problems, too. As you follow the diet, you’ll lose weight which helps your body to be able to respond to the insulin signal.
Unlike diabetic diets, which treat food as the problem, the paleo diet looks at the whole person and is able to pinpoint the root of insulin resistance. Eating the paleo way means that you’ll be able to eliminate the foods from your diet that can trigger an inflammation.
Some of these foods are things like vegetable oil, sugar and certain grains. You’ll be introduced to foods that can stop inflammations and problems associated with insulin resistance.
Things like vegetables that are high in natural antibiotics and are imperative for helping insulin signals achieve their goal. The paleo way of eating can lead you to a healthier lifestyle free of the frustration and complications that living with Type 2 diabetes can cause.
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