Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments

Current medical guidance for treating diabetes may be fundamentally flawed, according to this provocative study. Medical journalist Taubes (The Case for Keto) notes that diabetes treatment consisted of following high-fat diets until the 1921 discovery of insulin. In 1971, the American Diabetes Association began advising diabetes patients to adopt the American Heart Association’s general dietary guidelines for “carbohydrate-rich/low-fat diets,” despite the fact that carbohydrates were “the one macronutrient that [diabetics’] bodies could not safely metabolize.” The advice, Taubes explains, was based on the paternalistic assumption that patients wouldn’t follow a more restricted diet and so it would be easier to instead rely on insulin therapy. Worse, the high-carb diet had little evidence to support it, and when clinical trials were finally conducted on its effects in the 1980s, they found the diet exacerbated “defects in fat and carbohydrate metabolism” for diabetes patients. Taubes warns that the “medicalization of modern life” has led to a reliance on pharmaceuticals with harmful long-term side effects (long-term use of insulin therapy has been linked to severe hypoglycemia and weight gain) and makes “medical associations become ever more likely to consider... diseases beyond the control of patients.” He argues for the need for more research on how diets, such as a low-carb/high-fat regimen, could benefit diabetes patients. Exhaustively researched and providing cautionary insight into the fallibilities of medical advice, this intrigues. Agent: Kristine Dahl, Curtis Brown. (Jan.)