I received this detailed response to a recent video on my YouTube Channel about the documentary, What The Health. My response follows as a helpful guide, just in case you face a similar crisis with a friend or loved one down the road too. The YouTube video in question in this case is also at the bottom of the post if you’d like to watch it.
The Argument
TheAltruismActivist: Hello Paul. Addressing your concern about the recommendations and research on diabetes, I believe that you are not looking deep enough into the issue.
Just because eating a sugary meal raises one’s blood sugar does not mean that sugar is the cause and main culprit of diabetes. Looking into it a step deeper, you must consider why the body is insulin-resistant (which causes the high, uncontrolled blood sugar).
There is much proof that dietary saturated fat is a significant inducer of insulin resistance. Pouring sugar into an insulin-resistant person’s body will surely exacerbate the diabetic issues, but the sugar intake is not the cause. Dietary saturated fat is.
That is how Dr. Walter Kempner, many decades ago, cured type 2 diabetics with a diet composed of white rice, white sugar, fruit, and fruit juice. That is not a healthy diet, but it proves that sugar is not the issue while dietary saturated fat is.
Switching anyone from a standard Western diet to a cleaner diet like yours will improve their diabetes, but that doesn’t mean further benefits can’t be obtained from digging deeper into the root cause of insulin resistance. Let me know your thoughts and response!
Study various diets
Hello! After reading your comments carefully, here are my thoughts about diabetes.
For starters, if you study Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, he didn’t find diabetes or any such chronic diseases among natives who were eating their natural diet.
Consider other books such as The Fat Of The Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was the first white man to live among the Eskimos for several years and lived exactly as they did. You’ll see that the Eskimo/Inuit people eat a diet of about 90 percent fat/protein (flesh foods) and only 10 percent carbohydrates, and he got much healthier living with them and eating their way.
If you research his name, you can find a paper that describes how Stefansson came back to the West, and challenged medical doctors and their notion that fat and meat were bad for people.
In fact, after allowing himself to be locked up in a New York hospital and fed only flesh food for one year, he remained very healthy and let the doctors challenging him evaluate him and his blood.
If you study the book, Eat Fat and Grow Slim by Dr. Richard Mackarness, you will see very well thought out discussions on the physiology and biochemistry of fat metabolism that were way ahead of his time, and his references to the Banting diet, another high flesh approach developed by William Banting that he used to cure himself of obesity.
This is probably the first book that ever discussed how calculating the caloric value of fat based on burn calorimetry was incorrect due to how fat is metabolized and how ketones are produced. Actually, he showed that fat and carbs both produce the same caloric value due to how they are broken down in the Krebs cycle.
As you study diets from around the world extensively as I have, you’ll discover that people can thrive on a very wide variety of diets and proportions of plant/produce relative to animal foods and the fats they contain.
Dr. Richard Bernstein wrote his book, Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution, after his frustration with the medical community and their inability to help him treat his own Type II diabetes.
After he made huge progress on his own, and got resistance from the medical community about how he did it, decided to go to medical school and get qualified as an MD so that when he wrote his book and shared his findings, the public and other doctors would take him more seriously.
If you are interested in the diabetes issue, you may find this book interesting, along with the others I’ve cited here.
Separating facts from fiction
As for the issue of saturated fats inducing insulin resistance, there are some key issues that need not be overlooked.
1. Not all fats or saturated fats are created equal! I have reviewed research showing, for example, that vegetable oils, such as those commonly used to make French fries and other deep fried foods in restaurants actually progressively become saturated through repeated use in deep fryers.
The key issue here is that the repeated heating of vegetable oils transform the fat molecules into molecules that were essentially akin to trans fatty acids.
2. Consider only 4-6 percent of all the food eaten worldwide today is really organic (meaning actually grown organically under the guidelines of organic farming certifications that are authentic, of which the Demeter Association is the gold standard).
Then, think about what occurs within the flesh, fat and physiology of the animals being raised on all sorts of drugs and antibiotics and fed things such as engine oil, sawdust, cement dust, plastic chips, dead animal parts and other very odd and offensive things.
Taking all of those things into account, it becomes quite clear the fat in most people’s blood and body is not the kind that human beings are designed to digest, metabolize, assimilate and eliminate efficiently.
Unless research studies looking at saturated fat are being done on healthy people with functional physiologies, and with non-toxic, organically raised farm animals or the fat from wild animals such as deer, elk and moose, then we are really at risk of making some very dangerous assumptions, which is what I see going on all the time with so called “science.”
I’ve been trained in Functional Medicine and related testing and have used this practice particularly on cases that were slow responders or non-responders to my standard holistic approach.
I repeatedly find high — very dangerously high — levels of all sorts of toxins in things like commercial makeup and body care products, xenoestrogens from plastics, soy-based foods and other sources and heavy metal toxicity from mercury, copper, aluminum and nickel, among others.
These exposures lead to fungal and parasitic infections of significance, as well as dysbiosis and very dysfunctional gland/organ performance (often in multiple areas in their bodies), as well as loads of previously unidentified food allergies and intolerances.
These people are considered “normal,” and are the ones generally being used as subjects in “research studies,” which creates a ton of confusion among professionals and lay people alike who read such studies and believe them as gospel.
When you look deeply and honestly at system interdependence, it becomes evident that researchers are blaming saturated fats as the cause of diabetes, yet overlooking many, if not all, of the issues I’m sharing here.
There are many reasons, aside from eating sick animals and toxic fat, that one may develop biochemical challenges of most any sort due to dis-regulation of the many automatically controlled systems in the body. Without a comprehensive assessment of each individual, there is no way to actually localize an etiology.
Additionally, relative to the complexity of the human body and what we know today, we are a long way from being able to do the kind of research we need to do to pin down the actual culprits in most cases.
In my experience, the biggest challenge of all is that the average person out there is breaking almost every principle of healthy, holistic living. Their diets and lifestyle practices are dangerous and are sure to cause all hell to break loose, as we see all around us every day.
Type II diabetes is just one of many such problems stemming from gross misinformation and mismanagement of the public by our government and conventional medicine. They are the culprits most responsible for selling out and not publishing the truth (which their own research and books shows they do know if they “want to know”) because the truth of diet and lifestyle is bad for business!
We don’t have a medical/healthcare system… we have a disease maintenance system. One need only look into the current issues with vaccinations to see just how far big industry is willing to go to keep people sick and profitable.
Metabolic individuality
If you read the very excellent book, Biochemical Individuality by Roger Williams, you will quickly see there is a vast difference in people’s biochemistry. He shows, for example, that there can be a 1,000 percent difference in the ability to clear alcohol from one’s body “within the same family!”
Williams gives many examples of the very wide differences in blood levels of different nutrients and markers commonly measured by medical doctors, and shows how the conventional medical and the pharmaceutical industries have teamed up to carefully craft such narrow windows of “normal ranges” as to be almost sure that they will be able to prescribe some drug to just about anyone!
Therefore, we have to be very careful about how we interpret any study without an awareness of what normal is for each individual. But, normal can’t be identified in anyone until they are actually healthy!
Having been a part of this industry for 32 years, and reading thousands of studies on almost every aspect of human physiology, biomechanics, kinesiology, anatomy and psychology, a huge percentage of this research isn’t worth the paper upon which they are written.
The highest standard of study in our Scientific Materialist, reductionist culture is the double-blind study. This fact alone should concern anyone who understands that all systems in the human body are interdependent and essentially co-dependent.
If you change one hormone level, there is essentially a knock-on effect on every hormone and, therefore, every system in the body.
When referring to the kinds of studies featured in What The Health, one must look very carefully at their design, how people who are participating in them were qualified, and who funded them.
If these studies were actually factual and applicable to healthy human beings, we would see evidence of diabetes in every human tribe, society or culture that consumed a high percentage of animal flesh. There are MANY such cultures as Weston A. Price shows in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
Metabolic typing
If you study metabolic typing, you find some very interesting facts about human individuality with regard to diet (and lifestyle).
Two great books that cover a variety of different approaches to metabolic typing:
- Metabolic Man: Ten Thousand Years from Eden by Charles Heizer Wharton
- The Metabolic Typing Diet by William Wolcott and Trish Fahey
Bill Wolcott is both a mentor and a personal friend of mine who has been successfully guiding people with a very wide variety of diseases to better health using the principles of metabolic typing initially established by William Donald Kelly and advanced by his own research. (Bill has advanced Kelly’s approach over the many years since he was his assistant.)
What is essential to glean from metabolic typing in general is that all people do not respond the same way to fat, protein, carbs or even foods such as orange juice, specific fruits, chocolate, coffee or even herbs and drugs due to variations in our anatomy (see Biochemical Individuality by Roger Williams for an explanation of anatomical differences), physiology and biochemistry.
In my observation and opinion, this is why you mentioned Dr. Walter Kempner who “cured” type II diabetics many decades ago by creating a diet composed of white rice, white sugar, fruit and fruit juice.
However, something neither you nor the experts in What The Health mentioned about any study — with very few exceptions — is that there are always people who respond favorably (they are the ones who get promoted!), those who didn’t respond at all, and those who got worse! The latter group is rarely ever mentioned because it goes against what is often the dogma being sold or promoted.
If you look at a wide variety of such studies, you will see this fact, which is one of the key reasons that metabolic typing is so critical.
One need only look into the history of diet (see the Brief History Of Diet chart) and all of the studies touting their effectiveness to see exactly what I’m referring to here. This is easily seen in studies of the Atkins and Ornish diets along with others.
In the resources I’ve shared, you’ll find people who have healed from various diseases with seemingly opposite diet approaches. Based on my observation and experience, this is because of differences in metabolic types and the other differences I’m highlighting here, including the complicating factors of toxicity.
Additionally, those getting positive results from a high-carb diet like the one devised by Dr. Kempner were also likely to have been eating less toxic animal flesh. At the very same time, his patients were gaining a variety of nutrients that were missing in their previous diets, which often provides improvements that last different lengths of time depending on the overall level of nutrients one consumes, along with their gland and organ function and integration.
To make this point more clear, I can share that I’ve seen a number of cases in my career of vegetarians with Type II diabetes, so these would be the people Dr. Kempner didn’t publicize in his percentage split of responders, non-responders or those who became sicker statistically.
In closing…
You can expose any number of people to a given stress factor and see quickly that you get a wide variety of different responses and diseases. It is dangerous to take research, particularly double-blind research, at face value.
Having been in the game as long as I have, I can assure you that science is “a religion.” It changes its mind on “facts” regularly. Just look at the many changes in what people should do, be it taking aspirin to prevent heart disease, eating low-fat diets or high-fat diets, taking drugs like Vioxx, determining what the ideal blood levels of cholesterol are (for the moment), or even what science says is “fact” regarding the nature of gravity and the universe.
Over and over, I’ve seen this or that vitamin, supplement, strain of bacteria or hormone promoted as the be-all, end-all thing, only to have that opinion overturned by the next “scientific finding.”
Plus, some studies end up finding out the old ways were indeed better as research becomes more capable of studying multiple system responses.
There is no replacement for empirical observation and practical skills at the level of the therapist or doctor. Those skills are generally reflected in the therapist’s or doctor’s own health and vitality.
As a general rule, you can’t teach or give what you don’t have, at least not authentically.
In my Holistic Lifestyle Coaching program, my instructors and I teach this dictum: “We don’t treat the disease that has the person. We coach the person who has acquired a disease.” Many people with the same disease can have it for very different reasons and I’ve seen that over and over again during my career.
Some quotes from Hippocrates are relevant in closing my commentary on this issue.
If someone wishes for good health, one must ask oneself is he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him.
Until governments and regulatory bodies, such as those governing science, medicine, nutrition, agriculture, food processing and manufacturing and the chemical industry among others, put human health, and the health of nature as first priority over money, most people will have a very hard time without being very committed to life-giving diet and lifestyle practices as those taught in my Holistic Lifestyle Coaching programs.
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.
This quote is very relevant in light of the science of psychoneuroimmunology, bio-psycho-social medicine and psychology.
At the end of the day, a huge percentage of disease (some say 85-90 percent) is the direct result of lifestyle factors. How one lives his/her life is heavily influenced by developmental programming and belief systems.
Holistic Lifestyle Coaching and 4 Quadrant Coaching Mastery training offers tools for effectively coaching people with a wide variety of mindsets and belief systems, which conventional medicine, allied medical systems, therapists and doctors do not yet embrace.
Again, the challenge is that no doctor or therapist can take anyone deeper into behavioral changes or paradigm shifts than they have taken themselves. The very same thing applies to gurus who are limited in how far they can guide their patients toward enlightenment based on how far have been able to take themselves.
Thank you for your comments and inspiring me to share my thoughts, feelings and experiences on what is really a much larger issue than diabetes itself.
It’s an issue of the world, nature and how we all live in it, and how we influence our environments and each other by the choices we make consciously and unconsciously, or by being ignorant or trusting science blindly, which includes medicine and related fields that claim to be based on science.
To quote Hippocrates, the father of medicine, once again: The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it.
It is time that we all quickly begin to pay closer attention to what we are creating within ourselves and in the world each day.
We are rapidly approaching a tipping point in human health. If we don’t act immediately and life-affirmatively, cancer will be an expected outcome in almost every human being, a plague that will infest a huge percentage of wildlife and masses of people and, with it, a massive amount of nature will die.
Love and chi,
Paul
Postscript: After writing this piece, I reached out Bill Wolcott, an expert on Metabolic Typing and the founder of Healthexcel, for his comments. Here’s what he had to say…
The only scientific research on diet that makes sense would be to test only homogenous metabolic type subject populations. One can’t logically, rationally or reasonably expect to see the same responses to saturated fat on an Inuit population (traditional diet: 90 percent+ protein + fat) as would be seen on the Tukisenta population of New Guinea (traditional diet: 90%+ carbs).
Also, all degenerative diseases are symptoms of underlying multifactoral causes unique to the metabolic individual. If diseases were conditions that could be treated — a specific treatment for each specific disease — then one would not see that a high protein plus fat diet would lower cholesterol in an Inuit-type metabolism and raise cholesterol in a Tukisenta-type metabolism, and vice versa.
Yet, that is precisely the clinical reality we have witnessed with every degenerative condition in thousands of cases over nearly 40 years of the clinical application of Metabolic Typing principles.
