By the time I graduated college, I’d been a type 1 diabetic for almost half my life. I already had many complications of the disease. Eventually, seeking to arrest the downward spiral of my health, I came to analyze virtually everything I ate, constantly monitoring the effects on my blood sugars and my health. This is also a claim most diet doctors probably cannot make, and it provides me with an utterly distinct view of how diet affects not only me. I would not necessarily wish my particular vantage point on anyone, but it has given me insights that I never would have had otherwise. The key insight was that what I ate as a young man nearly killed me.
I can safely say that I am healthier today because I did not trust my doctor, who had told me that what I have accomplished would not be possible. I can also say that I am healthier today not in spite of having a potentially fatal illness, but because of it.
When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1946, the life expectancy after diagnosis of diabetics like me was about thirty years. My death would not have come from diabetes per se. I am pretty certain that I would have died of kidney failure, a direct result of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate, American Diabetes Association (ADA) diet I followed for 24 years after my diagnosis.
By the late 1960s to mid-1970s, I was married and had small children. I’d had excruciatingly painful kidney stones, a stone in a salivary duct, stones in my gallbladder, and “frozen” shoulders. Not only had my feet become progressively deformed, they had begun to lose sensation from peripheral neuropathy, the kind of nerve damage that could eventually lead to amputation. After a routine exercise stress test, I was told that my heart had been damaged, scar tissue had replaced muscle tissue, a common cause of heart failure and death among type 1 diabetics.
I will gladly admit that back in 1969, I was as affected by the conventional thinking as anyone and had no idea that the result I was looking for was normalized blood sugars. I was lucky. Right around the time I was certain my life was near its end, I got a second chance and was fortunate enough to make the most of it. That year I happened across an ad in a scientific journal for the first blood sugar meter, but the manufacturer would sell them only to doctors or hospitals. If my wife had not been a physician, I might have gone on and died, but she was, and I obtained one through her for $650. In short order I became the first diabetic patient to monitor his own blood sugar levels. While I used the machine for my original intent, to catch hypoglycemic episodes early, I also began to discover the effects that various foods had on my blood sugar.
Three years of blood sugar testing went by, and although I was aware of my blood sugars levels daily, I was still the proverbial “98 lb. weakling” wracked with complications. I was eating the same food and taking the same medication for my symptoms, still not connecting the dots between the foods that I ate and my blood sugar roller coaster. I was more than frustrated. First and foremost was the life and death issue, by the measure of kidney disease, as I had only a few years left, but there was also an intellectual issue. I knew there was something more. I suspected that the answer to reversing diabetic complications would be exercise.
I ordered a search of the medical literature on diabetic complications and exercise, which took weeks to arrive by mail. There was nothing on exercise helping with diabetic complications. As an engineer, I had left my hypothesis in serious doubt. But I discovered what the answer was. The results of my search were several studies on blood sugar normalization in animals, and how it, not exercise, helped reverse diabetic complications. If I had a eureka moment, this was it.
When I showed these results to my doctor, he was not impressed. “Animals are different,” was his response. Anyway, blood sugar normalization, he told me, was impossible in humans. So I took up my quest alone. I spent the next year checking my blood sugars 5-8 times each day. Invariably I found that the foods I had been told to emphasize, carbohydrates, were those that caused rapid and substantial rises in blood sugar. Those I had been told to avoid, protein and fats, were the ones that had a much less profound and rapid effect. On a graph my blood sugar swings on the high-carbohydrate diet would look like sharp peaks and valleys. I discovered that with a low-carbohydrate diet, they were much closer to a somewhat wavy line. I also discovered that what had been true in the animal studies was true for me, my complications began to ease. Protein disappeared from my urine, other complications gradually evaporated, even complications that I assumed would never reverse have done so.
Within a year I had refined my insulin and diet regimen to the point that I had essentially normal blood sugars around the clock. After years of chronic fatigue and debilitating complications, almost overnight I started to gain weight, and at last I was able to build muscle. People commented that my gray complexion was gone.
I found myself in a quandary, everything I had been taught was wrong, and I could prove it, but nobody was listening. My doctor wasn’t interested, so I wrote a paper on my findings and even distributed it to many medical professionals, but it was uniformly ignored. All of my attempts to publish my discoveries in medical journals were met with ridicule by the editors. 1976, the year of my death, came and went. I believed the only way I could beat the establishment was to join it, so at age 45, I went to medical school then started my own practice.
Now, nearly 40 years since I became certain my days were numbered, I am doing fine. I did not cure my diabetes, but I have what a cure will provide: normalized blood sugars. It’s ironic to think that if and when there is a cure for diabetes, I and those who have used my program will likely prove to be healthier than many of those who someday are cured.