Advance praise for The Diabetes Code
“By understanding the underlying cause of the disease, Dr. Fung reveals how [type 2 diabetes] can be prevented and also reversed using natural dietary methods instead of medications. This is an important and timely book. Highly recommended.”
MARK HYMAN, MD, author of Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?
“With rich scientific support, Dr. Jason Fung has sounded a clarion call to re-evaluate how we view and treat diabetes. Considering that roughly half of all adults worldwide are diabetic or on their way (pre-diabetes), The Diabetes Code is essential reading.”
DR. BENJAMIN BIKMAN, Associate Professor of Physiology, Brigham Young University
“In The Diabetes Code, Dr. Fung lays out the case for eliminating sugar and refined carbohydrates and replacing them with whole foods with healthy fats. Dr. Fung gives an easy-to-follow solution to reversing type 2 diabetes by addressing the root cause, diet.”
MARIA EMMERICH, author of The 30-Day Ketogenic Cleanse
“In this terrific and hopeful book, Dr. Fung teaches you everything you need to know about how to reverse type 2 diabetes. It could change the world.”
DR. ANDREAS EENFELDT, author of Low Carb, High Fat Food Revolution
“The Diabetes Code should be on the bookshelf of every physician and any patient struggling with blood sugar control.”
CARRIE DIULUS, MD, medical director of the Crystal Clinic Spine Wellness Center
“The Diabetes Code is unabashedly provocative yet practical . . . a clear blueprint for everyone to take control of their blood sugar, their health, and their lives.”
DR. WILL COLE, leading functional medicine practitioner and educator at drwillcole.com
“With his trademark humor, Jason Fung exposes the secret that type 2 diabetes can be reversed with the right combination of diet and lifestyle—you can reclaim your health and vitality. Dr. Fung will teach you how.”
AMY BERGER, MS, CNS, author of The Alzheimer’s Antidote
“The Diabetes Code clears the fog around type 2 diabetes and underscores that for most people, it is preventable or reversible.”
DR. KARIM KHAN, MD, British Journal of Sports Medicine
I would like to dedicate this book to my beautiful wife, Mina. You are my guiding star, without which I would be forever lost. You are my life, my love, my everything.
CONTENTS
How to Reverse and Prevent Type 2 Diabetes: The Quick Start Guide
Chapter 1: How Type 2 Diabetes Became an Epidemic
Chapter 2: The Differences between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes
Chapter 3: The Whole Body Effect
Part 2: Hyperinsulinemia and Insulin Resistance
Chapter 4: Diabesity: The Calorie Deception
Chapter 5: The Role of Insulin in Energy Storage
Chapter 6: Insulin Resistance: The Overflow Phenomenon
Part 3: Sugar and the Rise of Type 2 Diabetes
Chapter 7: Diabetes, a Disease of Dual Defects
Chapter 8: The Fructose-Insulin Resistance Connection
Chapter 9: The Metabolic Syndrome Connection
Part 4: How Not to Treat Type 2 Diabetes
Chapter 10: Insulin: Not the Answer for Type 2 Diabetes
Chapter 11: Oral Hypoglycemics: Not the Answer
Chapter 12: Low-calorie Diets and Exercise: Not the Answer
Part 5: How to Effectively Treat Type 2 Diabetes
Chapter 13: Lessons from Bariatric Surgery
Chapter 14: Carbohydrate-reduced Diets
Chapter 15: Intermittent Fasting
Afterword
Appendix: Two Sample Week-Long Meal Plans
Endnotes
Index
FOREWORD
IN JUST A generation, diabetes has gone from rarity to epidemic, a catastrophic turn that presents urgent questions: Why are so many suffering, and so suddenly? And how have our health authorities failed to offer an explanation or treatment for so devastating a scourge, despite spending billions? They have, instead, essentially given up on finding a cure, pronouncing type 2 diabetes1 a chronic, progressive disease that promises a life of slow, painful decline and early death.
Tragically, diabetes authorities worldwide have come to the consensus that the best hope for sufferers is merely to control or delay the disease through a lifelong dependence on medications combined with medical devices and surgery. There is no emphasis on better nutrition. Instead, some forty-five international medical and scientific societies and associations around the world declared in 2016 that bariatric surgery, which is both expensive and risky, should be the first option for diabetes treatment. Another recently approved idea is a new weight-loss procedure in which a thin tube, implanted in the stomach, ejects food from the body before all the calories can be absorbed, which some have termed “medically sanctioned bulimia.” And all this is in addition to the basic regimen for diabetes sufferers: multiple medications, which cost hundreds of dollars a month, and which include insulin, a drug that paradoxically often causes weight gain.
These techniques for managing diabetes are expensive, invasive, and do nothing to reverse diabetes—because, as Dr. Jason Fung explains in The Diabetes Code, “you can’t use drugs [or devices] to cure a dietary disease.”
The groundbreaking idea Dr. Fung presents in these pages is that diabetes is caused by our bodies’ insulin response to chronic overconsumption of carbohydrates and that the best and most natural way to reverse the disease is to reduce consumption of those