How to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally | Jason Fung

[Music] what happens is that the um diabetes they tell you is a chronic disease so this is what happens and this is what happens in all studies and if you've taken medications you know this is what happens so your sugars start out actually not bad as you take the medications the sugars actually comes down a bit but over the years it kind of the effect sort of wears off so then you wind up having to add more and more and more medications so what happens is that no matter what drug you take so these compare three drugs metformin gly briide and Rosy glone so M no matter what drug you take the initial effect is very good up to about 6 months and then after about 6 months the effect kind of wears off and you can see that the sugar slowly goes up and so what happens is that you wind up on a second medication or a third medication and this is pretty well what happens to everybody so if you've taken if you've had diabetes for a while and many people have had for 10 you know 12 15 years what you find is that you start off on Metformin then you go to metformin and gide then maybe three agents or four agents then you wind up on a little bit of insulin then you wind up on more insulin and more insulin and if you think about the diabetes if you think about who has um you know mild diabetes and who has severe diabetes you can see that the people who are just on the little bit of Metformin are you know have mild diabetes and if you're on a lot of insulin you have very severe diabetes so in fact over these years despite what everybody tells you your diabetes is just getting worse and worse and worse so your sugars might go up they might go down but your diabetes is actually getting worse and I think that's what confuses people a lot because they think that the sugar and the diabetes are the same thing but they're actually not but over the that period of time you can see that no matter what it's actually progressing and they say it's a progressive disease so this is the thing that you have to understand that the the sugars and the diabetes are actually two different things so diabetes the real heart of diabetes is the insulin resistance okay so that part is what's getting worse the sugars is really just a symptom of the insulin resistance okay but it's not the actual diabetes the actual diabetes is the resistance to insulin and the subsequent very high levels of insulin if you want to think about it you know a um analogy you can think about an infection so if you have an infection so you have a big you know infection in the lungs or whatever that's the actual disease the symptom is the fever okay so what you have to do is treat the disease which is the infection with antibiotics you can't treat the symptom of the fever so if you have a very bad infection you need antibiotics you don't need more and more Tylenol so diabetes is the same thing the disease is about insulin resistance but the symptom is the high blood sugar and yet all our treatment is directed against the high blood sugar so you can see that controlling the high blood sugars actually doesn't do anything for you because you're not actually treating the disease the disease actually continues to progress and that's the real problem so up to about 5 years ago we thought that treating the sugars would make you better right and this is what probably all of you have heard your sugars are doing fine your sugars are doing fine so if you um think that that's that the the sugars is the same thing as the diabetes then you think that the diabetes is doing fine but it turns out about 5 years ago that they did three very large studies and what they found was that no matter if your sugars were well controlled or poorly controlled it actually didn't make any difference you still got complications of diabetes you still got the disease you know the the heart disease The Strokes you got the you know the eye disease the kidney disease all of it so none of that was made better by controlling the sugars and if you think about it this way you can see why because you're not actually treating the disease you're only treating the symptoms so just like if you take Tylenol for a a an infection it might make you look better but it doesn't actually make you better so this is the same thing so the the the the diabetes is the insulin resistance so you have to understand what is the cause of the insulin resistance and then you actually have to treat it so you have to treat the insulin resistance and not the sugars now at a certain point when your sugars are very high yes you have to treat it but that's not what is really important in the disease the real part of heart of the disease is the insulin resistance and because they don't really understand what causes the insulin resistance they can't actually treat it so all your treatments all the metformin all the GID all the uh insulin all of that is aimed at simply treating the the sugars so here's the real question what causes the insulin resistance and this is what happening in the body this is just a cartoon so normally the insulin causes you to lower the blood sugars that's what it does as you eat you know your blood sugars go up and insulin is released to take that Sugar out of the blood and into the tissues and that's a normal thing uh when you develop insulin resistance it's the the insulin doesn't seem to work as well so what happens is that the body kind of pumps up the levels of insulin to make it work well enough to get your sugars out of the way but the high insulin level is a result of the insulin resistance but what causes the insulin resistance in the first place and that's really what you need to understand in order to treat it because if you know what causes the insulin resistance then you can treat it and it turns out that it's actually the insulin that causes the insulin resistance and that might seem funny at first but in fact that's what happens in most biological systems so if you um look at any other hormone if you get exposed to it your body develops resistance to it so if you look at addictive drugs or alcohol or anything or smoking or anything as you take the first one say for instance marijuana or cocaine or one of these addictive drugs or you can take valium or any of these anti- um anti- psychotics and stuff as you take the first one you get a real high but every subsequent one is a little bit lower so you wind up having to take higher and higher doses to get the same effect and that's really resistance or tolerance and it happens for all drugs insulin is exactly the same as you take more and more insulin your body develops more and more resistance to it and now you see that it's actually a real vicious cycle because what happens is that if your insulin level is high then it you get some insulin resistance as you get insulin resistance you get higher insulin levels as you get higher insulin levels you get higher resistance and it goes round and round so you have a vicious circle and in fact treatment with insulin now is not simply not effective it's actually making things worse because you're feeding into that cycle so while the insulin lowers your sugars it is actually raising your insulin resistance so in fact it's making things worse you're getting more Diabetes by taking the insulin and that's the real problem when you understand the actual disease disas you can see why current standard treatment is actually not only not effective it's actually really really really bad for you because you're treating the exact uh what is actually causing the disease is what you're treating it with that's never going to work right it's just not going to work so if you think about it the the problem is that the insulin level is too high so you're not going to make things better by taking more insulin it's like treating an alcoholic with alcohol right this is exactly the same thing so the same same thing happens in alcohol if you take alcohol the first one you get you know a real Buzz and then every subsequent one is a little lower and what happens is that if you take the alcohol your sympt you feel a little bit better but you're not making the alcoholism any better right this is the exact same thing the problem is that your insulin levels are too high so how can taking more insulin possibly be good for you and the truth is that it wasn't it was never good for you in fact it made things worse but people didn't really understand that and because they didn't understand that they then made an excuse for themselves by saying that this is a chronic progressive disease but the truth is that diabetes was not a chronic progressive disease because we know that we can cure it in many cases so if you do weight loss surgery or gastric banding or bariatric surgery basically if you staple somebody's stomach their diabetes goes away in like 90% of cases so this was not a chronic progressive disease this is a curable disease so if you say that this is a curable disease yet our treatment is making people worse the only logical conclusion is that our treatment is completely Incorrect and that's exactly what it is so when you're thinking about treatment of diabetes there's a few things you have to consider one you have to understand that the key to treating diabetes is not to take more insulin that makes things worse the key is how are you going to get those insulin levels really low the second thing is that diabetes is a dietary disease okay almost for sure it's a dietary disease we know that um yet if it's a dietary disease The Cure is going to have to be dietary you can't take a dietary disease and treat it with drugs and pretend that that's going to make things better but yet that's what we've done we've taken a disease which is dietary in nature and we've prescribed you drugs that suppress the symptoms it's not going to make it better and it hasn't the last 30 years has borne it out the third thing is that this is not a chronic progressive disease at all this is in fact a curable dis disease but you have to treat it the right way you have to understand what you're doing so one of the things we do in our Clinic is that we are looking at ways of how to lower the insulin levels and that's the real thing and one of the simpler ways to do it is intermittent fasting and that's that's what that's why we have a lot of people on these sort of protocols and one of the things to remember is that fasting um has been done for many many years you know everybody thinks that it's so crazy everybody hears about it at first and think it'ss crazy but you have to remember that fasting has been done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years and not only that but almost every single major religion in the world has periods of fasting that are prescribed not because you know of any particular reason but they recognize that it is actually a very healthy thing for people to be doing every so often and why is it so healthy because what happens is is that when you fast your insulin levels go down very low because you're not eating your insulin levels go down and having periods where your insulin level is down helps prevent that vicious cycle right it's the insulin that leads to the resistance which leads to higher insulin it's a vicious cycle so if every once in a while you know you you you do Ramadan which is a month of fasting or you do you know the 40 days of Lent or whatever it is you do if you have a period now where your insulin level is very low you're going to completely break that vicious cycle and if you do that routinely through the year then you will stay healthy you will prevent the development of that resistance if you don't get the resistance you don't get the high levels and that's what we do so I'm I'm going to show you here what um what we do kind of in a uh demonstration so what we do in terms of the sugars you can think about it this way the body actually has the ability to store energy in two ways so when you eat you're taking in energy as food right so you can store that in two ways you can store Sugar and you can store fat okay so sugar is stored in the liver as something called glycogen and there is a really a limited amount of glycogen that you can store in the liver but it's readily available okay so it's kind of like a shortterm uh storage but you can store Sugar if you store more energy than that the body will actually turn that into fat and that's kind of long-term food energy storage right so as long as you're eating you're going to be burning that off um you're going to be increasing insulin and insulin is going to tell your body to store some of that away okay so if you have too much sugar what happens is that some of that is going to go into the stores but as long as your stores are not full it's not going to spill over into the blood and what I'm going to do is I'm going to demonstrate it this way normally as you take a little thing to eat if you don't have filled up stores of sugar what's going to happen is that you're going to fill it up a little bit right but it's fine as you don't eat so for instance you eat dinner you take in more calories than you can really use for that period of time so your body produces insulin and Insulin says to the body okay well I'm I've eaten a big meal I'll use a little bit that as energy the rest I'm going to put in storage as sugar okay because that's what I do so it fills up the storage but the storage is empty so it's fine then you go to sleep so for the next you know 9 12 hours you're not eating so what happens is that your body is going to take that and it's going to burn it off as energy so that's fine that's the normal situation now what happens in the uh diabetic situation is something like this so over time your your storage is you know empty but over time as you kind of continue to eat more and more what happens is that that storage kind of gets filled up and now here's the situation in diabetes this is your storage levels of sugar right they're completely full right and what you do when you eat is this you're going to take in a meal and you're going to have more sugar and what's going to happen it's all going to spill over into the blood right so the blood sugar levels go up there's nothing it can do it can't store anymore so for a while your body can compensate but what does insulin do so now you're diabetic and this is what happens every meal time your storage is filled up every time you eat the sugar spills out into the blood well as you take insulin to take care of that problem the body is going to take that excess sugar and and force it back into the body so what happens to that your body is just going to store it as fat in other words this insulin is going to make you gain weight and if you've ever taken insulin you know already that's exactly what happens but this is the problem if you continue to do this day after day year after year all you do is gain weight right but it doesn't make you any better cuz all that sugar is still in your body body so it's kind of like that show hoarders I don't know if you've seen it but people you know hoard too much stuff and their house is full of stuff so pretty soon the stuff F flows out and what happens if you're taking insulin all you're doing is taking all that garbage and shoving it back into the house well that's not going to help that's not going to make things better in fact over time it's just going to make things worse and that's exactly what happens in the current treatment of diabetes so this is what we do instead if your cup is completely full the only rational treatment for diabetes so this is the situation now in diabetes your cup is completely full the only way that's going to make you better is to start draining it off so that's what you do so as you fast what happens a little bit of this water is going to come out and it's going to get burned off the next time you fast a little bit more of this water is going to come and it's going to get drained off every single time you do it so when you eat it will fill back up a little bit right but as you go what's going to happen is eventually your stores are going to come down and it won't be it won't spill over into the blood you're basically just forcing the body to burn off that sugar but as you do you reduce the stores of sugar and you get better your diabetes gets better because now you're burning it off it's like that guy in hoarders instead of shoving it back into your house which is what the inant does we're just going to throw it out and really that's really the the the the the reason that we do this you have to so you have to lower insulin levels but you got to get rid of that sugar okay you've stored up too much and it hasn't been stored up over like a month it's been stored up over like 10 years right so the thing is that it's not going to reverse in a week or a month or two months even yes if you do fasting every day it will reverse faster right because you're getting rid of that Sugar every day so this is what we do and um the you know a few a few patients actually have been uh kind enough to share their stories with us but I'll present a few other cases because we've we've had you know quite a number of people go through the program so I'll I'll I'll just share their stories with you quickly um because really illustrates really how powerful this uh this New Concept is um so the first case we have is Richard who's uh here today and so he's had diabetes for about 10 years now and he's had a few complications including some kidney disease which is why he was here in this office and um he saw a colleague of mine DrTing and uh so he was referred into the Intensive dietary Management program and we started him in June of 2013 and we started him with a fasting regimen as opposed to the amount of insulin that he had so this is Richard and his wife oh I can't see that very well um and this is what's happened to his weight so his weight starting just above 250 has been steadily coming down and it's down to 210 his waist size has continued to come down and his hemoglobin A1c which is the measure of his sugars has has stayed relatively stable below 7% and this is him now so if you look at what has happened to his insulin dose so he started off with 55 units of insulin and within you know 6 weeks he was off of all his insulin and other words he his sugars are doing fine and he's off of all his medications completely and his you know his his levels of A1C are no longer at a level where you could make this case that he is diabetic in other words you could say that his diabetes has been cured by using these kind of simple uh understanding of diabetes you can see that this is actually the rational but also the natural way to cure diabetes we're not talking about piling on more drugs for you I mean you go to some of these places they'll tell you to take these experimental drugs and they want to sign you for drug trials no what we're doing has been done for thousands of years and is in fact exactly the way they used to treat diabetes but they understood that it was a dietary disease it has to be treated with dietary measures uh this is the second case b Raj who's here this uh this morning as well so he was diagnosed in 2003 with diabetes and he also had some complications of that and so you know after treating him incorrectly for many years I uh started him on the Intensive dietary Management program because you know back then I didn't understand me much of this myself much of this is new so he started in August and so his weight has come down a bit but you know he started at 186 and he's come down you know 8 10 pounds or something or so his waist has come down but you can see his sugars his hemoglobin A1c has stayed uh very good and this is his his his medications so again starting at over 40 units about 40 units a day of insulin so this is what he had to take within 5 7 weeks he was down to zero he was no longer taking insulin he's no longer taking any medications for his uh diabetes which again you could say if your sugars are good and you're no longer on any medications you could say that your diabetes has been cured in essence what we're doing is exactly the same thing we do with the stomach stapling surgery so the stomach stapling surgery The Cure rates for diabetes are like 90% but the benefits are because of the fasting they cut your stomach so you can't eat in other words you're fasting but if all the benefits come from fasting why do the surgery at all it doesn't even make sense just do the fasting um this is another case he's not here but it's a 45-year-old Filipino man and he was just recently diagnosed with diabetes he started with a hemoglobin A1c of 88. 7% so anything over 6 and a half is considered diabetes anything over 7% is diabetes but he was newly diagnosed and he really didn't want to start any medications so I said to him well if you don't want to start medications then come into my program and we'll treat you and we'll treat you and therefore you won't have to take medications so it had been slowly rising over the last 6 months and what happened was that he started in June his weight again came down it came down about 3 kilos but his A1C continuously came down so you can see that his final A1C at the end of 10 12 weeks was 6. 3% so again at a level that you wouldn't be able to say that he has diabetes so in other words this fellow instead of taking medication and then later taking more medication then more medication then more medication we're able to treat him right off the bat with a dietary regimen and he's been able not to take any medications in essence his diabetes has been cured so again lots of cases another fellow uh 66 year-old Chinese man much the same story type 2 diabetes which was recently diagnosed in 2012 and you can see that his sugars were really high his A1C was 10.

5% um I told him to try different things but uh by se but I just saw him actually in September of 2013 and his A1C was still 99. 4% and he couldn't he he didn't have a drug plan so he really didn't want to take any medications so I said well if you don't want to take medications come into the program and that should say September 2013 so we started him a few months ago and this is what's happened so as he's following the program his sugars are coming down exactly what we would expect and as You Follow the program longer you're burning off those stores of sugar and your hemoglobin A1c is coming down so he went from 9. 4 to 8.

4 and I just saw him at 7.