Lynn Capehart Wellness Project

ADULT ONSET, “NON-INSULIN DEPENDENT DIABETES,” IS CAUSED BY PERSONAL CHOICES, MEANING YOU CAN CHOOSE NOT TO HAVE IT

CATEGORIES: 1: Simple Malnutrition, 8: Exercise & Fitness, 10: Food & Diet

RECOMMENDED: Monavie Active, Increased Exercise, and Improved Diet

Type 1 diabetes was formerly known as juvenile diabetes, because it’s usually diagnosed in children and young adults. It stems from an impairment in the immune system. Only about 5 to 10 percent of reported cases are in this category, a comparatively small number. But a whopping 90 to 95 percent of people diagnosed with diabetes are Type 2, adult onset. Increasing the cringe factor is the news that of those numbers, most have this disease only because of unhealthy lifestyle choices. Meaning, Type 2 could be made obsolete in no time, if people made different and healthier choices.

Ordinarily, you end up with Type 2 after a lifetime of doing whatever you wanted to your body. You had no fear; you were carefree. You probably ate and drank what you liked without regard to nutrition or weight. Maybe spent too much time at the computer or big screen sitting on your butt. Likewise had no idea what the inside of a gym or health club looked like, or that the outdoors was good for more than passing through on your way from your house to your car.

Or maybe you had greater nutritional needs than average. But no one in your family understood, causing them to go unmet even as an adult. Maybe no one ever taught you how to eat in a balanced fashion, or that your body needs movement by way of exercise and activity in order to stay healthy and thrive. Whatever the cause, Type 2 diabetes is the result of chronic neglect that has caught up with you.

DIABETES OVERVIEW

Type 1 occurs when the immune system, embodied in the white blood cells, wrongly attacks the body’s own insulin producing cells, decimating their numbers and preventing them from making insulin. Think of it as friendly fire, as when troops mistake their own soldiers as the enemy and attack them. The result is high blood glucose (sugar) levels, which are treated with diet, blood monitoring, and insulin shots meant to replace the insulin from cells destroyed by the immune system.

Type 2 is something you do to yourself. It’s self inflicted. It’s not a gun to the head, but it’s a slower form of suicide that robs you of promised years. It’s caused by a metabolic malfunction arising from an unhealthy diet and no exercise, whereby the insulin cells that are produced by the pancreas are inferior, and therefore can’t remove enough glucose from the blood to keep you healthy. This is called “insulin resistance.” The result is high blood sugar levels, which are treated by diet changes and increased activity.

Nutrition is responsible for all functions inside your body, including making strong insulin cells and other replacement parts. If you have a Type 2 diagnosis, it means you have not given your body enough nutrition, so that now it can’t do things like it used to, like construct strong insulin cells.

Types 1 and 2 both result in elevated blood sugar levels and if not controlled can lead to heart attack, stroke, toe and limb amputation, kidney failure, and loss of eyesight, among other problems that will lead up to these events. But the edges between Type 1 and Type 2 start to blur when you examine them closely, especially in children. Type 2 used to be associated with middle age and the elderly. But how do we explain that children as young as 8 are presenting with, and dying from, Type 2 now? Or that countries normally associated with good eating habits, like Japan, showed Type 2 diabetes cases almost double in junior high school students, making it more prevalent than Type 1?

Dr. Francine Kaufman knows. She is the Director of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California Medical School. She reports that, “poor eating habits and lack of exercise—once the prerogative of older people in rich countries, but now almost a global phenomenon—are largely to blame for the rise of Type 2 Diabetes.”

So there you have it folks, your lousy diets are killing not just you adults, but now your children as well. Type 2 is a disease that arises due to a sedentary lifestyle, and a diet that, because it provides too much fat and not enough nutrition, leads to weight gain and obesity, which further exacerbates the Type 2 disorder. People who are overweight are more likely to have Type 2, because fat actually interferes with the body’s ability to use insulin.

A high fat diet stores too much fat inside your cells. It prevents your body from responding to the insulin it does manage to produce, because the fat is hogging all the space in the cell. Like a room, there is only so much space inside a cell. If it’s filled up with fat there is simply less space inside it to store glucose, no matter how hard your insulin works. It’s like having a private storage unit that’s filled up all the way to the door. There’s no room for that desk you want to store.

THE CORE ISSUE IN BOTH TYPES IS INSULIN

Without enough insulin in your bloodstream at all times, glucose builds up and remains there, instead of being moved into storage in your cells. This process of sugar being transported to, and stored in your cells, is what keeps you moving. When you run a race, or go to the cleaners, it’s the glucose energy stored in your muscle cells by insulin that keeps you moving. The body is unable to use glucose as a food for energy as long as the glucose is trapped inside the bloodstream. Glucose must be inside a cell in order for that cell, and therefore your body, to tap it for energy use. Insulin is the transportation system for glucose. It takes sugar out of the blood and into the cell.

Think of insulin as high speed rail taking workers from the outskirts into the center of town. If the rail system is working at peak effectiveness it will efficiently transport them. But let’s say the system gets bogged down and moves 25 percent less efficiently. What about 50 or 75 percent? What if the rails shut down and no trains move? In those cases, fewer and fewer workers would get to their jobs, until finally no one would. Likewise, if your insulin becomes less and less effective at taking sugar to work inside your cell, you will get a Type 2 diagnosis.

OBESITY AND TYPE 2 DIABETES

If too much glucose remains in your blood, you will feel unsatisfied no matter what or how much you eat. And you will gain weight despite your best efforts not to. Your body can’t burn off the sugar until it gets moved into the cells. When your cells don’t respond properly to the insulin, the pancreas tries to solve the problem by producing more and more insulin. These large amounts of insulin constrict your arteries and increase your chances of having a heart attack or stroke due to decreased blood flow. They stimulate your brain to make you hungry, even though you’ve taken in more than enough calories to fill your needs—making it almost impossible not to overeat. All because they cause fat, instead of glucose, to be stored in your cells.

If you’re overweight, the failure to store glucose in your fat-laden cells where it belongs is what makes you so tired all the time. The sugar your cells need for energy is trapped inside the bloodstream, of no use whatsoever because your cells can’t access it. That’s also why the first thing people say when they change their diets for the better is, “I have so much more energy now.” Of course. The healthier diet increases the efficiency of the insulin you’re producing. More glucose food energy gets stored in the cells because the fat has moved out to make room for it. Like maybe you removed something from that storage unit in order to make room for the desk. Once glucose is inside the cell, energy is then accessible to you when you need it to cross the finish line, or pick up the clothes.

MANITO S.

Manito was a 23 year old dancer and Cuban hunk when he immigrated to Miami in 1962. The trip was far from easy. He spent two days in a small boat with five other people; three men and two women. The boat started to leak and broke apart in a rogue wave. Two men and a woman were swept away and drowned. Manny, one woman, and the last man took turns lying on top of a piece of the wreckage, while the others held on to the sides. The curvature of the wood kept a pocket of air under it and made it more floatable. They stayed alive like that for two more days until they were picked up by a passing American fishing boat. They’d had no food or water for four days.

Manny loved the U.S. He got a job dancing in a nightclub and three years later he owned the place. Two years after that he added a small restaurant and populated the menu with his favorite dishes: achiote marinated chicken, veal scallops with bacon, roast suckling pig, deviled crab rolls, moros y christianos, criollo chicken and rice gumbo.

Manny ate at his own restaurant every night, even after he met and married Maria. She joined him in managing the business, handling the front end while he ran the kitchen and planned menus. It was a match made in heaven because Maria loved food as much as Manny. They grew successful together, and they grew fat together. All the more to love, they often told each other.

That is where Manny and Maria’s background tale ends for me. I don’t know what happened between that happy chronicle and the phone call I received from their daughter, Katrina, so many years later. I was running an experiment on the effects of Monavie Active on metabolism and Type 2 diabetes. Katrina contacted me online and then we spoke by phone. She told me her parents had separated, but both had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes a decade ago. The trial samples were free so I offered to enroll both Manny and Maria. Katrina said they didn’t want their mother in the trial, just their father.

That begged a “why not?” from me, and her answer gave me pause. Katrina said that if Monavie Active helped their dad’s glucose numbers, she and her brother, Marc, would order it for their mother on a long term basis. But they wouldn’t pay to have their father take it, even if it would save his life. Okay. But why not start both of them on it now instead of waiting to see what happens with your dad, I asked. She said they didn’t want me experimenting on their mother, but didn’t care what happened to him. “She could get hurt,” she said. I didn’t pursue it. I assumed Manny had earned his children’s wrath.

Manny and I started communicating by phone. I figured that if Monavie worked for him he would find some other way of paying for it. He was 73, maybe he had a pension. I asked him what was the biggest negative impact that Type 2 had had on his life. He didn’t mention the two missing toes, or the inability to walk more than a few feet at a time, the chronic infections, tingling extremities, debilitating fatigue, or loss of eyesight. He said it was not being able to walk his dog Georgi along the beach.

In the end there was good news and bad. The good news was that Monavie Active worked great for Manny. Normal blood glucose should fall between 70 and 120. Manny’s had been 565 at the start. After two weeks taking Monavie Active twice daily, Manny’s glucose dropped to 95, and he returned to walking Georgi. His physician was so impressed that he called me to get more information on just what Manito had been taking.

Katrina told me that the treatment also worked for Maria, who saw her numbers return to normal. But I’m sure you’ve already guessed the bad news. The kids ordered Monavie for Maria but not Manny. He asked me to talk to them because he didn’t want to go back to being sick. I told him I didn’t think it would do any good. A couple of weeks after he ran out of the sample, his blood glucose was sky high again.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP YOURSELF

You can easily turn things around by changing certain habits. You’ve heard it all before and it’s true. It’s all about choices. You don’t have to start living like a monk, but even a few changes will make a big difference in your health: Choose multi grain breads, cereals, and pastas instead of refined white. Substitute brown rice for white rice on occasion. Always eat something raw/fresh along with a cooked meal. Go completely vegetarian two days each week. When you eat meat, choose lean cuts. Try to avoid buying food in cans; make it a last resort choice. Keep frozen foods at a minimum; choose fresh as often as possible. Read the labels of foods you buy and avoid ones with too many additives. Don’t overeat; portion control is very important. Think about what you are putting in your mouth. Don’t assume because something is served to you that it’s really fit for your consumption.

In addition to the above, you have to get moving, literally. If you can’t afford a health club or gym membership, or don’t want others to see you exercising right away, then just start walking. Even if you only get to the end of your block on your first try, it’s a start. Try to go a little farther each time you walk, until you can do something substantial like two miles. And expect pain; some of your muscles have not been stressed in a long time. Pain is no reason to stop, unless it’s in your chest. Once you’ve built up your strength a little, try something harder, like swimming, or jogging, or free weights. Whatever appeals to you and gets your heart beating faster.

There is also a supplement that will make your life back to good health much easier. For most people with Type 2, Monavie Active can balance your metabolism and lower your glucose numbers in two to three weeks. It’s a juice combination with acai berry as the primary ingredient.

NOTES

► If you are taking a prescription for Type 2 diabetes, you have to be watchful as you take Monavie Active. Be aware that while it is a simple combination of juices, it is powerful and effective. The chances are 95 percent that it will remove the need for your medicine, because it will bring your glucose under control and balance your metabolism.

 ► Monavie Active costs about $150 a month to take as prescribed here. If you cannot afford it you will have to pay strict attention to your dietary restrictions to bring and keep your glucose numbers within normal range.

Please be nice to each other, and look for my next post: Blog 14: Erectile Dysfunction, where I explain why the problem happens, and an easy fix—if it’s physical and not psychological.