Dr. John & Mary McDougall
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Vegan Diet Benefits Diabetics
By John A. McDougall, M.D.
A Low-Fat Vegan Diet Improves Glycemic Control and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in a Randomized Clinical Trial in Individuals With Type 2 Diabetes by Neal Barnard in the July 2006 issue of Diabetes Care found a low-fat vegan diet improved the health of people with type 2 diabetes even more than the American Diabetic Association (ADA) Diet did. Forty-three percent (21 of 49) of the vegan group and 26% (13 of 50) of the ADA group participants reduced their diabetes medications. Reductions of hemoglobin A1c, LDL "bad" cholesterol, and urine protein were greater in the vegan group, than those on the ADA diet. People following the vegan diet could eat unlimited amounts of food, while those on the ADA diet were required to control their portion sizes-and compliance was better on the vegan diet. Exercise did not play a role in this study.
Comments
Type 2 diabetes is widely-accepted as an illness caused by the rich Western diet. The cure is to stop the cause. This kind of diabetes, and associated obesity, is essentially unknown in parts of the world where people consume a diet based on starches (like rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and legumes) with fruits and vegetables. Activity is also a hallmark of these populations. However, even people whose occupations are sedentary, like schoolteachers, shopkeepers, and ministers, are generally free of obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes.
This study is especially important because it shows that people with type 2 diabetes have the hope for getting off medications and improving their health by simply changing their diet to delicious foods-and never being hungry. Adding exercise, with the associated weight loss, also helps. My experience has been that almost all people with type 2 diabetes can get off all of their medication and cure their disease. After all, these people are producing as much, and sometimes twice as much, insulin as someone without diabetes-because of insulin resistance, due to the rich diet and being over-fat, their insulin fails to work efficiently. Correct these two issues and they are cured.
Some people are not purely type 2 in nature-they have developed the defining feature of type 1 diabetes-which is that the pancreas no longer produces sufficient insulin to meet their needs. In this case, even with weight loss and adherence to a low-fat, starch-based diet, they still have elevated blood sugars and many times a need for additional insulin by injection or inhalation. Still, they need to follow a healthy diet in order to prevent the all too common complications of diabetes-heart attacks, kidney failure, loss of vision, and more.
I have had the privilege of calling Neal Barnard, MD my friend for more than 25 years-he is one of the most honest and dedicated people I have ever met. Neal is the founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (www.pcrm.org). He is willing to do the research needed to prove to the rest of the world what we all already know about the benefits of a healthy diet. Mary and I were able to contribute to this study in a small way-the participants in the vegan group received the McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook and the DVD, Dr. McDougall's Total Health Solution for the 21st Century. To learn more about diabetes, from my web site visit:
February 2004 newsletter: Diabetes—the Expected Adaptation to Overnutrition.
Star McDougallers:
Logan Ginger: http://www.drmcdougall.com/stars/050308starlogan.html
Jason Wyrick: http://www.drmcdougall.com/stars/jason_wyrick.html
Barnard ND, Cohen J, Jenkins DJ, Turner-McGrievy G, Gloede L, Jaster B, Seidl K, Green AA, Talpers S. A low-fat vegan diet improves glycemic control and cardiovascular risk factors in a randomized clinical trial in individuals with type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes Care. 2006 Aug; 29(8):1777-83.
Pomegranate Juice Benefits Prostate Cancer Patients
Phase II Study of Pomegranate Juice for Men with Rising Prostate-Specific Antigen following Surgery or Radiation for Prostate Cancer by Allan Pantuck reported in the July 2006 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research found pomegranate juice (a major source of antioxidants) benefited men with prostate cancer (who had a detectable PSA >0.2 and <5 ng/mL and Gleason score </=7).1 Patients were treated with 8 ounces of pomegranate juice daily until their disease showed signs of progression. The growth of cancer was apparently slowed so that it took 54 months for the PSA to double, compared to 15 months for those not drinking the juice. When observed in the laboratory, cancer cell growth was found to slow and the death of prostate cancer cells (apoptosis) increased for those on the juice.
Comments
Prostate cancer is the most common invasive cancer in men-in the US 232,000 cancers are diagnosed annually, most of them because of the over-enthusiastic use of PSA testing-a test, by the way, which fails to save lives because it cannot detect prostate cancer until it has been growing on average for 10 years-long after the cancer has spread. Annually, 30,350 men die of prostate cancer-and there is good evidence that most of those who do not die of prostate cancer, never had a fatal form of the disease, and would have been better off not knowing they were "sick." (See my February and March 2003 lead newsletter articles on prostate cancer-and my May 2005 article: "What's New in Prostate Cancer Treatment?")
Components of the rich Western diet are the cause of prostate cancer. Dairy products, red meat, all kinds of fats and oils, and environmental chemicals have been the focus of research pointing to practical means for the prevention and treatment of this potentially fatal disease. Ingredients of a plant-food diet, such as antioxidants, polyphenols, ellagic acid and tannins, interfere with the growth of cancer cells at the cellular/biochemical level.
The simple addition of pomegranate juice to a low-fat diet of plant foods appears to be the most effective treatment for prostate cancer available today—especially when balanced against the fact that surgery, radiation and chemotherapy have failed to demonstrate meaningful survival benefits. Dr. Dean Ornish recently showed that the PSA in men with prostate cancer decreased 4% for patients on a low-fat vegan diet-compare this to a 6% rise seen in the control group on the American-diet.2 Serum (a part of the blood) was taken from the patients and used to grow prostate cancer cells in the laboratory. The serum from those on the vegan diet inhibited growth of the cancer cells 8 times more effectively than did the serum from those on the American diet. The stricter the patients followed the low-fat vegan diet, the better the results with PSA lowering and inhibition of cancer cell growth.
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