Category Archives: Uncategorized
Paleo Diet Improves Glucose Tolerance and Blood Cholesterol
A Paleolithic diet improved metabolic status with respect to cardiovascular and carbohydrate physiology, according to a 2009 study at the University of California San Francisco. Here are the specifics, all statistically significant unless otherwise noted: total cholesterol decreased by 16% … Continue reading
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Is Exercise Supposed To Be Fun?
Exercise is not supposed to be fun. If it is, then you should suspect that something is wrong. That quote is from an essay by Ken Hutchins posted at the Efficient Exercise website. When I was a young man in … Continue reading
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LADA Awareness Week
This is the first ever LADA Awareness Week, organized by Diabetes Hands Foundation and dLife. LADA stands for Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults. I think of it as type 1 diabetes that starts in adulthood, although there are some differences from typical juvenile-onset … Continue reading
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Introducing Paleo Diabetic, a New Blog
A few of my patients have asked me if the paleo diet and lifestyle would be good for their diabetes. I’m not sure. A few pilot studies suggest it would be. I expect much more published scientific research over the coming … Continue reading
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Is Grape Seed Extract as Healthful as Wine?
Patients ask me periodically if grape seed extract provides the same health benefit as judicious red wine. Nobody knows with certainty. The health benefits of red wine may be due to resveratrol. Grape seed extract contains potentially healthy antioxidants called … Continue reading
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A Good Night On-Call
At the hospital last night, I admitted an elderly heart patient with chest pain. I asked if he’d ever heard of the Mediterranean diet. He answered, “What’s that? Does it mean you only eat those kinds of people?” Steve … Continue reading
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The Holy Grail of Diabetes Treatment: Preserving Beta Cell Function
A Nobel Prize in Medicine belongs to whoever (whomever?) figures out how to reliably and affordably protect and preserve beta cell function starting early in the course of type 2 diabetes. Or type 1 diabetes, for that matter. Dietary carbohydrates lead to … Continue reading
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History of Diabetes: Elizabeth Hughes, Insulin Pioneer
One of the very first users of insulin injections lived to be 73. That amazes me since most of her life was lived before we could keep close track of blood sugar levels with home glucose monitoring. She died of … Continue reading
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WHY Is the Mediterranean Diet So Healthy?
I’ve found that nearly everbody’s eyes glaze over if I try to explain how, physiologically, the Mediterranean diet promotes health and longevity. Below are some of the boring details, for posterity’s sake, mostly from my 2007 book, The Advanced Mediterranean Diet: … Continue reading
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Quote of the Day
By the 1990s, state action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 million people during the [20th] century, more perhaps than it had succeeded in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. … Continue reading
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