Good news for type 2 diabetics....

Today's Post:  Friday, 6-29-2012

First, the two pieces of bad news are that:

1.  Many people today have type 2 diabetes or are well on their way to getting it but have never been tested and don’t realize it.   This is like getting into your car to drive it somewhere and not knowing the brakes are out or failing. 

(The tests to get are for fasting blood sugar and HBA1C.  To stay healthy, they should be 99 or less for fasting blood sugar and 5.8 or less for HBA1C.  Fasting blood sugar is like a snapshot & HBA1C gives you an indicator of your average blood sugar 24 hours a day for the last 60 days or so.)

2.  The always too high blood sugar defined as type 2 diabetes is unusually harmful to you and your health:

The excessive and chronic blood sugar that is termed type 2 diabetes tends to harm the inner surface of your blood vessels and destroy capillaries.

What recent research suggests happens is that the extra sugar sticks on to your LDL even the normally less harmful large particles of it.  When it does so it acts in your blood vessels like moving particles of abrasives.  Think of pouring sand into an engine.

In your brain, this tends to cause Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.  In your optic nerve this causes blindness. For men it at least doubles heart disease and for women it multiplies it by four times!  It causes erectile dysfunction and reduces response in both sexes. It even causes direct damage to your sensory nerves.  Some people lose enough peripheral circulation they wind up with amputation of their feet.

In addition to being sedentary and eating and drinking high fructose corn syrup and too much real sugar and eating lots of refined grains, exposure to second hand smoke as a child and exposure to a fungicide and likely some other toxins make this problem more likely.

Fortunately, there is a long list of good news including two blockbuster brand new stories of great importance to anyone working to stop or turn down high or very high blood sugar.

1.  First, the exercise that turns down or prevents chronic high blood sugar has so many other proven health benefits, that anyone not yet doing regular exercise is at risk from so many kinds of health harm and missing so many health benefits that having to add it to combat high blood sugar is actually a good thing for many people. 

(Even a few sessions a week of quite vigorous exercise for just a few minutes each time lowers HBA1C.  Even people who are extremely pressed for time can do four or five sessions of 2 or 3 minutes each at home each morning.  Regular, moderate exercise such as walking also lowers blood sugar if you can fit enough of it in or can’t do vigorous exercise.  Doing both is ideal.)

Similarly the eating style that includes health safe protein foods and oils and lots of vegetables and some whole fresh fruit and stopping almost all eating or drinking high fructose corn syrup and too much real sugar and eating lots of refined grains that lowers high blood sugar and tends to prevent it has so many other health benefits and prevents so many kinds of health harm, having to add it to combat high blood sugar is actually a good thing for many people. 

Dr Mark Hyman has experience with patients who have been able to stop high blood sugar or keep it turned down by just doing both of these well and continuing to do so.

2.  Two supplements have long been known to help your body regulate blood sugar and prevent it from harming you.  Chromium polynicotinate also has heart benefits when you take 200 mcg a day.  Alpha lipoic acid not only lowers blood sugar but acts to prevent nerve damage and it’s an antioxidant soluble in both water and oil. So alpha lipoic acid is protective in every part of your body.  Even 200 mg a day will help though some people may need to take 300 mg two or three times a day.

Before I became knowledgeable about this subject, one of the best doctors I ever had added the fasting glucose test to my heart health lipid panel.  My fasting glucose was 115.  I had no clue this was the case nor that such a reading was scary, dangerous.  When he told me it was too high and to stay safe I needed to lower it, I’d heard of taking chromium and alpha lipoic acid.  So I added both and cut my intake of sugar in half. 

Fortunately most of my diet was good and I already exercised regularly.  My fasting glucose dropped to the 85 to 96 range and has remained there ever since.  It may even be better now because I exercise a bit more and have cut my sugar intake in half twice since then.

3.  If you already have really bad numbers on these tests, fasting glucose of over 120 and HBA1C 6.0 or higher, clearly you need to safely begin regular exercise, stop eating and drinking the things that cause the problem and eat right instead.  It will likely help you to add these two supplements.

But what if you still test with fasting glucose of over 120 and HBA1C 6.0 or higher because you just began these things or you started with far higher readings?

There once was another supplement that worked even better and had been in use for I think hundreds of years.  Since then it has been super-concentrated into the drug Metformin.  Even in two lower doses a day with your two largest meals, it reliably lowers fasting glucose and HBA1C.  Even better, it helps a bit for people to lose fat and belly fat!

This drug works and is unusually safe.  The only side effect you need to compensate for is that Metformin tends to deplete vitamin B12.  But you can I think override this effect by taking 1,000 mcg a day of B12 in the sublingual form that goes directly into your blood without having to be digested and reduced down first.

But there are two problems with taking Metformin. 

Some people start out and remain over 7.0 on their HBA1C reading even after they do the first set of things and take Metformin.  Ouch!  That condition is health and life threatening.  What can be done then?

Also, I’ve read some people have Metformin begin to not work as effectively.  What can be done then?

Many efforts have been made to develop added drugs to lower high blood sugar.  Those drugs have been a disaster.  Virtually all of them have worse quality of life side effects than Metformin.  Worse, many of them directly caused the heart disease people were taking them to prevent and killed many people.

That’s where the news gets much better recently!

Berberine has been around as a minor supplement long enough it’s recognized as safe and side effect free as far as I know.  It’s not cheap but is moderately priced instead of expensive.

Remember that Metformin is essentially a super-concentrate of a supplement.

I’d heard a woman say her doctor wanted her to take Berberine for lowering blood sugar.  Her doctor said it worked as well as Metformin and he thought it likely to be even safer.  Since my previous exposure to Berberine was that it often was in combinations of supplements to help people get over colds and flu, I was astonished.

But due to the importance of this information if it were true, I did an online search.  Dr Julian Whitaker had this:

“In a clinical trial published in Metabolism, people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes were randomly divided into groups and assigned to take Metformin or berberine. Improvements were noted the very first week, and at the study’s conclusion the average blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c levels were significantly decreased in both groups. Remarkably, berberine was every bit as effective as Metformin. The two had “identical effect[s] in the regulation of glucose metabolism.”

He adds that Berberine has several other health benefits also.  Like Metformin, it also helped a bit to lose fat and belly fat.  Like niacin it improved blood lipid measures of heart health.  And like alpha lipoic acid it has nerve protective effects.

I don’t yet know how much the people in the study took of Berberine.  (You can buy 400 mg capsules of Berberine on Amazon.  And at my local Health Food store they found and have begun stocking a supplement with 200 mg capsules.)

I don’t yet know if Berberine has been tried with people who need more blood sugar lowering than Metformin alone can deliver. If so, I’ve not heard the results.

And, I don’t yet know if it has been tried with people who stopped responding well to Metformin.  If so, I’ve not heard the result.

Clearly what both groups of people need to look at first is eating right and getting regular exercise.  These two things work directly to remove the causes of high blood sugar and help prevent some of the harms from high blood sugar.

Failing to do that is like putting new tires on a car to make it have better gas mileage but without stopping dragging a large sea anchor behind the car!

But for the few people who do have side effects with Metformin or for whom Metformin is not enough or stops working, Berberine looks well worth trying.

This is extremely good news indeed.

The other news is as important if it checks out and the new drug does wind up being free of harmful side effects.  Clearly it tested as effective in lowering blood sugar. And like Metformin and Berberine it is OK to use in people who want to stop or avoid having too much excess fat.

HealthDay had this:  “THURSDAY, June 28 (HealthDay News) -- A new drug for type 2 diabetes causes significantly less weight gain and may carry lower risks for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), heart attack and stroke than standard medications, a new study indicates.

Researchers in Germany noted that the new drug, linagliptin (Tradjenta), is intended for use in patients that do not fare well with metformin, the most common first-line drug used to treat the disease.