Overview
The National Diabetes Statistics Report for 2020 shows that 34.2 million Americans—just over one in ten—have diabetes. And eighty-eight million American adults—approximately one in three—have prediabetes!
In Greek, diabetes means siphon, or to urinate a lot. There is also diabetes insipidus, which means pee a lot and diabetes mellitus (mellitus means honey or sweetened), which means sugary pee.
There are two types of diabetes mellitus: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is when your pancreas stops making insulin, and type 2 is when your cells stop accepting insulin and become insulin resistant.
Diabetes causes your blood sugar/glucose levels to rise higher than normal. You need sugar to make energy. If you don’t have any sugar you have hypoglycemia, which leads to low energy. However, too much sugar isn’t good either!
Let’s say you have a fishbowl that fits two fish. With two fish in it, everything’s fine. But let’s say you put a thousand fish in there, it won’t be functional and will damage the fishbowl’s environment. That’s why the cells get damaged with sugar diabetes. Think of too much sugar in the bloodstream as too many fish in the bow; they are bumping into nerves and causing damage. A protein in the bloodstream may not be able to do its job because sugars are crowding it. The body won’t be able to do its job with all that sugar in the way.
Sugar has no use in your blood. It has no purpose and can’t do any good. When sugar is outside your cell, it becomes damaging to nerve endings, kidneys, eyes, toes, and any extremities. Insulin helps move sugar from the blood into cells.
Suppose the cell has a keyhole on it. Insulin is the only thing that can fit in the keyhole and once it does, it stimulates a protein in the cell to go to the edge of a cell wall and open up channels for sugar to come into the cell. Then the sugar can go to the mitochondria where fuel is burned to make energy.
With type 1 diabetes, there is not enough insulin to open the keyholes to the cells, and the cells die.
Type 1
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition, which means your immune system attacks your own body. There are cells in your pancreas called beta cells. Inside the beta cell, you have little pockets called vacuoles (a vacuole is a packet full of something in a cell,) and these little packets have insulin, among other things, in them. The body uses an antigen (the immune system sees antigens as something negative and attacks them) to break apart the insulin into three parts or chemicals—A, B, and C peptides—and the C peptides float around in the packet.
When the body recognizes that there is too much glucose in the vessels/bloodstream, it releases some of those packets because it needs more insulin. This then attaches to the cell membrane, bursting it apart, which releases the insulin, C peptides, and an antigen. Somehow, the body recognizes the released antigen as something other than what it is, marks it as a bad thing, makes an allergy to it, and starts attacking the cells in the pancreas with the antigen in them. That’s an autoimmune disease.
This can’t be seen until 80 to 90 percent of the cells have been killed, because while the body is attacking the cells, it’s breaking all of the packets that have insulin. So, the insulin is being released the whole time the cells are being attacked. Once they are destroyed, there isn’t enough insulin to get to the cells in the bloodstream. This is when we can see what has been occurring, the autoimmune disease—the cells being killed.
The body tries to recover from this in a phase called the “honeymoon period.” Many doctors don’t treat during the honeymoon period because they want to wait until their condition gets bad enough to put the patient on insulin. In actuality, there is a lot we can do during this honeymoon phase to preserve as many as 10 to 20 percent of healthy cells that are remaining. Research is ongoing.
According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), symptoms of type 1 may include frequent urination, thirst, hunger, extreme fatigue, blurry vision, slow healing, and weight loss. These symptoms can appear suddenly.
Type 1 is managed through various insulins in different forms. There are pens, syringes, pumps, or artificial pancreas systems. The amount needed can be different for everyone. Some common added medications include metformin, pramlintide, blood pressure drugs, cholesterol medications, and aspirin. These are meant to help control blood sugar levels. Lifestyle choices also help manage diabetes. Monitoring your blood sugar, tracking carbohydrate intake, exercising regularly, and eating a balanced diet are all important to diabetic health.
Type 2 Diabetes
With type 2 diabetes, there is enough insulin, but the cells’ keyholes get mucked up so that the insulin can no longer fit in the keyhole. Bad fats (from bad food) cause the keyhole to get mucked up.
This is one reason losing weight and exercise help. It changes how things are burning and cleans things up. To illustrate, if you had a room full of chairs and there was a fire in the room, it would be difficult to get to the exit. If you can clean up the path, then you can get to where you need to go faster. It’s the same way in the body. When the space between our cells starts getting mucked up, gunked up, and dirty, then reactions and cell communication can’t happen as quickly.
Type 2 diabetes has nothing to do with a lack of insulin. Your body has plenty of insulin; it’s making it just fine. It has to do with the cells resisting it. By resisting insulin, the cells are getting mucked up. This gets worse when we have a high lipid count or a high amount of fat in our blood. This is why diabetes increases with obesity.
Clean everything up, and you’ll function better! Guess what cleans it up? The proper chemistry, which we’ll discuss below. The wrong chemistry mucks things up, whereas the right chemistry cleans it up.
A lot of the symptoms for type 2 diabetes are the same as those of type 1, except with type 2 you might also experience tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands and feet.
Everyone’s case of type 2 diabetes can be different. As mentioned, it is important to put the right fuel in your body. A healthy diet will help you feel better and help your body work toward getting better. It is best to stick to whole, minimally processed foods.
The Right Chemistry
A Harvard Medical Study states that “greater consumption of fruit juices was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.” A government standard for a serving of fruit or vegetable is a half cup of juice, the equivalent of a cup of whole fruit or vegetable. There’s a problem with this.
A diabetic can eat two apples a day, and it won’t cause problems with his or her blood sugar. This is because an apple contains all the chemicals needed to buffer it—it’s not just sugar (unlike juice). It’s so much more! However, if a diabetic juiced two apples into juice and drank that, their sugar levels would skyrocket. Juices are not equal to whole fruits and vegetables, just like vitamins aren’t equal to whole fruits and vegetables. With juice, we get extracted parts of the fruit, and some of the important chemistry, like fiber, has been thrown out!
The follow-up study states that “greater consumption of whole fruits—especially blueberries, grapes, and apples—was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.” These three fruits are among the highest in fiber, more specifically a fiber called pectin. Pectin helps mediate how sugars will be released. Take a cup of blueberries and grind them up really well and let them sit for an hour or two. It sets up, you’ll have a blueberry pudding really fast because of the fiber.
We don’t recommend that you only eat grapes, blueberries, and apples, but there is no need to avoid them as many believe. The study also states that “consumption of green leafy vegetables and fruit was associated with a lower risk of diabetes” and other health conditions. This isn’t rocket science; it’s just real nutrition.
The ADA’s Nutrition Consensus Report found that losing weight can improve blood sugar and diabetes outcomes, just as adjusting your food choices can help reduce risk factors. Work with health professionals to create an eating and fitness plan, if needed. Having clear goals can help you stay motivated.
Diet
Natural fruits and vegetables can start cleaning things up. The cell’s keyhole doesn’t really have to be repaired as much as it needs to be cleaned up. Whole fruits and vegetables cleanses; it goes in and cleans things up. As it does so, insulin can fit more regularly into the cell. So do what you can to help your body function properly by supplying it with the chemistry it needs!
Diabetics can eat whole plant foods take because they have all of the chemistry—the peel, the fiber, everything—that works together to keep the blood sugar from spiking. Juice has lost much of this chemistry and contains added sugar (whole produce does not.) There are different kinds of fiber only present in a whole apple—like pectin and coarse fiber—that don’t spike the blood sugar because the chemistry is all there.
FAQs about Plant Foods and Diabetes
Do fruits spike your blood sugar?
If they are extracted, they do. If you eat a banana, it could because it converts quickly to sugar. But, your blood sugar won’t spike if you eat a banana with fifteen other fruits. It can initially, but generally, it won’t.
How does fiber and spices help in the process?
Cinnamon and other spices are deep cleaners. Fiber helps move things through the system. It also slows the absorption of sugars. It aids the body in not digesting too fast or too slow. For example, a candy bar and a sweet potato are both sweet, but you don’t get the sugars directly from the sweet potato as fast because of its fiber and other chemistry (unlike a candy bar).
The fiber carries things through, cleans things up, improves the digestive system, and changes how sugars are digested. Fiber changes how the sugars are brought in the cell, allowing them to enter at a more gradual rate—instead of getting dumped in all at once—so the body is able to manage them.
Check out our infographic below all about diabetes: