vegan and raw diets

[academicdiabetic]

Hi,

The diet survey diabetes co uk ran on this site was interesting, although only a relatively small group of people completed it. I wondered if anyone who is or has been on a raw or vegan diet had found that their blood sugars improved? I have been vegetarian for a long time, but recently my partner became vegan and when I stay on vegan food for a few days (we take appropriate supplements), I find that my blood glucose goes down very significantly and I can even miss out all bolus insulin (staying on basal). I also find I have a lot more energy and am thinking more clearly.

 

[SaffronChucklebus]

Hi, I've recently spent 2 weeks at the Obsidian health retreat in Spain where an alkaline vegan and juice detox regime is followed. All the diabetics there saw significant drops in their bs levels.
Attached is a link to a film that a friend introduced me to, I have little idea why it works ... bit it does and significantly so!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG3V22cLUF0

 

[academicdiabetic]

Hi Saffron,

Thanks for the reply and the link. I have seen the 'raw' film and have the book. I have tried a vegan diet for a couple of weeks now and it both reduced my blood glucose substantially and held it more stable. If it continues to work I will be a very happy bunny

I wonder why, if a change to a vegan diet does work so well, so few people try it and no medic or dietitian volunteers this information?

 

[carraway]

This is interesting. I would be keen to hear a few of your meal ideas.

I am a vegetarian but I always think that vegan food is more work to prepare,as I work and cook for a family.

I love lentils and pulses, although they can be high carb. Quorn is so easy, it can make me a lazy cook


Cara

 

[Sid Bonkers]

I wonder why, if a change to a vegan diet does work so well, so few people try it

I suspect its because very few people could or would stick to any very restrictive diet. Humans are omnivorous by nature and although there will always be those who choose to eat a vegan or paleo type diets neither are natural for us eat.

On balance I think health wise a veggie diet would probably be quite good for us all but I cant see it ever happening, personally I just like eating meat too much

 

[academicdiabetic]

Hi Cara & Sid,

Re recipies, I have just bought a book called 'Vegan with a Vengeance' (Isa Chandra Moskowitz) which is great - genuinely tasty recipies which are easy to prepare. I find the biggest problem is trying to find 'snacks' which are vegan and don't require much cooking time. My partner (who is a non-diabetic vegan) uses snack bars by a company called 'Nudz' which can be bought from Sainsbury's, they are quite tasty, not too carby, but still some carbs... the 'raw diet' book by Cousens 'There is a cure for diabetes' has lots of snacky and general recipies in it, many of which are really tasty, but do require quite a few herbs and spices and some forethought!

Re 'like meat too much/can't be bothered with vegan'... I take your point re us being omnivorous Sid, but if its a choice between injecting six times a day, going hypo, getting retinopathy and.... not eating meat... I'm not sure I see lack of motivation as all that clever at the end of the day.... ? To be fair, I am vegetarian anyway, so wouldn't eat meat on ethical grounds, but if a vegetarian/vegan diet can genuinely improve outcomes for diabetes, I would have thought enlightened self-interest would get at least some people moving in that direction?!

 

[AlexMBrennan]

I wonder why, if a change to a vegan diet does work so well, so few people try it and no medic or dietitian volunteers this information?

Because there are hundreds of people out there selling miracle diets and cures for all kinds of diseases, so over time we had to develop a system for figuring out what works and what doesn't.
But since science is hard these gurus continue selling to the ignorant public rather than conducting expensive studies which would likely just show that their diet is as useless as the rest (hint: look at the verity of miracle diets - they can't all work).
Sadly, unlike medicines which cannot be advertised directly to patients there is no such protection from these scams.

Regarding that video you linked: if you it people on an extremely restricted diet (no meat, dairy, break or cooked food - they looked like they were about to throw up when they tasted their first meal) then obviously insulin requirements will go down. Extreme low calorie diets (e.g. Newcastle diet) are not unheard of, so your conclusion - that it's the raw food magic that's healing them is completely unfounded.
Edit to add: And they explicitly claim (1:24:00) that type 1 diabetes can be cured using their diet :thumbdown:

If you are doing well on a raw vegan diet you enjoy then that's brilliant - but it is irresponsible to go around telling everyone that it's the raw vegan diet that's doing it unless you can actually back that up with evidence.

 

[academicdiabetic]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your response. Just to clarify, I didn't post the link to the 'raw diet' video, although I have watched it and found it an interesting documentary.

Also, as it happens, I am a scientist and certainly wouldn't advocate anyone following a non-evidence based approach to their health care (unless they have a preferred option they want to adopt for themselves for a possible range of perfectly valid reasons, caveat two being that, frankly, much of the 'mainstream' care offered to diabetics is actually based on quite shoddy 'evidence' and many conventional treatments have been shown, using conventional science, to be harmful).

My post was not intended to advocate an assumed 'miracle cure' or 'nutty-vegan-medic says this is so, so it must be true ' stance. I have recently changed to a vegan diet and have found it to both lower (very significantly) and stabilise my desperately erratic blood glucose. Note here, that I keep rigorous measures and can do the stats on what is, clearly, just a personal 'single case study'. I simply wondered whether anyone else had found this and why, since as you also suggest, there is a clear logic behind why this might work, no-one ever mentions the option of changing to a diet which naturally requires less insulin to cope with. There is some limited research on diet and Type 1, but certainly rather more would be useful given the grim side effects of taking insulin long-term. If a raw or vegan diet has worked for a substantial number of people (and here would seem to be a good forum to initially explore the question), then it may deserve some further research.

Regarding the 'claims' in respect of Type 1 in the video Cara flagged , this is not matched in the book by Dr Cousens, in which he clearly states that the suggested diet is not a 'cure' for Type 1, but hypothesises that the raw/vegan diet may be a diet which some Type 1's may be able to cope with with less or even no exogenous insulin, since they have residual beta cell function and the amount of insulin still produced is enough to cope with the more limited insulin demands of the food source.

Out of interest, have you looked closely at much of the research evidence on conventional interventions for diabetes? If so, I would suggest that you may perhaps have noticed that there are rather more Elephants in the cupboard than is even possible in respect of a simple dietary change.

Thanks again for your comments, all discussion is good

 

[phoenix]

I don't really know much about current research into raw food diets though I'm aware that they seem to show good results in terms of lipids and weight. I am concerned that almost a third of the women surveyed in the Giesson study had partial or complete amenorrhoea which suggests that these women were either calorie or nutrient deficient.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10436305

 

[academicdiabetic]

Hi Pheonix,

Yes, you are absolutely right, if people are using 'raw' and/or vegan diets its important that supplements are taken if the diet isn't carefully worked out, my vegan partner has been taking a brand called 'raw meal' and 'raw protein' powder to ensure adequate vitamins and minerals, which I have started taking also. Having said which, any unbalanced diet (including heavily meat oriented) will require supplements for good health and most of us these days are probably lacking in necessary vitamins and minerals given constraints on time and poor quality food.

I realised I made a mistake in attributing the link to the 'raw' video - I think it was Saffron, not Cara who mentioned it - apologies.

Also, it was the impact of a vegan diet I was particularly interested in, experience with a raw diet would be really interesting also, but I doubt there are many people on the forum who have tried this (?)

 

[douglas99]

I couldn't claim it was a true vegan diet, but over summer I was on a low calories diet, of about 800 to 1200 calories. There was very little meat or dairy product in it, mostly veg, a little oily fish, a little chicken, a little cheese.
It certainly got my weight down, and my diabetes under control.

Now It's a bit colder, so I've upped the calories a bit.
I still eat proportionally high veg, eg, bean curry, veg stir fry, mushroom stroganoff etc. It seems to work well, but I also have re-introduced some lean steak I'm afraid.

 

[-Artemis-]

Hi Acedemicdiabetic; I am currently following a raw vegan diet, following watching the raw for thirty documentary and buying Gabriel Cousens "There is a Cure for Diabetes" book... honestly, it's early days and I can see both sides of the argument (i.e. for and against - particularly the raw aspect).

- my blood sugars are definitely better than they were at diagnosis, however I find it extremely socially isolating - so that, more than anything, is the reason I don't know how sustainable it is.

I'm not sure what you wanted to know re the impact, but feel free to ask me any questions - and I'll happily share my experiences to date.

 

[bunzorunny]

Hi, there,
I do mainly raw diet and have had amazing results from doing it. I have done it now for about 2-3 years and the doctors want to know my secret. They could not believe all the tests that they took and how good my results were. I have been following Gabriel Cousens for about the same time and have his DVD's SIMPLY RAW, REVERSING DIABETES IN 30 DAYS. People have difficulty in keeping to the vegetarian/raw diet because they have to rid themselves of the toxins from normal diet first, because they are highly addictive and cause a great deal of trouble and illness. People are extremely ignorant as to what they feed themselves; as they are brain washed by the media into believing certain types of foods are good for them.

My health got so poor that I've made it a priority for the last 12 years and I have been blown away by my findings. Regardless of whether your vegan or just ordinary diet - food does not have the same nutritional value today as it did 50 years ago. If you ate an orange 50 years it would be full of vitamins and minerals. To get the same nutritional value today you would have to eat 8 oranges. People do not understand that your diet is everything, its like the car analogy if you put diesel in an ordinary car it ruins the engine. We people are the same with the kind of food they eat if you eat processed foods its a compounding affect over time our health suffers. The other thing is people do not realise the damage the drugs they take cause and their side affect. For example, I have recently learnt that one of the side affects of Lantus Insulin is broken sleep and lots of other horrendous problems. I really want to get off it and I will continue trialling things until I find a cure. There is a cure for everything and I believe there is one for diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis but I am not waiting for the doctors to find it cause they never will! It makes too much money, be honest if they found a cure the doctors would be out of business! lol DIET, AND NUTRITION ARE THE KEYS TO IMPROVED QUALITY OF LIFE

Three months ago I got told I had a foliate deficiency and I asked my doctor whether it was a B vitamin or not? He laughed and said to me "you ll know better than me I have nt got a clue". I have realised I have to take responsibility for my own health because I will be the only one who will benefit/suffers from it.

 

[hanadr]

Over many years, I've read about vegan and vegetarian diets. I have a sister-in-law who is vegan. The things I've noticed that vegans all use supplements. I tend to think that any diet requiring everyone to take supplements is inadequate in some way.
Raw food however is a different matter. Very often foods are not changed all that much by cooking. with the exception of grains and some roots These are indigestible raw.
I personally prefer to eat food that I could eat raw, even if I usually choose to cook it. If it's edible raw, it's pretty much got to be natural and I'm anti processed foods. [for anyone, not just diabetics]
Just my opinion
Hana

 

[mpe]

I suspect its because very few people could or would stick to any very restrictive diet.

It probably depends what they are restricted to. At one extreme you'd have have someone restricted to food they liked at the other you'd have someone restricted to food they hated.

Humans are omnivorous by nature and although there will always be those who choose to eat a vegan or paleo type diets neither are natural for us eat.

Actually "paleo type" (along with "Atkins") would qualify as "natural" since these attempt to work out what humans evolved to eat or did eat prior to agriculture.

 

[mpe]

But since science is hard these gurus continue selling to the ignorant public rather than conducting expensive studies which would likely just show that their diet is as useless as the rest (hint: look at the verity of miracle diets - they can't all work).
Sadly, unlike medicines which cannot be advertised directly to patients there is no such protection from these scams.

Belief in "pet theories" or simply dogma can lead to any actual science being ignored. Even replaced psudo and junk "science" where "conclusions" are written first and/or unexpected (especially if they are "politically incorrect") results are downplayed/ignored. An actual scientific experiment or study would attempt to "falsify" (rather than "prove") a hypothesis or theory.

Part of the reason for science being hard is that scientists are humans who behave just like any other group of humans. Including not wanting to admit being "wrong" or show a peer (especially a high status one) being "wrong". (Politically it can be even worst if an "outsider" finds a major problem.) Sometimes completly daft "theories" only get properly examined when those who espouse them literaly die off.

 

[mpe]

Regarding the 'claims' in respect of Type 1 in the video Cara flagged , this is not matched in the book by Dr Cousens, in which he clearly states that the suggested diet is not a 'cure' for Type 1, but hypothesises that the raw/vegan diet may be a diet which some Type 1's may be able to cope with with less or even no exogenous insulin, since they have residual beta cell function and the amount of insulin still produced is enough to cope with the more limited insulin demands of the food source.

Is that down to it being raw/vegan or very low in dietary glucose?
The Inuit diet is also low in any carbohydrates but almost entirely meat based. There's also pemmican, a North American food which can easily be transported made virtually entirely from meat.