Stop Medicating Type II Diabetes and Other Lifestyle Diseases

Our 25-year friendship ended in a hospital bed — after a double amputation. Her heart, they said, simply stopped beating.

Although she had ten years on me, Mary and I shared something in common that perplexed us daily — our rambunctious little boys. As a baby, hers would crawl around on the floor looking for cords to yank. The louder the lamp would crash the more it delighted him. Mine was a happy little guy that walked every edge he could find, and crossed every line I drew. To no one’s surprise, they also became instant friends.

After a long morning of shopping together, we sat down hoping to relax and enjoy a little quiet, a cup of coffee and some grown-up conversation. It didn’t happen. Instead, her four-year-old boy began to run in circles. Up over the chairs, across the couch rounding the coffee table and back again. Over and over, around and around he went, howling at the top of his lungs. This went on for what seemed like an hour. He couldn’t stop.

This was bad behavior, even for this kid. The year was 1981. If ADHD was invented then, we hadn’t heard of it. It was also long before it was popular to look anywhere other than a pyramid for nutrition. Mary traced his behavior back to a red Kool-Aid and a hot dog lunch and a sugar cookie for dessert.

Few people, at that time if any, were correlating behavior with diet in children. She didn’t look for an excuse for his behavior — she looked for a catalyst. Through trial and error this mother found what foods would transform her boisterous little boy into an uncontrollable little monster. The most obvious offenders were dyes, sugar and any processed foods.

What Mary knew so many years ago, is almost common knowledge among mothers today. What Mary didn’t know, what Jordan S. Rubin explains in his book The Maker’s Diet just might have saved her life.

When my husband went into the hospital last year, his health problems were compounded by the onset of Type II Diabetes. The ER doctor diagnosed Mike with diabetes and sentenced him to a lifetime of insulin injections three times a day.

When he came home, and I began to unpack all the paperwork, I noticed something that struck me as odd. All the literature (and there was a ton of it) centered on “living with your diabetes.” The medical community assured him that he could eat what ever he wanted — just in moderation. Portion control was the name of the game.

No one told us there was a cure. They said he could live a long and happy life by simply controlling it with diet and insulin. No one ever said the word cure.

Truth is — Rubin is right; it is a lifestyle disease. Why would the medical community, that knows full well it can be eradicated with diet change, continue to push “control” with mere modification? Money? Is it a lack of faith in the human ability to make self-disciplined choices? Job security?

When we began to understand that God designed food especially for us, to keep us healthy and satisfied and begin eating accordingly — the diabetes disappeared. I think it’s important to note that the diabetes was cured long before he lost a lot of weight. As he continued to eat created foods rather than manufactured — the weight began to disappear as well.

Here’s what occurred to me in reading the above page: we as an advanced medical society want to “have our cake and eat it too.” We want to eat what we like and be healthy. There is a medicine or an operation for every lifestyle-induced disease listed above.

Like a lot of mothers, Mary worried far more about her son’s health than hers. It’s been over a decade ago, that Type II Diabetes took her life one bite at a time. I honestly believe, she would be alive today if she would have realized she was on to so much more than just behavior control.