Health Articles

Preventing or Reversing Diabetes in Six Simple Steps

 by Dr. Mercola


Here are my top six actions to take for increasing your insulin and leptin sensitivity, thus reducing your chances for developing diabetes—or reversing it if you already have the disease:

1. Exercise

   Exercise is an absolutely essential factor, and without it, you’re unlikely to get this devastating disease under control. It is one of the fastest and most powerful ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance.

   If you’re unsure of how to get started, I recommend reviewing my exercise program for tips and guidelines. It is also critical to work your way up to include some Peak 8 exercises.

2. Eliminate Grains and Sugars, Especially Fructose

   A large reason for the failure of conventional diabetes treatment over the last 50 years has to do with seriously flawed dietary recommendations. Fructose and grains are largely responsible for your body’s adverse insulin reactions.

   You will want to eliminate ALL sugars and grains—even “healthful” grains such as whole, organic or sprouted ones. This means avoiding all breads, pasta, cereals, rice, potatoes, and corn (which is in fact a grain).

   You might even need to avoid fruits until your blood sugar is under control.

3. Eat Right for Your Nutritional Type

   Exercising and avoiding grains and sugars might not be enough unless you balance your protein, carbohydrate and fat ratios for your specific genetic biochemistry. The first step is finding out your nutritional type, which then gives you information about your optimal protein/carbohydrate/fat ratio. I now offer the full nutritional typing program for FREE, so you can get started today!

4. Monitor Your Fasting Insulin Level

   This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You’ll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 and 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin sensitivity is.

5. Optimize Your Vitamin D

   Interestingly, optimizing your vitamin D levels not only treats type 2 diabetes but as already mentioned, can virtuallyeliminate your children's risk for type 1 diabetes if you are pregnant. It’s also vital for infants to receive the appropriate amounts of vitamin D in their early years for the same reason.

   Ideally, you’ll want to do this by exposing a large amount of your skin to appropriate amounts of sunshine (or a safe tanning bed) on a regular basis, year-round. Your body can safely create up to 20,000 units of vitamin D a day by direct UV exposure. If you are not getting regular sun exposure on large amounts of your skin you may need anywhere from 5 to 20,000 units of oral vitamin D3 per day.

   However, if neither of these options is available, you may want to use an oral vitamin D3 supplement. But remember, if you choose to take an oral supplement, it’s essential that you get your level tested regularly by a proficient lab to make sure it’s in the therapeutic range, which is 60 to 80 ng/ml.

6. Probiotics

   Your gut is a living ecosystem, full of both good bacteria and bad.

   Multiple studies have shown that obese people have different intestinal bacteria than lean people. The more good bacteria you have, the stronger your immune system will be and the better your body will function overall.

   Fortunately, optimizing your gut flora is relatively easy. You can reseed your body with good bacteria by eating fermented foods (like natto, raw organic cheese, miso, and cultured vegetables) or by taking a high quality probiotic supplement.