Diabetes Treatment Without Medication? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds

Diabetes is such a common diagnosis in the United States that hearing your doctor break the news barely even comes as a surprise. As sad as that is, preventing and treating diabetes may be easier than we used to believe. And less expensive, too. 

Leading nutrition and diabetes experts, including epigeneticist Dr. Lucia Aronica and Dr. Jeff Stanley, M.D., have worked tirelessly to break down the latest research on diet and metabolic health to empower people to prevent and manage this frustrating, even debilitating, condition. These tips can help improve health and reverse diabetes.

Before we get to the good stuff, brace yourself for some sobering facts. Ready? Here it goes:

These figures will skyrocket in the coming decades unless we radically change something. Doing so is possible, but first, we have to understand why the problem is so widespread to begin with.

Dr. Jeff Stanley has been studying diabetes for years, and the root cause isn’t much of a mystery. Each of our bodies are equipped with a handy system to control blood sugar. Like a computer, it works really well unless it’s overloaded with more than it was designed to handle. 

When we consume too much sugar too often, we’re abusing the well-designed system our bodies have to process it. Too much sugar results in frequent spikes in blood sugar levels. Over time, that results in insulin resistance, pre-diabetes and eventually diabetes. Anyone can develop it regardless of their genetics if they consistently abuse their system.

Although genetic factors do make some people more likely to develop diabetes than others, it isn’t a disease of unlucky genes. It’s a disease of high blood sugar and insulin resistance. Fortunately, both of those factors are ones we can influence by the food we lay out on the dinner table. 

The definition of reversing diabetes is controversial. It’s an emerging definition, but at present, diabetes reversal is defined as having all the markers of diabetes, hemoglobin, A1C, and fasting glucose and insulin levels brought back into a normal range without medication.

Some people don’t like the term reversal because maintaining the reversal requires making permanent lifestyle changes. If they return to eating ice cream every day, their diabetes will return.

Can it be completely cured? Sadly, not quite. It can only be reversed to the extent that a person is willing to make ongoing lifestyle changes to maintain. If you’re more committed to a nightly pint of Ben and Jerry’s than you are to your spouse, staying off medication is about as realistic as learning to fly. If you’re willing to change the way you eat for life, living well without daily doses of injected insulin is a real possibility.

On the surface, this one doesn’t make sense. If diabetes management is possible with food, why would treating it with medication be the more common approach?

For many reasons. Nutrition isn’t a focus of physician education. The evidence we have that reversing diabetes via nutrition is possible is based on a comparatively small body of new research. We’re still learning about alternative diabetes treatments, whereas traditional approaches have years of concrete evidence proving their effectiveness.

It’s only in the past couple of years that enough clinical evidence has been compiled to prove that type 2 diabetes reversal is possible for most patients. As the evidence continues to grow, the way doctors approach diabetes treatment will gradually shift. The way diabetes was treated a century ago looks a lot different than it does today, and it will look a lot different in 30 years, too.