Whether you have diabetes or not Dr Richard Bernstein is well worth reading and paying attention to.

I’ve mentioned quite a bit recently about carbohydrate intolerance and carbohydrate restriction and the value of learning to apply that for most people.   The extreme situation with carbohydrate intolerance is developing diabetes, which is often known as “The Silent Killer” as the prolonged effects of high blood sugars rips the life out of us leading to blindness, kidney failure and amputation, doubling our risk of heart attacks & strokes and increasing our risk of various cancers.   Immense human suffering.   There is talk of it being an epidemic.   Diabetes affects at least 25% of both people aged 64-75 and of obese teenagers.  There is often a lot of hopelessness attached but what if there was cause for hope?

My friend, Trish Epati, brought Dick Bernstein to my attention and he certainly believes he has found a solution to living with diabetes.  As someone who has himself lived with diabetes for 64 years, as a Type 1 or Juvenile Onset diabetic, I believe he is uniquely qualified to decide that.   He originally qualified as an engineer and he put the engineers part of his brain to work and found how he could consistently keep his blood sugars in the normal and below normal range.  Which for Type 1 diabetes is no small achievement.  He was so effective with it and so frustrated with the lack of attention from the medical world that he decided to become a doctor himself.  Retraining and finally graduating in 1979.   Since then he’s been helping more and more people get to grips with their blood sugar levels and reduce the human misery caused by diabetes by educating people on the steps they need to take with their diet, exercise and medications so that they can once again feel in charge of their situation.

If you or a friend have diabetes I thoroughly recommend getting two or three copies of his book.  One for yourself and the other two for your doctor and other diabetes support people you may be working with.  I’ve often said that it takes 40 years for new knowledge to gain traction and gain widespread acceptance.   You can be part of that change by making yourself aware of and spreading the news.

Dick makes a wonderful comment in the beginning of the book which should make us all pay attention:

Finally, much of what I will cover in this book is in direct opposition to the recommendations of the American Diabetes Association  and other national diabetes associations.  Why?  Because if I had followed those guidelines, they would have killed me long ago.

Dr Troy Stapleton 

Troy, an Australian doctor became a Type 1 Diabetic as an adult.  Being a doctor he knew without a doubt how damaging elevated blood sugars are and he was religious in following the standard protocols but he found they were not enough.  Then he found Richard’s book.   If you question whether LCHF Ketogenic Diets are helpful for Type 1 diabetics, have a listen to his story. 

March 2015 Update

Richard has started his own free online Diabetes University on YouTube:)

 August 2017 Update – Children with T1 Diabetes

If you are in the scary place of your child being diagnosed with T1 and you’ve seen what hypo’s and hyper’s look like for them, here is a FB group created by other parents of T1 that helps kids and their families apply what Dr Bernstein has been talking about all these years:

https://www.facebook.com/Type1Grit/