Carbohydrates and diabetes

I didn't know about the civil war until I became diabetic. No, not the war of northern aggression, I mean the one between diabetics and the American Diabetic Association. It has several aspects but the one I'm concerned with now is ADA carbohydrate recommendations.

They recommend a high carbohydrate - low fat diet. The problem is most diabetics can't handle carbs. It makes your blood sugar shoot up. The ADA response was to promote medications that would keep the blood sugar down even while you were pushing it up with carbs. Their recommendation comes to about 200 grams of carbs a day. I can't handle more than 20 at any given meal but I'm a KPD and we are very poor handlers of carbs. This is something I'm going to show you later but for now we'll just stick with carbs and anyones diet.

This link is to Gary Taubes, who, if you know any physics, ripped the heart out of "cold fusion". He is probably the most respected science writer in the English language. He has reluctantly become the point man in the diabetic's war with the ADA. He has challenged the accepted dogma with clear good science and, if there is a god, will probably get the Nobel Prize for Medicine some day. The book that this talk is based on is called: Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book is rough but worthwhile sledding and should be force fed to all diabetics as soon as they are diagnosed.

I believe he's correct but I think it is more important that all diabetics learn to trust their meters, even if the meters can have a 20% error rate. I ate to my meter and found that virtually everything I was told by my well intending diabetes educator was wrong. I believed my meter and followed it to a Low Carb - High Fat diet. My triglycerides dropped by 100, my HDL's rose fifty percent and my A1c dropped to 5.2. I had to resist all that I was told to get there. It was in my search to find some scientific backing for my results that I fell across Mr. Taubes. He got everything that I was looking for. Listen for yourself - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149#

Mike