The blog is dead, long live the feed!

For curated links on research for management, control, and possible remission of type 2 diabetes mellitus, please see:

• current @T2DRemission on Twitter
• archive Michael.Massing on Pinboard

Pending further developments,these posts will remain online; each represents my best understanding as of the time of publication. Posts are subject to review as science, clinical practice, and my thinking (e.g., about reliance on dietary animal protein) evolve.

Here and elsewhere, read critically. Your life and wellbeing depend on it.

food

I have a friend who’s got some peculiar ideas about diabetes, which he claims to exhibit acute symptoms of when he doesn’t eat right. He also has what I think of as some peculiar ideas and methods in managing his diet, and yet I have to admit:

• his approach is science-based, even when I can’t follow his conclusions
• the food he prepares is healthy and delicious
• he’s better at weight management than I am.

He and I been talking about food a lot lately. I’m grateful to be able to talk to someone who’s knowledgeable and effective in what he does, and can talk to me about my choices, and even express wondering reservations about them, without seeming to be scolding, or condescending, or conveying the idea that he knows how to “fix“ me—and that it’s his job to do so. (Most recently, our talks helped me to realize that I’d become very lax with my fat intake management.)

So with that prompt and another, I put together some thoughts about what I think and what I do about managing diet these days. This review of principles is partly descriptive and partly a call to myself to return to principles that have worked for me before.
[edit 2011/02/18: This post really has motivated me to be more scrupulous, and apparently that’s been paying off in the latest blood glucose readings.]

Current principles for long-term management of diet

Eat food. As you may have read, food activist Michael Pollan distills human wisdom about diet into seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He goes on to say:

A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by [“Eat food”…There are lots of edible foodlike substances in the supermarket, often] in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. [A] health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

For diabetics, “not too much” has a specific meaning. My body does not respond to food, and particularly to easily soluble carbohydrates (sugars and starches), particularly in large quantities, in a normal way. Just to complicate things,