One of every two of you have a deadly disease that's making you sick and will kill you, and 90 percent of you don't even know you have it.
What's worse is your doctor is not trained how to find it, and they are not even looking for it.
This problem will cost us $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years. It is bankrupting our economy. In 30 years 100 percent of our federal budget will be needed to pay for Medicare and Medicaid, leaving nothing for education, defense, agriculture, roads or even social security.
So what am I talking about? I'm talking about diabesity -- the number one cause of obesity, heart disease, cancer, dementia and of course type 2 diabetes.
You might hear many terms used to describe this one basic phenomenon -- a new epidemic of disordered biology and disease. It is the continuum of abnormal biology that ranges from mild insulin resistance to full-blown diabetes. We call it by many names. See if you recognize any of them:
• Insulin resistance
• Pre-diabetes
• Metabolic syndrome
• Obesity
• Syndrome X
• Adult-onset diabetes
• Type 2 diabetes.
In truth, these are ALL essentially one problem with varying degrees of severity. The diagnosis and treatment of the underlying causes that drive all these conditions are actually the same.
That is why I use a more comprehensive term to describe these conditions -- diabesity. Diabesity describes a continuum of disease, from optimal blood sugar balance to insulin sensitivity to full-blown diabetes. This biological imbalance is our modern plague. It affects 1 in 2 Americans and is the leading cause of most chronic disease in this country, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, dementia and cancer, not to mention its leading role in weight gain and obesity.
Despite this fact, there are no national recommendations from the government or key organizations to advise screening and treatment of it, and most doctors don't know how to properly diagnose it. The result is that 90 percent of the people who suffer from diabesity are left undiagnosed and untreated.
The instances of diabesity are increasing at an astonishing rate. Twenty years ago when I started practicing medicine, not a single state in the nation had an obesity rate over 20 percent. Today, not a single state in the nation has an obesity rate under 20 percent. The prevalence of type 2 diabetes has tripled in since the 1980s. There are now 27 million diabetics in the country.
The question is, "Why?" Why are we facing a diabesity pandemic? Why are our current treatment approaches failing so miserably? And why is conventional medicine floundering when it comes to diagnosing the biggest health threat of our time?
Conventional Medicine Misunderstands the Fundamental Laws of Biology
Modern industrial medicine treats disease with medication or surgery. That's what it is designed to do, and when it comes to emergency interventions it is still the best medicine in the world. When someone comes into the emergency room with a severed leg, conventional medicine treats the problem with incredible efficacy.
But when it comes to chronic illness, this approach simply doesn't work.
Here's why conventional medicine tends to break down in the face of chronic illnesses like diabesity:
Most medicine today is based on clear-cut, on-or-off, yes-or-no diagnoses that often miss the underlying causes and more subtle manifestations of illness. Most conventional doctors are taught that you have a disease or you don't; you have diabetes or you don't. There are no gray areas.
Practicing medicine this way is extremely misguided because it misses one of the most fundamental laws of physiology, biology and disease: the continuum concept. There is a continuum from optimal health to hidden imbalance to serious dysfunction to disease. Anywhere along that continuum, we can intervene and reverse the process. The sooner we address it, the better.
For example, when it comes to diabesity most doctors just follow blood sugar, which actually rises very late in the disease process. If your blood sugar is 90 or 110, you don't have diabetes. If it's over 126, you do have diabetes. But these distinctions are completely arbitrary, and they do nothing to help treat impending problems. I remember one patient, Daren, who came to see me with mildly elevated blood sugar. I asked Daren if he had seen his doctor about this. He said yes. I then asked, "What did your doctor say?" Daren's doctor had told him, "We are going to wait and watch until your blood sugar is more elevated, and then we are going to treat you with medication for diabetes."
This attitude is absurd and harmful in the face of what we know about the problems that occur even in the absence of full-blown diabetes. Science is now showing us that many people with prediabetes never get diabetes, but they are at severe risk just the same. Prediabetes actually isn't pre-anything, it's a serious health condition and needs to be treated as early as possible.
More to the point, this approach completely ignores more subtle clues from symptoms and signs of disease, which may highlight underlying metabolic imbalances (especially when complemented by further testing). These imbalances may be remedied by the appropriate treatment -- treatment that is not focused on some disease, but instead works to remove those things that alter or damage our functioning, and provides those things that enhance, optimize and normalize our functioning by balancing the system rather than treating the symptom. We need to treat the system, not the symptom; the patient, not the disease.
Consider the man in the emergency room with the severed leg again for a moment. For that person, identifying what severed the leg isn't likely to make the difference between life and death. The symptom -- the severed leg -- must be treated if he is going to survive.
But that paradigm simply doesn't hold true for health conditions like diabesity. This mechanistic model can be applied in some health crises, but it doesn't work when it comes to chronic disease.
Navigating the Terrain of Disease: Identifying the Causes
To effectively treat diabesity we must shift our focus away from the symptoms or risk factors of the disease and begin taking a hard look at the causes. All of our attention is on treatments that lower blood sugar (diabetes drugs and insulin), lower high blood pressure (anti-hypertensive drugs), improve cholesterol (statins), and thin the blood (aspirin). But we never ever ask the most important question:
Why is your blood sugar, blood pressure or blood cholesterol too high and why is your blood too sticky and likely to clot?
Put another way: What are the root causes of diabesity?
Answering that question must be the focus of our diagnosis and treatment of the disease if we are going to solve this global epidemic.
The good news is that the answer is shockingly simple.
In next week's blog I will outline what really causes diabesity and provide eight steps you can use to overcome it.
In the meantime, I'd like to hear from you:
Do you suffer from diabesity? What has your struggle been like?
Why do you think conventional medicine is so ineffective at treating this illness?
What do you think are the real underlying causes of this deadly disease?
Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.
Follow Mark Hyman, MD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markhymanmd
While the understanding of CFS is evolving, there are important clues coming from medical research to indicate an autoimmune attack on mitochondria (the body's engine for producing energy). When the immune system fights an infection in the body, it is like the fire department putting out a fire. Just as a great deal of "fire" damage is a result of fighting the fire, symptoms of illness are caused by the immune system fighting the infection.
An immune system that is constantly battling infection (or a perceived infection) in the thousand or so mitochondria in every cell of the body, causes a loss of energy (ATP) that creates problems for the body and brain. The fallout includes an incomplete processing of the material that mitochondria use to produce energy (fat and sugar). While your body tells your brain that there is not enough energy, the "uncombusted" fuel is building up in your body.
Science is finding that aging is the degradation of mitochondrial function over time. Diet and exercise that support healthy mitochondrial function will slow the aging process and avoid the epidemic spectrum of diabesity problems, but other factors are involved.
I never have to worry. I have a type of body that can never get overweight. Also I fast and that is great for blood sugar metabolism. Also people can add stevia and cinnamon to their diet to help.
Ever heard someone say or be told by a Doctor that they are eating too many plants and they need to cut down ? NOT !
Indeed, no real authority is saying, 'Hey, best cut back on your vegetables!' Quite the contrary, as evidenced by these studies. Based on the majority of posts here, it's clear that people want to have their cake (and meat and milk and eggs) and eat it too, as the cliche' goes. Most physicians are willing to cater to this denial, their SAD dietary preferences. I guess to do otherwise would put them and Big Pharma out of a job.
Thankfully there are legitimate studies and plenty of vegan networks out here for those who truly want to take their health into their own hands, and at an economical price. And isn't that the health care plan we claim to want...
Eating carbs, because they suppress the use of fat as an energy source, creates hunger for more carbs to provide energy (since the energy is not available from fat stores due to the supression of lipase action). This contributes to a vicious cycle of overeating and fat storage, leading to gaining weight. Salivary stimulants (sugar, salt, spices) and fats in the food also plays a role, as does the mechanical act of eating (in a way similar to the part that the mechanical act of smoking contributes to tobacco addiction).
Overfat people need to learn this--that carbs are toxic to them in anything more than very small amounts. And with that knowledge, they should adjust their diet accordingly if they want to reduce bodyfat and improve their health. And of course, exercise helps too, but without carbohydrate control the exercise won't help.
Desk jobs, and the inflexibility that comes along with them. Most working adults' time is spent in some type of sedentary position that does not afford them to exercise. Being sedentary begets being sedentary, and so even if one has a desire to exercise, his/her metabolism probably has declined so much that it's very difficult to resist doing nothing.
So stand up!
MDs who have learned Maharishi ayurveda [ qualifies for CME credit ] understand Dr Hyman well
in order to avoid the $ 3 000 000 000 000 problem many 1000s of MDs have to learn Maharishi ayurveda { clinical-ayurveda.org }
see the video at the David Lynch foundation website about Transcendental meditation (TM) vastly improving the diabetes problem on american indian reservations; Dr King at mum.edu is doing a study of it
combined with Maharishi ayurveda this can be even more miraculous
I always had low HDL, high triglycerides and regularl LDL.
5 months ago I started to cut carbs almost completely and eating a diet high in animal fats and protein.
In 5 months my trigs went from 210 to 110, my HDL from 28 to 52 and my LDL remained stable (a negligible increase actually) and it became pattern A (the fluffy harmless one) and I am pretty sure I was pattern B before even though I never took a VAP test prior to that.
My doctor believes I was on my way to diabetes eventually (even though I have never been overweight, but I have never been this lean either) and this might have reversed it.