Read an Excerpt
The pH Miracle for Diabetes
By Robert O. Young Shelley Redford Young Warner Books
Copyright © 2004 Hikari Holdings, LLC
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-446-53266-5
Chapter One
Diabetes: The Epidemic-and Working for the Cure What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -RALPH WALDO EMERSON
My journey toward understanding the cause of-and demonstrating the cure for-Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes began in the Caribbean in the early 1990s. It was there, in Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, and Barbados, that the proportions of the epidemic became clear to me. I knew, intellectually, that diabetes was the leading cause of death in the Caribbean (though the so-far-unanswered question Why? still nagged at me). But when I stood in front of an audience of a thousand islanders and asked (as part of a series of questions about common health issues) how many were challenged with diabetes, then watched half the people in the room raise their hands, I felt the enormity of the problem viscerally. I made up my mind right then to make it my mission to find the cause and the cure for diabetes.
It only took a few more questions about what the people I was addressing generally ate day to day to start seeing the roots of the problem. The answers quickly sketched out a diet consisting mainly of carbohydrates-sugars-heavy on fruit and root vegetables such as potatoes, along with chicken and some fish. That turned out to be the good news, such as it was. Although mainstream medicine would give those foods its seal of approval, as I later discovered it wasn't, in point of fact, a strong foundation. And it was now collapsing under the layers of sodas, pastries, candy, and American fast foods piled on top of it. As it turns out, my audience was consuming the perfect diet for creating diabetes. These people were enslaved to sugar, and it was killing them.
It took some years of study to understand and show it, but the solution was just as straightfoward as the problem. Shifting to a diet based on whole, natural foods, especially green vegetables, chosen to keep the body in pH balance (more about that coming right up!), could knock out diabetes and its many devastating health consequences, restoring a true island paradise free of such a plague.
It was, in fact, just the way of eating I'd come to recommend to my audience, for improved health in general. I just didn't realize at the time what an impact it could have on diabetes specifically. I can't say I met with unanimous enthusiasm right off the bat. One man in the audience was probably speaking for many among the crowd when he stood up and said, "Doc, mon, we can't be eating the bush all the day long!" I wish I had then the data I have now about how "eating the bush all the day long" can save your life.
As it was, I assured him, as I'll assure you, that this is not just a healthful way to eat. It is also easy and delicious, thanks to the recipes and guidance my wife, Shelley, will provide. Give it a try, and you'll soon see for yourself how great you look and feel when you break the deadly hold your sugar-seeking taste buds have over you. It won't be long before you won't want to eat any other way. And, like most of the people I've worked with on this eating plan over the years, including forty participants in two organized studies, you'll be able to sit back and watch your blood sugar levels stabilize, to the point that you'll be able to cut back on or even eliminate any medication-including insulin.
The next chapter of the story unfolds in Houston in the spring of 1994. I was there for a research project on diabetes, and as part of it I interviewed a twenty-one-year-old woman with Type 1 diabetes. She subsisted mostly on fast food and as many as fourteen cups of coffee a day. She didn't like vegetables, she said, and rarely ate them.
I proceeded as usual to analyze her blood using a technique I call live blood cell analysis. That is, I looked at her blood directly under a microscope-without using the fixatives usually used in making slides, which kills the cells. As I watched, stunned, a red blood cell turned into a bacterial cell. It moved through the blood plasma for a while, then, plain as day, turned back into a red blood cell.
All this was impossible according to everything I'd ever learned in twenty-plus years studying microbiology. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own two eyes. But the fact of what happened remained. In that one moment, everything I knew about human cells and bacteria cells was destroyed. My life as a microbiologist and nutritionist would never be the same. I'd happened on to the beginnings of a "New Biology." But I still had a few years ahead of me before I would understand that these cellular changes were actually to blame for the young woman's diabetes.
For two years, I thought I might be the only person on to this revolutionary view, and let me tell you, it was a lonely two years. I felt mine was a lone voice in the wilderness, and although I had a burning desire to share what I'd learned with the world, I couldn't see how I was going to get those who mattered most to listen, and understand that germs are the symptoms of cellular breakdown rather than the cause of any specific disease.
Then another microbiologist told me about the work Frenchman Antoine Bechamp had done in the late 1800s on "pleomorphism"-the many forms cells can take. I was ecstatic at the thought of other research that could help me understand my own work more deeply, not to mention relieved that I wasn't alone in my observations.
I quickly ran into a problem, however. Bechamp's work had been overtaken in his own time by his countryman Louis Pasteur's establishment of the germ theory of medicine, which still rules (if wrongly) today. I found a few references to Bechamp by combing through old or obscure sources, but I couldn't lay my hands on the originals. Plus, the originals, were they to be had, were entirely in French. (I eventually unearthed the one book that had been translated into English: The Blood and Its Third Anatomical Element.)
My breakthrough moment came three years later. My wife, Shelley, and I were in Paris to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. There, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with the love of my life, I reveled in the romance of the City of Lights. But I was also intensely interested in something well off the typical tourist's beaten path: the University of Paris Medical Library, which I was guessing might house Bechamp's long-forgotten work.
As Shelley and I walked up the marble stairs at the library, I was thrilled at the prospect of what I might find. We were soon stopped by an attendant, however, who told us we could not enter the stacks without an official pass. My heart sank as my pleas that I had come all the way from America moved her not at all. Shelley and I used our sadly elementary French to try to persuade her for more than an hour before a passing Frenchman fluent in English rescued us, uttering whatever the magic phrases were to get us the aforementioned pass. This same kind gentleman then helped us locate Bechamp's work using a handwritten log of old books.
And then there I was, finally, marveling over Bechamp's twenty-seven published books and volumes of original research material like a little boy on Christmas morning. Here was the remarkable research of a great scientist, unearthed from the obscure archives in which it had been languishing for more than a hundred years. I had tears of joy in my eyes as I gently turned the pages, thunderstruck by the pictures Bechamp himself had sketched showing the biological transformation of a red blood cell to a bacterial cell over a century before my microscope revealed the same phenomenon to me in a young woman in Texas. Here was a man who had truly seen the magic of life. I had a lot to learn.
As I learned, and the theories of the New Biology coalesced in my mind, I started to see that diabetes is not in truth a disease of the pancreas or the insulin-producing beta cells, or an autoimmune response. Diabetes results, rather, from a disruption of the delicate pH balance (acid-base) in the fluids that surround the cells of the pancreas.
Overacidity in the fluid allows cells to transform in negative ways, interfering with (among many other things) the way the body produces and uses insulin and sugar. On the other hand, with pH balance, the cells of the pancreas, insulin-producing beta cells, and glucagon-producing alpha cells could and would function in perfect harmony, and the phenomenon of diabetes could not occur. The mysteries of energy, health, fitness, and vitality are not revealed by focusing solely on the cells. The negative space, the fluids surrounding the cells, giving form and function to the cells, is at least as crucial. A cell is only as healthy as the fluids it is bathed in. I wrote about this extensively in my first book, The pH Miracle.
THE EPIDEMIC
Diabetes, a condition defined by high levels of sugar in the blood and the body's inability to make and/or use insulin, is a modern-day epidemic. There are an estimated seventeen to twenty million diabetics in the United States, somewhere between 6 and 8 percent of the population, with more than three-quarters of a million new cases each year. That's more than ever before in our history. Type 1 and Type 2 combine to be the third leading cause of death in the U.S., with more than three hundred thousand fatalities each year. Even those staggering numbers are relative small potatoes, however, when you consider that there are more than three hundred million diabetics worldwide, a figure that by some projections will double within a generation.
Women, people over sixty-five, African Americans, Hispanic people, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders are all at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes. Poor people are three times more likely to have it than middle- or high-income people. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) research shows that diabetes cost the United States $132 billion in medical care and lost wages in 2001 alone, up from $98 billion in 1997-as the epidemic spreads.
Diabetes can be severely debilitating and even fatal, due to side effects and complications including heart and kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage, and amputations. Tens of thousands of people lose their eyesight every year due to diabetes; it is the leading cause of blindness for people ages twenty-five through seventy-four. People with diabetes are about seven times as likely as people without it to become blind. That's according to a 1985 Emory University study, which also found diabetics to be twenty-five times more prone to gangrene (often leading to amputation), eleven times more likely to develop heart disease, and almost five and a half times more likely to have a stroke. Pregnancy diabetes increases the risk of premature delivery and even death of the baby. The bottom line of this tragedy is that the life expectancy of a person with diabetes is about a third shorter than the general population.
The vast majority-90 to 95 percent-of people with diabetes have the Type 2 variety. The vast majority-80 percent-of those with Type 2 are obese, which of course comes with its own huge set of negative health consequences. Every 1 mg increase in blood sugar represents a corresponding rise of 10 pounds, on average, in men and women both. It's no surprise that the recent increases in obesity in this country-more than half the country is now officially fat-has come hand in hand with increases in diabetes. About 1 percent of Americans had diabetes a century ago, but now we're looking at one in twelve people suffering from it. The rate of diabetes has increased by about half in the last decade alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and if current trends continue the ranks of those with diabetes can be expected to more than double in less than fifty years.
Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes-as opposed to juvenile diabetes, sometimes called insulin-dependent, now known as Type 1. But that label has been dropped because it has become inaccurate: Diabetes is now the leading major chronic disease among children-and the one with the fastest rate of increase the world over. (Rates vary tremendously, however, from less than 1 child in 100,000 with Type 1 in Japan and parts of China to more than 28 per 100,000 in Finland, the world's leader in this regard. In the United States, almost 15 children in 100,000 are affected.) As the rate of obesity in children has risen dramatically in this country in recent years, so has the rate of Type 2 diabetes in children-where it used to be all but unknown. A 2003 CDC report projected that a third of American babies born in 2000 will develop diabetes.
Only about half of people with diabetes have received an official diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The symptoms of diabetes often came on gradually, and with hallmarks you may not necessarily connect to blood sugar: general fatigue, light-headedness, dizziness, muddled thinking, forgetfulness, cold hands and feet, cloudy or blurred vision. So it may go undiagnosed for many years. If you don't know you have diabetes, you can't (or won't!) do anything to reverse it, or at least minimize the damage, so blood sugar levels should be part of your regular physical checkups at your doctor's office-it's one of the reasons you should have regular checkups, in fact.
As you see your doctor regularly, and perhaps obtain a diagnosis of diabetes, it is worth keeping in mind that the death rate from diabetes among doctors was reported to be 35 percent higher than that of the general population. That's what Bertrand E. Lowenstein, M.D., reported in his 1975 book Diabetes, where he placed the blame on conventional treatment methods, theorizing that doctors are more likely to be "good patients"-that is, to follow their treatment programs strictly-and so show the negative effects of those treatments more intensely.
Shelley and I witnessed the consequences of this in action in the Caribbean, watching many doctors with diabetes treating patients with diabetes. As the Good Book says, "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14). It was an eye-opening inspiration for us to find an alternative path. And I'm happy to be able to share it with you in this book.
THE pH MIRACLE
Mainstream medicine offers little real help with diabetes other than a lifetime of drugs and devastating potential side effects. In many cases, the best you can say of your options is that you can choose the lesser of the evils. Once you understand diabetes as a condition of the environment the cells are in, rather than a disease of the cells themselves, however, a new door opens to you, and you can use the simple, all-natural approach outlined in this book to help slow, stop, or even reverse diabetes and the damage it wreaks.
Continues...
Excerpted from The pH Miracle for Diabetes by Robert O. Young Shelley Redford Young Copyright © 2004 by Hikari Holdings, LLC. Excerpted by permission.
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