I’ve spent the past two weeks desperately trying to lower the blood sugar of a close family member. This person has received all manner of advice from medical “experts.” They call themselves experts, yet when it comes to real results—meaning better health, not just suppression of symptoms—they rarely have anything to show for it. Real health improvements are hard to achieve. Difficult. Difficult. Difficult. This is especially true for older people.
Anyway, this particular family member has received various nuggets of conventional wisdom that sound really nice, but doesn’t work: Eat five small meals. Only eat whole grains. These things aren’t the issue. If you don’t remove sugar, junk and starchy carbohydrates from the diet you will not reverse diabetes. In my experience, what has worked is this: Meat (or fish) and green vegetables. Avocado and Eggs. A little bit of cheese now and then. Basically a ketogenic diet.
This is difficult to enforce, especially if someone has access to cookies and bread at four in the morning. But I’ve seen how important it is to be impeccable with carbohydrate intake when someone is severely diabetic.
Which raises the question:
Why do medical professionals rarely recommend a ketogenic diet for advanced diabetes? Here’s one reason someone gave me recently: “This is not what the organisations recommend.”
Choosing Comfort over Truth
We often prefer to suffer in silence rather than rock the boat. Sticking our heads in the sand is easier than confronting uncomfortable truths. In health, however, denial can have devastating consequences. We can appease faceless organisations, or we can do what actually works.
By the way, Faarland (my first fantasy story) was about this tendency: The tendency to choose lies over truth because it’s easier. The tendency to fall in line with the narratives of an organisation instead of going on the difficult journey of seeking truth. In Faarland—as is often the case in life—faars became dependent on lies. In many ways, faars became too brittle to face certain truths (real truths—not Science Ministry Truths).
Here’s a quote from Cullford, the main narrator of the story:
“I understood that belief was like a safe warm bed and that the abandonment of that bed would mean severe discomfort for some. I knew that certain Faarland beliefs were so deeply ingrained that it would take more than a mere flying machine to dissolve it.”
I wrote Faarland as a reaction to what I was seeing online and in society at the time. A central theme is control through manipulation. Many of the themes that inspired Faarland are still relevant today.
The Medical Sector
In real life, the tendency to ignore difficult truths is very apparent in the medical sector. I’ve dealt with my share of doctors and hospitals in recent months due to family illnesses. If the medical systems and staff were paid only for positive outcomes, the entire sector would collapse within months. My opinion of the sector deteriorates by the day. Many interventions don’t work—and when something does work, like a ketogenic diet for diabetes, it’s rarely recommended.
Challenging the status quo also means confrontation. Not everyone wants to stick their neck out to make things better. Not every medical professional cares about outcomes. And on the patient side, most people don’t want to make difficult dietary changes.
But change is rarely achieved without difficulty.
Foundations of Fear
You will not reverse diabetes if you do not severely limit carbohydrates in the diet. Tim Noakes has been saying this for years.
But why is this truth so hard to accept? This truth is so damn hard to accept that people prosecuted Noakes. They busied themselves with this useless endeavour instead of contending with the problem of diabetes.
We have built organisations on foundations of fear. They serve to keep the status quo instead of doing the difficult task of actually solving problems.