Reversing diabetes. Mainstream medicine still not listening.

Posted on 11/28/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

How many times must I post this same story?

Dr. Barrie Weinstein at Mt. Sinai Diabetes Center

This is the 17th time. The folks at the American Diabetes Association still do not seem to know that type 2 diabetes can be easily reversed in 95% of the victims—with nothing more than a simple diet change. But then, what would people like Dr. Barrie Weinstein do for a living? From the New York Daily News on 11-21-12:

An instructor of medicine in the division of endocrinology diabetes and bone disease at Mount Sinai, Dr. Barrie Weinstein specializes in the treatment of diabetes and its complications, as well as general endocrinology. Over 60% of the patients she treats at the Mount Sinai Diabetes Center have type 2 diabetes.

“Thanks to medical advances and our improved understanding of the disease, it’s now possible for most diabetic patients to manage their disease through lifestyle changes, including diet and exercise, and by taking medication, if necessary,” says Weinstein.

In her defense, it’s not Dr. Weinstein’s fault. She works in a system that manages disease instead of promoting health. But someday that is going to change—it is inevitable. So, what should you do NOW if you would prefer to GET RID of your type 2 diabetes instead of “managing” it?

Dr. Neal Barnard

Dr. Neal Barnard is your answer. This past week, on 11-20-12, I had the privilege to visit with Neal in his office at the PCRM in Washington D.C. The PCRM is Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, that he founded in 1985.

This special doctor has already made a huge difference for the rest of us in his career—and is best-known for his work in reversing type 2 diabetes with a whole foods, plant-based diet.

Like other enlightened medical doctors, he has proven that that all-too-common disease is entirely reversible—most of the time. So, why is this powerful fact not better known—especially among physicians? Why is this not on the evening news? Not because Dr. Barnard hasn’t done his best to publicize the simple, plant-based cure.

Dr. Neal Barnard wrote an entire book about reversing diabetes—and it’s nothing new.

Most medical doctors have not read his book that was devoted entirely to this topic.  Apparently, one of those MDs still in the dark is Dr. Weinstein; from the article, explaining that most doctors don’t understand the cause of diabetes:

While doctors haven’t pinpointed the exact cause of diabetes, it appears to be due to a combination of genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors. “Groups considered at elevated risk are those who are over the age of 45, are overweight and sedentary, or who have a family history of diabetes, high fasting glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol,” says Weinstein.

Dr. Barnard is still trying to spread the word about reversing diabetes, but as he told me last week in his office, his new passion is better understanding Alzheimer’s and teaching people how to prevent it with a near-optimal diet. Apparently, there is a relationship between diabetes and Alzheimer’s. On that topic, check out this earlier blog: Connecting the dots: FOOD . obesity . diabetes . Alzheimer’s!

The Bottom Line. Would you like to help end our nation’s diabetes epidemic? Then send this blog to everyone you know that has diabetes. If they read this blog and the other seven listed below, they should have a pretty good idea what to do.

And if they don’t want to make dietary changes themselves, maybe they should think about the children—two of the last three blogs listed below. Click here to purchase Barnard’s Reversing Diabetes book on Amazon. —My 662nd consecutive daily blog—

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Alzheimer's Disease, Diabetes, M.D.s---Health-Promoting | Tagged | 6 Comments

More “confusion over clarity” from Dr. Oz in TIME

Posted on 11/27/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

This time the title is Give Frozen Foods A Chance

Well, Dr. Oz has done it again. He’s back on the cover of TIME with a story that’s guaranteed to keep the consumers confused about food. But then, that’s exactly what makes food producers happy. His latest article appears in the 12-3-12 issue and I have provided a link below to the online article that you may not be able to view unless you’re a TIME customer.

December 3, 2012 Cover of TIME

So what’s the problem? From the looks of the cover, it looks like Dr. Oz is going to write about a truly health promoting diet—like the ones that Esselstyn, Ornish, McDougall, Fuhrman, and Barnard all use to reverse chronic diseases in their patients. But he doesn’t.

Mehmet and Lisa Oz; she must be the vegetarian in the family.

Ostensibly, the article was written to help people pick out the best values for their families; things like recommending that we give frozen or canned veggies, grains and legumes a chance. But then he proceeds to talk about all the other “good” foods in a healthy diet—things like beef, chicken, ice cream, olive oil, etc. From the article, a few highlights:

I live in a vegetarian household, so I simply don’t have the opportunity to eat a lot of meat at family meals. But I am not opposed to meats that are served in an appropriate portion size and are well prepared.

Any lean meats are generally fine as long as the serving size is correct–and that means 4 to 6 oz., roughly the size of your palm.

Those burgers your kids (and probably you) love can be fine if they’re lean and grilled, the fat is drained and you’re not burying them under cheese, bacon and high-fructose ketchup and then packing them into a bun the size of a catcher’s mitt.

An inside view of our “system” at work — the systematic torture of TEN BILLION animals a year in just the USA

Indeed, chicken is so lean and tasty it can actually redeem a lot of foods that are otherwise dietary bad news. I don’t have a problem with tacos, for example, if you do them right. A chicken taco is a better option than beef, and a fish taco is the best choice of all.

One great advantage to canning is that it does not affect protein content, making such foods as canned tuna, salmon and chicken excellent sources of nutrition. Canned salmon in particular is as nourishing as if you caught a fresh salmon that afternoon.

Ice cream should be in your life too. What’s more, it’s not even a bad or unhealthy food.For starters, the protein and calcium in ice cream are great. And some of the ingredients in better ice creams are good for you too, including eggs (yes, eggs, a terrific source of protein and B vitamins and perfectly O.K. if your cholesterol is in check)

As for seeking “value” for you and your family, when it comes to energy for your home, you might want to contact my friends at Texas Electricity Providers.

The Bottom Line. Just another example of “confusion over clarity” when it comes to what we should be eating. To be fair, Dr. Oz talks a great deal about eating lots of fruits and vegetables and even points out that he lives in a vegetarian household. I guess that means that his wife is a vegetarian, because he clearly isn’t.

TIME cover in September of 2011, when I blogged about a similar Oz article.

But, just as he did in his September 2011 TIME cover story about food, he provided much more confusion than clarity. I have provided my blog about his earlier article below, but will share one of my paragraphs with you here:

Reading all thirty five paragraphs, I kept thinking that surely at least one would provide some clarity. Of course, if there had been just one, then it would’ve just added to the confusion, since the readers still wouldn’t know the difference and would just choose to follow the advice of whichever of those other 34 paragraphs best suited to their collective bad eating habits.

If you’re looking for clarity on what you should be eating; don’t waste your time or money reading the latest Dr. Oz article in TIME. Just read my 2011 blog shown below and maybe buy one or two of the items in the health kit that follows. —My 661st consecutive daily blog—

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Celebrities | Tagged | 9 Comments

Using vocabulary from our book; reader creates puzzle

Posted on 11/26/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

Word Search Puzzle Created by Nicole Foucault (from Canada)

Canada, the beautiful and wonderful country to our North

In November of 2012, my publisher (BenBella Books) in Texas received a hand-written letter addressed to me. It contained the Word Search Game presented below. Here is that letter:

October 27, 2012

Dear Mr. Hicks, I loved reading “Healthy Eating, Healthy World!” It should be required reading in all high schools. Excellent suggestions, clear explanations!

Here is a word search game I created with vocabulary from your book. You may use my game.

Thank you, Nicole Foucault

Here are the instructions for Nicole’s game:

  1. Print off the grid by clicking here for the one-page PDF.
  2. Using all of the words listed below in alphabetical order, find them in the following grid.
  3. The words can be horizontal, vertical, diagonal and may be right to left or left to right. They may also be going up or down.
  4. As you find the words, draw a line around each word.
  5. Some letters in the 14 by 14 grid will not be used. You may use those letters to solve the puzzle—a seven letter word.

Word Search Game by Nicole Foucault of Pontiac, Quebec, Canada

Andrew Hicks (10) —- that’s his dad, Jason, on water skis in the photo behind him; on Lake Wallenpaupack in PA in 1990.

On Thanksgiving Day (2012), my 10-year-old grandson, Andrew, solved this puzzle in less than twenty minutes. The only direction his mother (Lisa Hicks) gave to him was: “Use your leftover letters to form a word.” After circling all the words on the grid, he quickly found his seven un-used letters and discovered the correct word just seconds after that. I didn’t do nearly as well.

A puzzle with meaning. Shortly after learning the correct one-word answer, I thought of a meaningful visualization. Think of the 196 squares in the grid above as the farming fields of the world—with each of them containing about 40 million acres. Think of the seven squares remaining at the end of the game.

They would contain about 280 million acres. What if they were the only acreage left to feed our growing population? As we continue to add 200,000 people per day to our population and continue to lose an area about the size of South Carolina (20 million acres) each year—we will soon be out of enough land to feed everyone and enough land to maintain the fragile harmony of our ecosystem.

This is how much arable land is lost in the world every year—about 20 million acres.

The obvious solution is a move to a plant-based diet for humans. Not only is it much more healthy for us, it is much more healthy for the planet AND will enable us to feed the world’s seven billion people on far less than half the land the we’re currently using.

Think about half the squares of the grid being available for a return to forests, meadows and natural habitats. Think about the human race retuning to living in harmony with the rest of the planet—something we haven’t done for a few hundred years.

The Correct Solution. Did you find the secret word?  Using your seven-letter word in ALL CAPS as your password to access the page, Click here to find out if you are right.

If you didn’t find the correct solution or you had trouble opening the solution page, just send me an email and I will send you simple clues that will help you quickly find the solution. jmorrishicks@me.com —My 660th consecutive daily blog—

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Activism & Leadership | 5 Comments