Dr. Westman has been treating obesity and type 2 diabetes for more than 30 years. In this lecture, Eric Westman - Practical implementation of a low carb diet, he demonstrated how he guided his patients to switch to a healthy lifestyle in office visits.
At the beginning, he talked about his own journey of getting into low carb high fat (LCHF). He was skeptical and went through all the skepticism that we have back in 1990s, for example, whether cholesterol going up is harmful, despite of his own randomized controlled study in clinic showed that low carb (w/o calorie mentioned) diet worked much better than low fat low calorie diet in terms of weight loss.
One of his patients gave him a prevailing text book of medicine for 50 years by William Osler. To his surprise, the diet for diabetes in 1923 was the diet he was studying in 1999. Before medicines were available for diabetes, the smartest people on earth back then put only10g of carbs on the diet.
Back to his own randomized controlled trial. The data said not only the diabetic biomarkers were improving, but also the cardio metabolic risks were going down: the triglycerides went down, HDL went up, and the blood pressures both went down.
The reduction in medication for diabetes is very remarkable. Below is a list of patients whose A1C and weight were reduced and medications were discontinued or reduced with several months of LCHF diet.
Below is one of the cases, the patient's glucose is under very good control after the 100units/day insulin was discontinued in two weeks under low carb diet. Dr. Westman said his personal record is to taken two people off 180unit/day of insulin in one day. One of them drank a lot of cokes and the other ate bread all day. A lot of people are on medication to treat the food they eat. If you change the food, you need to change the medicine. This is a cautionary note!!!
Dr. Westman then put on his white coat to show the audience how he talks with patients when they visit his office. It is very fun to watch. He reminded his patient first that he is a doctor although he is talking about food. That is why he put on his white coat. He told his patients the diet is called no-sugar no-starch diet. Sugar and starch raise glucose, glucose raises insulin, and insulin tells our body to store fat. Insulin also prevent your body from burning fat. This is why "you" (his patient) would have lived much longer than "me" (Dr. Westman) when the famine came. This is a system our body tries to save us from famine and winter time. But now it becomes a liability. When was the last time you don't have access to food.? I like his analogue of energy consumption. If a car runs on gasoline, you need to feed it with gasoline. Human body has two engines, one burns glucose and the other burns fat. If you want your body to burn fat, then what do you need to feed it?
He mentioned they have a support group that will meet the patient once every month in a local restaurant. They will teach the patient what to eat and how to eat there. The service is free. Now turn to page 4 of the guideline ...
Enjoy watching the video.
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