https://nutritionfacts.org/video/oatmeal-diet-put-to-the-test-for-diabetes-treatment/
Dr.Michael Greger:
● Thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, diabetes was described as a “too great emptying of urine”.
● The recommended remedy, ironically, was a diet consisting of wheat grains, grapes, honey, and berries.
● The person who coined the term “diabetes” (** was Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the 2nd century. He provided the first accurate description of diabetes, while in the
17th century Thomas Willis added the term mellitus to the disease).
● Aretaeus also prescribed a high-carbohydrate diet. Then, right up until we had insulin, doctors were saving the lives of people with diabetes with an oatmeal diet.
● This wouldn’t make any sense until Sir Harold Himsworth arrived on the scene, the first to separate out type 1 diabetes from type 2 diabetes and define the concept of insulin resistance. After just a few days on a high-fat diet, you can get twice the blood sugar spike in response to drinking sugar water, compared to after eating a high-carb diet.
● Now that type 2 diabetes is like the Black Death of the 21st century in terms of devastating health impacts, what about revisiting the almost forgotten, short-term dietary oatmeal intervention as an economical, yet highly effective tool to achieve better blood sugar control in patients with type 2 diabetes?
● Basically, patients are offered up to about two and a half cups of oatmeal three times a day as their meals with nothing but some herbs and maybe small amounts of raw vegetables just to mix things up. For how long? Just a couple of days. Note that’s only about a thousand calories; so, the result is a hypocaloric, plant-based dietary intervention that is low in fat—in fact, no added fat—no salt, and excludes animal protein.
● Is a few days of oatmeal really going to make much of a difference?
● Dr. Greger reports on a case of an oatmeal intervention for a person with severe
insulin resistance, in the ICU.
● Within 48 hours of admission, the patient developed such severe insulin
resistance she required more than 200 units of insulin per day. Up until then, the patient received standard diabetic tube feeds, which obviously were not working. So instead, they dropped oatmeal and vegetables down the tube instead,
presumably using a really good blender. And it worked. Her first blood sugars of the day dropped from up around 250 down to about 100 five days later. But that near-normal blood sugar was on 160 fewer units of insulin, down from over 200 units a day. Lower blood sugars on 160 fewer units of insulin!
● But for people with type 2 diabetes (“regular diabetes”), what good is eating oatmeal for a few days if you just go back to your regular diet?
● Several studies have suggested that the beneficial effects could last about a month after a few days of oatmeal.
● For example, in this randomized controlled crossover trial, not only did insulin needs drop about 40 percent in just two days, compared to just restricting calories alone with a hypocaloric diabetic diet, but also a measure of long-term blood sugar control taken four weeks later reflected the benefit. There was a highly significant reduction of required daily insulin doses, with beneficial effects shown weeks later.
● Dr. Greger posed: “Who cares if you have to take huge doses of insulin, though?” He stated that insulin causes weight gain, which just makes the underlying insulin resistance worse. It is a vicious cycle.
● But instead, with the oatmeal you’re actually treating the cause, not to mention the incidence of cancer and overall mortality associated with having such high levels of insulin in your body all the time.
● Other new studies have shown the same thing. Two days of oatmeal significantly reduced the required amount of insulin and improved blood sugar levels with beneficial effects noted for up to four weeks.
● For example: Patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes, using the two-day oatmeal diet lead to a 40 percent reduction of insulin dose, accompanied with almost normalization of average blood sugars.
● Although the intervention only lasted for two days, they observed a lasting significant reduction of insulin dosage and ameliorated mean blood sugars for weeks after they were dismissed from the study. And this was after they resumed their regular diets.
● A massive drop in insulin was needed after eating the oatmeal for two days, but, a month later they were still needing about 40 percent less insulin.
● How could this short intervention lead to such dramatic results that somehow continued for weeks?
● Although short-term dietary oatmeal interventions cannot be compared to whole food, plant-based diets in terms of maximizing the intake of protective foods—(as per Dr. Greger) that’s ideally what people should try to eat to reverse their type 2 diabetes completely—eat oatmeal and eat a WFPB diet that strictly excludes the animal-based foods that seem to increase the risk of developing diabetes.
● Dr. Greger stated: “even cutting out saturated fat for even two days may reduce insulin resistance. You can free ride on that for at least a few weeks, even if you go back to eating crap.”
WARNING! If you try this oatmeal diet, your physician has to be ready to rapidly deprescribe your blood sugar drugs, else you become dangerously overmedicated. Imagine if this woman was still getting 200 units of insulin. Her sugars would crash so low she’d be dead. So, oatmeal interventions should not be performed in patients that might have difficulties in reporting symptoms of low blood sugars, who you can’t closely monitor. The downside of trying oatmeal is that it may work a little too well; so, it must be done under close medical supervision.
Sources Cited:
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Bryder L, Harper C. Commentary: more than “tentative opinions”: Harry Himsworth and defining diabetes. Int J Epidemiol. 2013;42(6):1599-1600. Himsworth HP. The influence of diet on the sugar tolerance of healthy men and its reference to certain extrinsic factors. Clin Sc. 1934(Nov. 14):251-264.
Storz MA, Iraci F. Short-term dietary oatmeal interventions in adults with type 2 diabetes: a forgotten tool. Can J Diabetes. 2020;44(4):301-303.
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Delgado G, Kleber ME, Krämer BK, et al. Dietary intervention with oatmeal in patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes mellitus - a crossover study. Exp Clin Endocrinol Diabetes. 2019;127(9):623-629.
Zerm R, Helbrecht B, Jecht M, et al. Oatmeal diet days may improve insulin resistance in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Forsch Komplementmed. 2013;20(6):465-468.
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Lammert A, Kratzsch J, Selhorst J, et al. Clinical benefit of a short term dietary oatmeal intervention in patients with type 2 diabetes and severe insulin resistance: a pilot study. Exp Clin Endocrinol Diabetes. 2008;116(2):132-134. Storz MA, Küster O. Hypocaloric, plant-based oatmeal interventions in the treatment of poorly-controlled type 2 diabetes: A review. Nutr Health. 2019;25(4):281-290.
** National Institute of Health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4707300/#:~:text=In%20the%202 nd%20century,sweet%20taste%20of%20the%20urine.