The Diabetes Code. Dr. Jason Fung

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The Diabetes Code - Dr. Jason Fung

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weight. Attempts to stop the wasting were unsuccessful despite continual feeding, and the disease was almost uniformly fatal. Curiously, ants were attracted to the urine, which was inexplicably sweet.

      By 250 BC, the Greek physician Apollonius of Memphis had termed the condition diabetes, which by itself connotes only excessive urination. Thomas Willis added the term mellitus, meaning “from honey” in 1675. This descriptor distinguishes diabetes mellitus from a different, uncommon disease known as diabetes insipidus. Most commonly caused by traumatic brain injury, diabetes insipidus is also characterized by excessive urination, but the urine is not sweet. Fittingly, insipidus means “bland.”

      Colloquially, the non-specific term diabetes refers to diabetes mellitus since it is far, far more common than diabetes insipidus. In this book, the term diabetes only refers to diabetes mellitus, and there will be no further discussion of diabetes insipidus.

      In the first century AD, the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote the classic description of type 1 diabetes as a “melting down of flesh and limbs into urine.” This summary captures the essential feature of this disease in its untreated form: excessive urine production is accompanied by almost complete wasting away of all tissues. Patients cannot gain weight no matter what they eat. Aretaeus further commented that “life (with diabetes) is short, disgusting and painful” as there was no effective treatment. Once affected, patients followed a predestined, fatal course.

      Tasting the urine of the stricken patient for sweetness was the classic diagnostic test for diabetes (ewww. . .). In 1776, the English physician Matthew Dobson (1732–1784) identified sugar as the substance causing this characteristic sweet taste. The sweetness was found not only in the urine, but also in the blood. Slowly, an understanding of diabetes was unfolding, but a solution was still out of reach.

      In 1797, the Scottish military surgeon John Rollo became the first physician to formulate a treatment that carried any reasonable expectation of success. He had observed substantial improvement in a diabetic patient eating an all-meat diet. Given the uniformly grim prognosis of diabetes, this approach was a breakthrough. This extremely low carbohydrate diet was the first diabetic treatment of its kind.

      By contrast, French physician Pierre Piorry (1794–1879) advised diabetics to eat large quantities of sugar to replace what they lost in their urine. While the logic seemed reasonable at the time, it was not a successful strategy. A diabetic colleague unfortunate enough to follow this advice later died, and history now only laughs at the good Dr. Piorry.3 However, this outcome foretold the grim shades of our own highly ineffective advice to follow a high-carbohydrate diet in the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

      Apollinaire Bouchardat (1806–1886), who is sometimes called the founder of modern diabetology, established his own therapeutic diet based on the observation that periodic starvation during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 reduced urinary glucose. His book, De la Glycosurie ou diabète sucré (Glycosuria or Diabetes Mellitus) laid out his comprehensive dietary strategy, which forbade all foods high in sugars and starches.

      In 1889, Dr. Josef von Mering and Oskar Minkowski at the University of Strasbourg experimentally removed a dog’s pancreas, the comma-shaped organ between the stomach and intestine. The dog began to urinate frequently, which Dr. von Mering astutely recognized as a symptom of underlying diabetes. Testing the urine confirmed the high sugar content.

      In 1910, Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer, sometimes regarded as the founder of endocrinology (the study of hormones), proposed that the deficiency of a single hormone he called insulin was responsible for diabetes. The word insulin came from the Latin insula, which means “island,” as this hormone is produced in cells called the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

      By the turn of the twentieth century, prominent American physicians Frederick Madison Allen (1879–1964) and Elliott Joslin (1869–1962) became strong proponents of intensive dietary management for diabetes, given the lack of other useful treatments.

      Dr. Allen envisioned diabetes as a disease in which the overstrained pancreas could no longer keep up with the demands of an excessive diet.4 To give the pancreas a rest, he prescribed the “Allen starvation treatment,” which was very low in calories (1000 calories per day) and very restricted in carbohydrates (<10g per day). Patients were admitted to hospital and given only whiskey and black coffee every two hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This regime continued daily until the sugar disappeared from the urine. Why was whiskey included? It was not essential, but was administered simply because it “keeps the patient comfortable while he is being starved.”5

      The response of some patients was unlike anything seen previously. They improved instantly and almost miraculously. Others, however, starved to death, which was euphemistically called inanition.

      A lack of understanding of the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes severely hampered the usefulness of Allen’s treatment. Type 1 diabetic patients were usually dramatically underweight children, whereas type 2 diabetic patients were mostly overweight adults. This ultra-low calorie diet could be deadly for the very malnourished type 1 diabetic (more on the differences between these two types of diabetes below and in chapter 2). Given the otherwise fatal prognosis of untreated type 1 diabetes, this was not the tragedy it may at first have appeared to be. Allen’s detractors pejoratively called his treatments starvation diets, but they were widely considered the best therapy, dietary or otherwise, until the discovery of insulin in 1921.

      Dr. Elliott P. Joslin opened his practice in 1898 in Boston after receiving his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, becoming the first American doctor to specialize in diabetes. Harvard University’s eponymous Joslin Diabetes Center is still considered one of the foremost diabetes institutes in the world, and the textbook Joslin wrote, The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, is considered the bible of diabetes care. Joslin himself is likely the most famous diabetologist in history.

      Although Dr. Joslin had lost many patients to diabetes, he had also saved many by applying Dr. Allen’s treatments. In 1916, he wrote: “That temporary periods of under-nutrition are helpful in the treatment of diabetes will probably be acknowledged by all after these two years of experience with fasting.”6 He felt the improvements were so obvious to everybody involved that studies would not even be necessary to prove the point.

       THE DISCOVERY OF THE CENTURY

      FREDERICK BANTING, CHARLES Best, and John Macleod made the breakthrough discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921. They isolated insulin from the pancreases of cows and, with James Collip, found a way to purify it enough to administer it to the first patient in 1922.7 Leonard Thompson, a fourteen-year-old boy with type 1 diabetes, weighed only sixty-five pounds when he started insulin injections. His symptoms and signs rapidly disappeared and he immediately regained a normal weight. They quickly treated six more patients with equally stunning success. The average lifespan of a ten-year-old at diagnosis increased from about sixteen months8 to thirty-five years!

      Eli Lilly and Company partnered with the University of Toronto to commercially develop this revolutionary new drug, insulin. The patent was made freely available so the entire world could benefit from the medical discovery of the century. By 1923, 25,000 patients were being treated with injected insulin, and Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

      Euphoria ensued. With the momentous discovery of insulin, it was widely believed diabetes had finally been cured. British biochemist Frederick Sanger determined the molecular structure of human insulin, which garnered him the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and paved the way for the biosynthesis and commercial production of this hormone. Insulin’s discovery overshadowed the dietary treatments of the previous century,

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