The End Of Diabetes – by Dr. Joel Fuhrman

We’ve previously reviewed another of Dr. Fuhrman’s books, “Eat To Live”, and this time, he’s focusing specifically on preventing/reversing type 2 diabetes.

And yes, this is really only about type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetics can still benefit from this dietary approach (it won’t cure T1D but it will help manage it), as indeed can people with one of the rarer forms of diabetes or for that matter people with no diabetes at all (it’s great for all of us to avoid blood sugar spikes and improve insulin sensitivity)… But this book is written with the type diabetic firmly in mind.

The title “The End Of…” is fair, by the way—on an individual level, at the very least. While most doctors treat type 2 diabetes as a lifelong condition to be managed, the simple (well-evidenced and honestly uncontroversial at this point) truth is that it can be reversed. So, why not do that?

The dietary approach here is sensible: eat many plants, aim for high protein, high fiber, low carb, and limit animal products to just small portions of those that don’t spike insulin levels.

It’s worth noting that Dr. Fuhrman’s “Nutritarian Diet” (which works by assigning all foods a single numerical aggregate nutritional value) has been criticised as being pseudoscientific, and technically it is (there is no evidence-base that optimizing nutrients in this fashion is best; indeed, it could result in missing out on some nutrients that are critical but occur only in otherwise lower-scoring foods—see for example if someone notes how highly Brussels sprouts score and decides to eat only Brussels sprouts, thus missing out on nutrients that aren’t in this otherwise top-tier food), but in practical application, it clearly works well and helps people to eat more nutritionally-dense foods, on balance, which can only be a good thing.

The style of the book is information-dense pop-science (with more than 20 pages of bibliography to back it up), with also a recipe section (60 pages of that). The recipes are a touch on the basic side for this reviewer’s tastes, but perhaps that’s no bad thing—it provides a good “base” from which we can all personalize our recipes according to our preferences and local availability of ingredients.

Bottom line: whether or not you (and/or a loved one) are diabetic, this is a great book for understanding glycemic control and insulin sensitivity, and a great resource for improving those in one’s own life and one’s own body.

Click here to check out The End Of Diabetes, and put an end to diabetes!