This is the second of a four-part piece exploring the impact of chiropractic care on diabetics.

“CONVENTIONAL wisdom” states that table sugar is okay for diabetics, as long as medications are adjusted to compensate appropriately. But if you have diabetes, it is best to limit or eliminate refined sugar from your diet altogether, especially sugar in the form of fructose. When fructose joins with glucose, the result is sucrose, or table sugar.

Fructose does not stimulate a rise in leptin, so your satiety signals are suppressed. It also raises your insulin and your triglycerides, which effectively reduces the amount of leptin crossing your blood-brain barrier. This interferes with the communication between leptin and your hypothalamus. Your brain senses starvation and prompts you to eat more, thus you crave insatiably for sugars and carbs such as most diabetics have a real problem with.

Conventional nutritionists have also recommended using toxic artificial sweeteners like aspartame in lieu of sugar for diabetics, despite the evidence showing that this can rapidly stimulate the release of insulin and leptin (which diabetics need to avoid), and can actually lead to greater weight gain than even sugar itself. This is beside the fact that these chemicals are known carcinogens that everyone should avoid consuming in any amount.

When you add toxic drugs to this harmful mix, your pancreas can actually be stimulated to produce even more insulin, and this is the last thing that you would want to occur in a type 2 diabetic whose pancreas has been producing excess insulin for some time (to try to compensate for being insulin resistant).

In terms of diabetes, leptin may even supersede insulin in importance, for new research is revealing that in the long run, glucose (and therefore insulin) levels may be largely determined by leptin, which plays a vital role in regulating your brain’s hypothalamic activity, which, in turn, regulates much of a person’s “autonomic” functions – those functions that you don’t necessarily think about but which determine much of your life activities (and health), such as body temperature, heart rate, hunger, the stress response, fat burning or storage, reproductive behaviour, and newly discovered roles in bone growth and blood sugar levels.

Another recent study reveals leptin’s importance in directly regulating how much sugar that the liver manufactures via gluconeogenesis.

Many chronic diseases are now linked to excess inflammation, such as heart disease and diabetes. High leptin levels are very pro-inflammatory, and leptin also helps to mediate the manufacture of other very potent inflammatory chemicals from fat cells that also play a significant role in the progression of heart disease and diabetes. It has long been known that obesity greatly increases the risk for many chronic diseases including heart disease and diabetes. Now we may have an idea as to why.

It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolised in fat cells, fat releases surges in leptin, and those surges very well could result in leptin-resistance, just as in insulin-resistance.

The only known way to re-establish proper leptin (and insulin) signalling is to prevent those surges, and the only known way to do that is via diet and supplements. As such, these can have a more profound effect on your health than any known modality of medical treatment.

This is why many type 2 diabetics actually become worse by following current medical recommendations and treatment. If your physician has not talked to you about the importance of limiting refined sugars, fructose and grains, and only wants to give you drugs, your diabetes will most likely get worse, not better.

So remember, type 2 diabetes is a perfect example of a health problem best treated without drugs whenever possible. Positive lifestyle changes are the ticket to the wellness you’re really looking for. It is not desirable or rewarding to “manage” and to “live” with diabetes. This is a disease that can be reversed, and in many cases is curable, if not by medicine which claims to have no cure, then by paying attention to decades of metabolic science and applying positive lifestyle changes.

Don’t you think it best to have your spinal alignment assessed by a qualified doctor of chiropractic to give your nervous system the best possible chance naturally to fight diabetes and many other disorders?

Don’t forget to “Ask Your Chiropractor” every week, where your questions may be published and answered in subsequent articles. Address questions to: Dr Chris Davis, the Spinal Mechanic at movethebone@gmail.com; or, Dr Michael Harvey, director, at dr.michael_harvey@yahoo.com or visit www.drharveychiropractic.com