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Rethinking diabetes : what science reveals about diet, insulin, and successful treatments / Gary Taubes.

by Taubes, Gary.

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Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

070.44961 T222r

Diabetes -- Nutritional aspects.

Diabetes -- Treatment -- History.

Diabetes -- Research -- History.

Diabetes -- Research.

9780525520085 (hc.)

Alternate title:

What science reveals about diet, insulin, and successful treatments

495 p. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"An eye-opening, investigation into the history of diabetes research and treatment, by the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of 'Why We Get Fat'"--Jacket.

"Current medical guidance for treating diabetes may be fundamentally flawed, according to this provocative study. Medical journalist Taubes (The Case for Keto) notes that diabetes treatment consisted of following high-fat diets until the 1921 discovery of insulin. In 1971, the American Diabetes Association began advising diabetes patients to adopt the American Heart Association’s general dietary guidelines for “carbohydrate-rich/low-fat diets,” despite the fact that carbohydrates were “the one macronutrient that bodies could not safely metabolize.” The advice, Taubes explains, was based on the paternalistic assumption that patients wouldn’t follow a more restricted diet and so it would be easier to instead rely on insulin therapy. Worse, the high-carb diet had little evidence to support it, and when clinical trials were finally conducted on its effects in the 1980s, they found the diet exacerbated “defects in fat and carbohydrate metabolism” for diabetes patients. Taubes warns that the “medicalization of modern life” has led to a reliance on pharmaceuticals with harmful long-term side effects (long-term use of insulin therapy has been linked to severe hypoglycemia and weight gain) and makes “medical associations become ever more likely to consider... diseases beyond the control of patients.” He argues for the need for more research on how diets, such as a low-carb/high-fat regimen, could benefit diabetes patients. Exhaustively researched and providing cautionary insight into the fallibilities of medical advice, this intrigues."--Publishers Weekly.

Gary Taubes is the author of six books, including the best sellers Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. He is a former staff writer for Discover and correspondent for Science, and his writing has appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and in The Atlantic, Esquire, and numerous “best of” anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Science Writing. He has received three Science in Society awards from the National Association of Science Writers and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. He lives in Oakland, California.

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