Laura: Alright, Sophia, I have a challenge for you. What if the standard, doctor-prescribed treatment for the world's fastest-growing chronic disease was not only ineffective but was actually making people sicker? Like pouring gasoline on a fire, but with a prescription pad. Sophia: That sounds like a massive conspiracy theory, Laura. We're talking about established medical science, the kind that millions of people rely on every single day. You can't just say it's all wrong. Laura: I'm not saying it, but our author today does. That's the explosive premise at the heart of The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung. And this isn't coming from some fringe blogger. Dr. Fung is a Canadian nephrologist—a kidney specialist—who spent years watching his diabetic patients end up on dialysis, despite following all the conventional rules. He wrote this book out of sheer frustration with a system that was failing right before his eyes. Sophia: Okay, that's a powerful origin story. A doctor from inside the system calling out its failures. So let's start there. What is so fundamentally wrong with how we treat type 2 diabetes?

Laura: The fundamental error, according to Fung, is that we've been treating the symptom, not the disease. The symptom is high blood glucose. The disease is something much deeper. He uses this brilliant analogy of an overflowing sugar bowl. Sophia: An overflowing sugar bowl? Okay, I'm listening. Laura: Imagine your body is a sugar bowl. Throughout your life, with every sugary drink, every piece of white bread, every bowl of pasta, you're putting sugar into it. For decades, your body handles it. But eventually, the bowl gets full. Type 2 diabetes is simply the moment that sugar bowl starts to overflow. The sugar spills out into your bloodstream. That's the high blood glucose that doctors measure. Sophia: That makes sense. It’s a simple, clear image. The body is just at its limit. Laura: Exactly. So, what does conventional medicine do? It sees the sugar spilling onto the floor—the high blood sugar—and prescribes drugs. The goal of these drugs, including insulin, is to lower the blood sugar. But here’s the critical part: they don't get rid of the sugar. They just force it back into the already overflowing bowl. Sophia: Hold on. So you're saying the drugs just cram more sugar into a body that's already overloaded? Laura: Precisely. Fung has another great analogy for this. It’s like your house is full of garbage. Instead of taking the garbage out, you just start shoving it under the bed and stuffing it into closets. The main room—your bloodstream—might look cleaner for a little while, and your blood sugar chart will look better. But the house itself is getting filthier and more toxic. The organs, like the liver and pancreas, are getting packed with fat and sugar. Sophia: Whoa. So the blood sugar numbers look better, but the patient's body is actually getting sicker. That's terrifying. It feels like a deception. Laura: It's a vicious cycle. The body becomes more and more resistant to the effects of insulin because the cells are already engorged. So doctors prescribe higher and higher doses of insulin, which shoves even more sugar into the cells, which creates even more resistance. The patient gains weight, the organs get fattier, and the disease gets worse, not better. Sophia: Is there actual evidence for this? It sounds so counterintuitive. Laura: There is. Laura mentions several huge, multi-million dollar clinical trials, like the ACCORD and ADVANCE studies. They took thousands of patients and aggressively lowered their blood sugar with drugs. Everyone expected this to save lives. But the results were shocking. It didn't reduce heart attacks, strokes, or death. In the ACCORD trial, they had to stop it early because the group with the most intensive drug treatment was actually dying more often. Sophia: You're kidding. The treatment designed to save them was harming them? Laura: Yes. It proved that just mopping the floor—lowering blood sugar—while the sink is still overflowing doesn't fix the flood. It might even make things worse. We were so focused on the symptom that we completely missed the actual disease.

Sophia: Okay, if the problem isn't just high blood sugar, what is the real problem? You mentioned this 'overflow.' What's causing it? Laura: The root cause is a condition called insulin resistance. And Fung explains it with a beautiful biological principle: exposure creates resistance. Sophia: What do you mean by that? Laura: Think about it in other areas of life. If you work in a noisy factory, you eventually tune out the noise. You become resistant to it. If a shepherd boy keeps crying wolf, the villagers eventually stop responding. They become resistant to his cries. It’s a natural, protective mechanism. Your body does the same thing with hormones. Sophia: So if the body is constantly exposed to something, it starts to ignore it? Laura: Exactly. And what have we been exposing our bodies to, nonstop, for the last 50 years? Refined carbohydrates and sugar. These foods cause a huge spike in the hormone insulin. When insulin is screaming at your cells 24/7, your cells do the smart thing: they start to ignore it. They become insulin resistant. Sophia: Huh. So insulin resistance isn't some weird defect. It's the body's logical response to being constantly bombarded. Laura: It's a defense mechanism! The body is trying to protect itself from the toxic effects of too much sugar and too much insulin. And this leads to what Fung calls "diabesity." He argues that type 2 diabetes and obesity are not two separate problems. They are two sides of the same coin, both driven by the same hormonal imbalance: too much insulin. Sophia: I've heard that term, diabesity. It makes so much sense. But I always thought this was mainly an issue for people who are significantly overweight. Laura: That's one of the biggest misconceptions. And Fung tells the perfect story to bust this myth. It’s about Dr. Michael Mosley, the famous BBC medical journalist. He considered himself healthy. He wasn't obese; his BMI was just barely in the overweight category. Sophia: Right, I know who you're talking about. He seems fit. Laura: Well, for a TV segment, he got a special MRI scan. And the results horrified him. On the outside, he was thin. But on the inside, his organs were marbled with visceral fat. He was a classic "TOFI"—Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside. And just 18 months later, a routine blood test confirmed he had full-blown type 2 diabetes. Sophia: Wow. So you can look healthy, have a normal weight, but your internal organs can be in that 'overflowing' state you described. Laura: Exactly. It’s not about the fat you can pinch on your waist; it's about the fat clogging up your liver and pancreas. That's why Fung says waist circumference is a far better predictor of health than BMI. It's a measure of that dangerous internal, or visceral, fat. Dr. Mosley's story is the perfect illustration of diabesity. His body was screaming for help on the inside, long before it was obvious on the outside. Sophia: That’s a chilling thought. It means so many people who think they're healthy could be on the same path. It's an invisible epidemic. Laura: And it's driven by our food environment. Fung is especially critical of fructose, particularly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Unlike glucose, which all our cells can use, fructose is metabolized almost exclusively by the liver. When the liver is overwhelmed with fructose, it has no choice but to turn it into fat. This process is called de novo lipogenesis—literally, 'making new fat.' Sophia: So drinking a soda is like a direct injection of fat-making ingredients into your liver? Laura: That's a perfect way to put it. It directly causes fatty liver, which is the ground zero for insulin resistance.

Sophia: This is all very bleak, Laura. If drugs are a trap and our modern diet is a hormonal poison, is there any real hope? How do you actually reverse this? It sounds like an impossible battle. Laura: This is where the book becomes incredibly empowering. Because if you understand the real cause, the solution becomes elegantly simple. Fung uses another great analogy: if your sink is overflowing, what's the first thing you do? Sophia: You turn off the faucet. Laura: Exactly! You don't start by mopping the floor faster; you turn off the water. That's Step 1 of Fung's code: turn off the faucet. This means adopting a low-carbohydrate, healthy-fat diet. Stop pouring sugar and refined carbs into your already overflowing body. Sophia: Okay, that makes logical sense. Stop adding to the problem. But what about all the sugar that's already stored in there, clogging up the works? Laura: That's Step 2: unclog the drain. And the most ancient, powerful, and natural way to do that is intermittent fasting. When you fast, you're not putting any new energy in, so your body is forced to burn what's already there. It starts by burning through the stored sugar in your liver. It's the body's own natural cleaning process. Sophia: So it's a one-two punch. Diet to stop the influx, and fasting to clear out the backlog. Laura: Precisely. And the results he documents are nothing short of miraculous. He tells the story of a 63-year-old patient named Elena. She had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, fatty liver—the full metabolic syndrome. She was on multiple medications. Sophia: Sounds like a typical case, unfortunately. Laura: She started Fung's program: a low-carb diet and a fasting regimen. Within two weeks, she was off her main diabetes medication. Within a year, she was off her blood pressure medication. Her A1C—the measure of average blood sugar—dropped from a diabetic 6.2% to a completely normal 5.2%. She lost 60 pounds, and her fatty liver damage completely normalized. She reversed her disease. Sophia: That's incredible. Not just managed, but reversed. That's a word you almost never hear in relation to diabetes. Laura: And it's not an isolated case. He tells another story about Richard, a 76-year-old man with a decade of diabetes, who had already had a stroke and had chronic kidney disease. He was on 36 units of insulin a day. Within a month on the program, he was off insulin completely. After six months, he was off all his oral medications. His kidney function, which is usually considered a one-way street to failure, actually improved significantly. Sophia: This sounds almost too good to be true. It's so simple. Why isn't this the standard of care? This is where the controversy you mentioned comes in, right? Laura: Absolutely. The book has been widely praised by readers, but it's also been met with skepticism from parts of the medical establishment. Some argue that Fung oversimplifies the causes of diabetes, or that his dietary recommendations are too rigid and difficult for people to sustain. Sophia: And I imagine it challenges a massive industry. Laura: A multi-billion dollar industry. You have pharmaceutical companies that profit from selling diabetes drugs and insulin, and food companies that profit from selling the processed, high-carb foods that contribute to the problem in the first place. Fung's solution—eat real food and sometimes, don't eat at all—is simple, free, and doesn't make anyone rich.

Sophia: It's a radical message. It completely flips the script on personal responsibility and medical authority. Laura: It does. Ultimately, The Diabetes Code reframes the entire disease. It's not a life sentence of inevitable decline. It's a message of hope that says you can't use a drug to cure a dietary disease. The body has an incredible, innate capacity to heal if we just stop doing what's making it sick and give it a chance to clean house. Sophia: The core idea is so powerful. We've been trying to treat an overflow problem by just shuffling the overflow around, instead of turning off the tap and unclogging the drain. Laura: That's the perfect summary. The problem wasn't that the disease was chronic and progressive. The problem was that our treatment was wrong. Sophia: It really makes you question what other 'irreversible' conditions might not be. It leaves us with a powerful question: What if the solution for many of our modern health crises isn't about adding a new medicine, but about taking something away? Laura: A profound thought. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Join the conversation and let us know what resonated with you. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.