Product Description
150 delicious plant-based recipes designed to tackle diabetes and its complications.
Finally an approach to managing diabetes that is not based on pills or injections, but on food—the most delicious “prescription” you could imagine. Written by Dr. Neal Barnard, the unparalleled expert on diabetes and health, with recipes developed by Dreena Burton, bestselling cookbook author and creator of the Plant Powered Kitchen blog, this plant-based cookbook is filled with 150 easy and delicious recipes.
Inside, expect to find favorite foods like burgers, onion rings, muffins, and pudding, but approached from a healthful angle—focusing on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes. Dr. Barnard also offers thorough explanations about the scientific relationship between nutrition and diabetes, and identifies the ingredients in the book by their vitamins, nutritional properties, and health power in a simple and easy to understand way.
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Cookbook for Reversing Diabetes is a treasury of meals that are as tasty as they are powerful for health.
About the Author
Neal Barnard, M.D., F.A.C.C., is the founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He has authored more than 70 scientific publications as well as 19 books, including the bestsellers
Power Foods for the Brain,
21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart, and
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes. Dr. Barnard is a frequent lecturer appearing throughout the world and an adjunct professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
At Yale University, researchers turned our understanding of type 2 diabetes on its head. At the time, a common belief was that diabetes was caused by eating too much sugar or too many carbohydrate-rich foods, such as bread or potatoes. That was an understandable notion, because people with diabetes have too much sugar in their bloodstreams. It made sense to think that maybe the whole problem was that they had too much candy, soda, bread, etc., in their diets. Hundreds of guides were written advising people to limit sugar, potatoes, fruit, pasta, beans, and other sweet or starchy foods. Unfortunately, these dietary changes didn’t help very much.
But using a high-tech scanning technology called magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the Yale researchers looked inside the cells of people with diabetes, and what they found revolutionized our understanding of this disease.
Hidden inside muscle and liver cells, the Yale team found microscopic particles of fat. This was not belly fat or thigh fat; it was fat
inside the muscle and liver cells. It had come from the foods the research participants had been eating, and it had lodged in their cells. Once inside, those fat particles kept sugar from entering the cells. More specifically, the fat particles interfered with insulin—the hormone that normally escorts sugar into cells. If insulin can no longer move sugar into cells, sugar builds up outside your cells, in your bloodstream.
In other words, diabetes isn’t caused by eating too much sugar or carbohydrate. Rather, it apparently starts with fat building up inside the cells. And that causes
insulin resistance—insulin no longer works normally. And it also became clear that the answer to type 2 diabetes is not to avoid potatoes, bread, fruit, or other sweet or starchy foods, but rather to counteract the fat buildup inside the cells.
At the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, our research team has been working on ways to do just that. We tested a diet that had no animal fat at all and very little vegetable oil. In theory, this ought to cause that intracellular fat buildup to start to disappear. In a head-to-head test, we compared this low-fat vegan diet with a conventional “diabetes diet” in people with type 2 diabetes.
The results were spectacular. Af