About That Study on the "Dangers" of Lowering Blood Sugar

You may have heard about the U.S. government-funded diabetes study that was abruptly shut down in February 2008. The study involved the aggressive medical (not nutritional) treatment to lower blood sugar in people with diabetes.

The idea behind the study was that reducing blood sugar levels to near normal levels would improve the health of people with diabetes. It turned out that people in the study with the lowest blood sugar levels were far more likely to die from a heart attack, com-pared with people who were not treated as aggres-sively. Newspaper stories questioned the rationale of lowering blood sugar too much in people with diabetes.

Meanwhile, a second and similar study, directed by Australian researchers, did not find a higher risk of death. However, the second study did not seek to lower blood sugar as much and, based on initial reports, and did not involve either as many prescrip-tion drugs or high doses.

Make no bones about it: elevated blood sugar is dangerous, and even modest increases in blood sugar increase the risk of heart attack.

But the researchers in the American study used a panoply of drugs – not nutrition – to reduce blood sugar. The patients’ blood sugar did in fact decrease, but the drug treatment simply modified a symptom – high blood sugar – while the underlying disease process continued.

The fatalities may have been further complicated by the interactions of the various drugs. The patients were given a variety of FDA-approved drugs for treating diabetes, including metformin, thiazoli-dinediones (e.g., rosiglitazone), sulfonylureas, exanatide, acarbose, and insulin. Insulin alone can increase the risk of a heart attack. One doctor was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the treatment was “brutal” and had little relevance to real-world treatment.

This was yet another unfortunate – and deadly – study showing that more drugs are more dangerous than fewer drugs. So much for the Hippocratic Oath of first doing no harm. The ideal approach to treating diabetes (and prediabetes) is through nutrition and supplements. I’m yet to hear of anyone, diabetic or not, dying from good eating habits.

(To read more on the safe prevention and reversal of prediabetes, get excerpts from my book, Stop Prediabetes Now, at www.nutritionreporter.com)