The diabetes treatment that worsens the disease
Gasoline on the Fire
The Man Who Lost a Foot Before Anyone Told Him the Truth
Morgan Nolte, a board-certified clinical specialist in geriatric physical therapy, walked into an apartment to evaluate a patient with a history of diabetes and multiple amputations. Several toes gone. One foot removed entirely. She began the standard medication reconciliation—reviewing every drug the patient was taking—and stopped.
“Where’s your diabetes medications? You have amputations, you have a history of diabetes, you’re not taking any medications. Let me check your blood sugar, because it’s probably raging high.”
“I don’t need them anymore,” he said. “I got off of them.”
He had changed his diet. Started eating low carb. Reversed his diabetes.
What motivated him to finally make that change? “I didn’t want them to take my other foot, because then I couldn’t live independently anymore.”
The system had taken his toes. Taken his foot. Failed him completely. Only then, facing the loss of the second foot—and with it, his independence—did he discover what no one had told him: the disease was reversible all along.
A Last Ray of Hope
Nolte describes another patient. A woman, morbidly obese, bedbound for ten months. She had sold assets to qualify for Medicaid, to get the care she needed. The physical therapy order read, literally, “as a last ray of hope.” The woman had wounds, skin breakdown, vision loss from diabetes. She couldn’t get up. Couldn’t go to the bathroom. Couldn’t do anything anymore. She wasn’t old.
And she was taking massive doses of insulin.
When Nolte visited, she observed the household. Potato chips. Spaghetti. The woman’s husband had consulted a nutritionist, who told him to switch to whole wheat pasta.
“Let’s pump the body with some glucose,” Nolte reflected, “and then let’s add more insulin to get rid of that glucose. But that’s making the problem of insulin resistance even worse.”
The word Nolte uses for this: heartbreaking.
It’s why she left traditional practice.
What Causes Insulin Resistance?
Type 2 diabetes is defined as a disease of insulin resistance. The cells resist insulin’s signal to absorb glucose from the blood. Blood sugar rises. The standard treatment: give insulin to force the glucose into the cells.
The logic seems sound until you ask a question that medical training apparently discourages: What causes insulin resistance in the first place?
Jason Fung, a nephrologist and researcher, poses an analogy. When antibiotics are first introduced, they work brilliantly. With time and steady use, bacteria become resistant. The drugs lose effectiveness. The body’s response to persistent exposure is adaptation—resistance. This principle is universal in biology. Resistance requires two conditions: high levels of the stimulus, and persistence of those high levels.
Antibiotics cause antibiotic resistance. Viruses cause viral resistance. Drugs cause drug tolerance.
Insulin causes insulin resistance.
This is not speculation. Insulinomas are rare tumors that continuously secrete abnormally large amounts of insulin. Patients with these tumors develop insulin resistance in lockstep with their rising insulin levels. Remove the tumor surgically, and the insulin resistance reverses.
Experimentally, constant infusion of insulin into healthy, non-diabetic volunteers induces insulin resistance within days—a 20 to 40 percent drop in insulin sensitivity. Young, lean, healthy men can be made insulin resistant simply by giving them insulin.
When type 2 diabetics are started on intensive insulin therapy, their average dosage climbs steadily. In one study, patients went from zero to 100 units daily over six months. Blood glucose control improved. But the more insulin they took, the more insulin resistant they became. The underlying disease worsened even as the surface marker—blood glucose—looked better.
Ben Bikman, a metabolic researcher, frames it starkly: “Giving a type 2 diabetic insulin is like giving an alcoholic another glass of wine. We’re giving them more of the very thing that caused the problem.”
The Vicious Cycle
The vicious cycle operates like this: A patient is prescribed insulin for high blood sugar. The insulin forces glucose into cells that are already overfull. The patient gains weight—commonly 20 to 30 pounds. Weight gain worsens insulin resistance. Blood sugar rises again. The doctor increases the insulin dose. More weight gain. More resistance. More insulin.
Fung describes patients confronting their doctors: “You gave me this insulin. I gained 30 pounds, and then you gave me more insulin. How is that making me better?”
It’s not.
Fung uses the image of an overfilled balloon. You keep forcing more air into a balloon that’s already stretched to capacity. It takes more and more pressure to add anything. Eventually something gives. But the standard treatment keeps pumping.
Gary Taubes documents a particularly graphic case in his research on insulin’s effects. A woman developed type 1 diabetes at seventeen. For the next forty-seven years, she injected insulin into the same two sites on her thighs. The result: cantaloupe-sized masses of fat on each thigh—visible proof of insulin’s direct fattening effect on tissue, independent of diet or calories consumed.
A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that type 2 diabetics on intensive insulin therapy gained an average of eight pounds. Nearly one in three gained more than twenty pounds in three and a half years.
The treatment makes patients fatter. Fatter patients become more diabetic. More diabetic patients need more treatment.
Chronic and Progressive
Fung practiced nephrology for ten years, following orthodox protocols for his diabetic patients. When he looked back at the results, he realized he had not helped them much. He had made them fatter, sicker, and more reliant on drugs.
This confronted him with a choice that confronts every physician working within this system. If the treatment isn’t working—if patients are getting worse—there are two possible explanations. Either the treatment is wrong, or the disease is simply like this: chronic and progressive, inevitably worsening no matter what you do.
Doctors, Fung observes, don’t want to blame themselves. So the profession chose the second explanation. Type 2 diabetes was declared a chronic, progressive disease. The treatment was correct; the disease was just incurable.
“The doctor said, well, the treatment is correct because the blood glucose is fine. Therefore, this must be just the way the disease is—chronic and progressive. Not understanding that their entire treatment paradigm was quite incorrect.”
This framing persists despite obvious counter-evidence. Everyone in medicine knows that if a type 2 diabetic loses significant weight, their diabetes usually improves dramatically or disappears entirely. The disease is observably reversible. The profession declared it irreversible anyway.
Fung identifies two “big lies” in diabetes treatment. The first: that type 2 diabetes is chronic and progressive and cannot be cured. The second: that lowering blood sugar is the primary goal. The actual disease is not high blood sugar—that’s a symptom. The disease is too much glucose in the body and too much insulin trying to manage it. Lowering blood sugar with more insulin just moves the glucose from the blood into the tissues, where it continues to cause damage. The trash isn’t thrown out; it’s hidden under the bed.
Twenty Years On, Off in a Month
The reversal evidence is not subtle. Fung conducted a case series with three patients who had been on insulin for twenty years. They implemented 24-hour fasting three days per week. Within one month, all three were off all their insulin.
Twenty years on the drug. Off in a month.
Nolte reports clients getting off blood pressure medications they’d taken for years within a couple of months. Cholesterol medications. Blood sugar medications. “Happens all the time,” she says. “All the time.”
The man with the amputated foot reversed his diabetes after losing multiple toes and an entire foot to a treatment paradigm that never addressed the underlying cause. His remaining independence depended on figuring out what his doctors hadn’t told him.
Tim Noakes, the South African scientist, puts the absurdity plainly: The medical profession has never encouraged people with lactose intolerance to consume milk, or people with gluten intolerance to eat wheat, or alcoholics to keep drinking. “Yet somehow this common-sense rule seemingly does not apply to the treatment of diabetes.” Patients who cannot properly metabolize carbohydrates are told to eat carbohydrates and inject insulin to manage the consequences.
We fuel the fire with carbohydrates and try to put it out with insulin. The fire grows.
The New Standard of Care
In 2023, the American Diabetes Association updated its standards of care. For patients 65 and older with few other health problems, an A1C of 7 to 7.5 is now acceptable.
An A1C over 5.6 indicates prediabetes. Over 6.5 indicates diabetes.
The new standard of care is diabetes.
As populations get sicker, the definition of sickness is adjusted. The threshold for concern rises to meet the worsening baseline. Physicians become desensitized to illness. One of Nolte’s members lost 50 pounds, eliminated her blood pressure medication, resolved her joint pain. At a church function, someone asked if she was sick—she looked so thin. “I’ve actually never been healthier,” she said.
We are becoming desensitized to what healthy bodies look like. We are becoming accustomed to people who are overweight, on multiple medications, progressing through a disease they were told could not be stopped.
Nolte has heard physicians tell patients directly: “You can’t reverse insulin resistance.”
She has seen a physician refuse to order a fasting insulin test, writing back: “I reached out to some colleagues in endocrinology and they said they only check insulin for a type 2 diabetic. You’re only prediabetic, so we’re not going to do that. And you can’t really reverse insulin resistance anyway.”
The patient needed a new doctor. But most doctors learned the same curriculum.
The Endpoint
The woman bedbound for ten months, covered in wounds, losing her vision, taking massive amounts of insulin while eating spaghetti—she represents the endpoint of a treatment logic that inverts cause and effect. The system identified high blood sugar as the enemy. It deployed a weapon that causes weight gain, which worsens insulin resistance, which raises blood sugar, which requires more of the weapon. Then it declared the resulting devastation proof that the disease was always going to progress this way.
The man who reversed his diabetes after losing a foot did so by removing carbohydrates from his diet—by stopping the influx of glucose that insulin was trying to manage. He addressed the cause. The insulin had been addressing the symptom while worsening the cause.
Prescribing insulin for type 2 diabetes is putting gasoline on a fire. Patients see this. “You gave me this insulin, I gained 30 pounds, and then you gave me more insulin.” They experience the paradox in their own bodies. But the institution that created the paradox cannot acknowledge it without acknowledging decades of harm.
So the disease remains chronic and progressive. The patients remain blamed for their failure to comply. And the treatment that worsens the condition remains the standard of care.
References
Books:
- Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Anchor Books, 2008.
- Taubes, Gary. Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Anchor Books, 2011.
- Noakes, Tim. Lore of Nutrition: Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs. Penguin Random House South Africa, 2017.
- Noakes, Tim, et al. Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating. Columbus Publishing, 2017.
- Fung, Jason. The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally. Greystone Books, 2018.
- Bikman, Benjamin. Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease—and How to Fight It. BenBella Books, 2020.
Interviews and Presentations:
- Fung, Jason. “Get Rid of Diabetes Once and for All.” The Jesse Chappus Show, September 2022.
- Nolte, Morgan. “How to ELIMINATE Insulin Resistance Once and for All (COMMON Early Signs).” The Jesse Chappus Show, December 2024.
- Bikman, Ben. “If You DO THIS Your Insulin Resistance Will Be Normal FAST!” The Jesse Chappus Show.
March 1, 2026 -
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Insulin Resistance, Type 2 Diabetes
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