The Jan. 23, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association discussed the newest breakthrough for the treatment of type 2 diabetes —surgery. Frankly this makes no sense.
Why would physicians now be recommending gastric surgery? It’s because a diet seems so hard. Patients getting gastric surgery using banding lost 20 percent of their weight, while those being treated through diet lost less than 2 percent of their initial weight. Maybe it’s not that diets don’t work, but that bad diets don’t work. For example, in 1998 it was reported in Diabetes Care that insulin resistance (the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes) could be reversed in four days time with the right diet. It just happened to be the Zone Diet. These are the same results observed with the more severe type of gastric surgery known as gastric bypass that reverses type 2 diabetes in 85 percent of the patients (of course, there is considerable risk of dying during surgery as well increased neurological problems after five years).
As I have stated before, gastric bypass surgery represents the first time in medical history that doctors are removing healthy tissue. There were more than 200,000 gastric surgeries performed in 2006. This is a 1,500-percent increase in the past eight years. Rather than having physicians recommend surgery to their type 2 diabetic patients, why not simply suggest the Zone Diet? It makes more sense.