Disorders of Carbohydrate Metabolism:
Sugar Diabetes, Hypoglycemia, Obesity, and Weight Loss (in Russian)

 People with diabetes are told that there’s no problem with consuming table sugar because it’s no different from all the other carbohydrates in their diet. According to the American Diabetic Association, table sugar, (a.k.a. sucrose) is perfectly fine in the diabetics’ diet. The following quote is excerpted from a document entitled Evidence-Based Nutrition Principles and Recommendations for the Treatment and Prevention of Diabetes and Related Complications:

"As sucrose does not increase glycemia to a greater extent than isocaloric amounts of starch, sucrose and sucrose-containing foods do not need to be restricted by people with diabetes." *

Translated from doctor-speak into layman’s language, it means:

Since table sugar doesn’t increase blood glucose levels any more than the same amount of carbohydrates in vegetables, grains, legumes and fruits, table sugar and food with added sugar do not need to be restricted by people with diabetes.

Indeed: once carbohydrates get digested—be it bread, pasta, rice, or sugar—the blood absorbs nothing but glucose, fructose, and galactose, the three basic “sugar” molecules that feed the body with energy. The only difference is that the table sugar absorbs into the blood faster than the bread, the bread faster than the rice, and the rice faster than the pasta. Everything else remains the same. So the message is: eat, baby, eat, just don’t forget to take a pill or some insulin to counteract glucose’s effect on the impaired body.

That’s despite the unquestionable fact that if you suffer from the predominant (95%) type II diabetes, the moment you stop consuming foods that convert into glucose, your blood sugar plummets, and technically you no longer suffer from diabetes. So the smartest, the simplest, and the most direct way to get rid of diabetes and related complications is to substantially reduce carbohydrates, and in some cases exclude them altogether.

The results of the conventional approach isn’t pretty: over 25 million Americans suffer from diabetes (one-third of them undiagnosed), and another 30 million are considered prediabetics, meaning that some of the symptoms are already present, but not yet bad enough to justify being treated.

This book is based on the author's own experience with severe diabetes, which wasn’t properly diagnosed because, as so often happens in younger patients, his “fasting blood sugar” wasn’t high enough to diagnose the diabetes despite all of the obvious signs—weight gain, polyuria (frequent urination), dry mouth, nerve damage, and other, less obvious, symptoms.

Why the book-length treatment for a problem that fixes itself simply by eliminating the carbs? Well, as with everything else in life, success is in the details. There’s much more to disorders of carbohydrates metabolism than carbs.

* Evidence-Based Nutrition Principles and Recommendations for the Treatment and Prevention of Diabetes and Related Complications, Section: Medical Nutrition Therapy For Type 1 And Type 2 Diabetes. Diabetes Care 26:S51-S61, 2003, American Diabetes Association, Inc.

An English translation of Disorders of Carbohydrate Metabolism is scheduled for release in 2008.