Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Assoc push insulin instead?

I am pretty interested in weight loss (but I am not a professional), I will try to explain.<p>First, the stance of medical profession is to treat diseases. There is not much effort on preventing diseases. They will wait until you get sick and then when you pass a magic threshold will assault you with a battery of treatments. We know that diabetes takes <i>decades</i> to develop, yet our description of a person who is halfway to developing diabetes is still &quot;healthy&quot;. You need to wait until your body gets so devastated by your bad diet and habits that it gets completely disregulated and you put on a lot of fat before suddenly being considered a subject for treatment.<p>Second, the dissemination of knowledge in medical profession is glacially slow. Even if the research progresses quite fast, it takes a generation of medical professionals to die out and newly trained people to replace them to actually update the knowledge as it is being practiced. We are still in the &quot;fat is bad&quot; times even though we know and have known for a long time that it is actually carbs, processed food and bad fats that are major contributing factors to the obesity epidemic (that plus sedentary lifestyle, stress and bad sleep).<p>Third, people in the medical profession are heavily penalised for having a different view on things to the point that most are scared to speak up. For the most part, practicing anything that is not in line with mainline view will get you expelled from the profession and barred from practicing medicine ever again.<p>Fourth, the dieting, while sounding nice as a solution, does not tend to work well. Most people are unable to stick to a diet long term. Managing early diabetes with a diet would require sticking to it religiously and permanently. Medical professionals are not stupid and know that that&#x27;s something that very few people can actually do.

This is written by someone who has never had to convince people to do what they know they should be doing.<p>Diet and exercise (i.e., what to do) are solved problems. The hard part is convincing people to change their behavior (i.e., how to get people to do it). The medical profession is constantly searching for better ways of doing this (e.g., motivational interviewing).<p>And while you work on changing their habits, the disease process is still causing them harm and if there exists a medication that can mitigate that harm that a patient is more likely to take, the risk:reward ratio often leads to a clear recommendation.

I don’t where the author got the idea that clinicians aren’t advocating low carb diets for diabetes patients. Every clinician I have ever had has recommended a low carb diet to help with diabetes.

It&#x27;s the same as all diets, no? We know that if you eat less, you will lose weight. You just need to do that for the rest of your life, forever, or you will most likely put the weight back on. I am pretty sure there is research that shows &quot;diets don&#x27;t work&quot; because of that.<p>The same probably applies to diabetes. Yes, if you eat a low carb diet you can improve your A1C, but you would have to do that for the rest of your life (or however long). Sure, part of it is probably _capitalism_, but I&#x27;m fairly sure that for a large part of the population, prescribing them diet instead of insulin would result in worse outcomes.

See also: the American Heart Association.<p>At a macroeconomic level - disease yields substantially higher profits than health in our current model.

because America is a massive money-hungry machine and run by for-profit corporatjons, and if your business is treating chronically ill people, where&#x27;s the money in preventing illness through proper nutrition and awareness?<p>jason fung and many other modern doctors have proven time and time again, demonstrably, that type two diabetes is absolutely reversible purely through better nutrition and dietary practices.<p>and it doesn&#x27;t even have to be low-carb.