THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION
The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight,
Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now!
By Dr. Mark Hyman
Renowned physician, health advocate, and bestselling author Dr. Mark Hyman, provides a simple but comprehensive, scientifically based program to eliminate causes of heart disease, cancer, obesity, and diabetes in his latest book.
In The Blood Sugar Solution (www.bloodsugarsolution.com), author Dr. Mark Hyman – Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and founder and medical director of The UltraWellness Center –reveals the secret to losing weight and preventing diabesity. A staggering one in two Americans suffers from diabesity, the condition of metabolic imbalance and disease that ranges from mild blood sugar imbalance to full-blown diabetes. Diabesity is one of the leading causes of chronic disease in the 21st century, including heart disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer, and the numbers of sick people keep growing. One in three children born today will have diabetes. We are now raising the first generation of Americans to live sicker and die younger than their parents.
Dr. Hyman stresses that insulin resistance is the real biological cause of the obesity, pre-diabetes, and diabetes epidemic that impacts more than 100 million Americans and over one billion people worldwide and which is a huge economic burden costing us over $2 trillion a year in health care costs. Currently, there are no national screening recommendations, no treatment guidelines, no approved medications, and no reimbursement to health care providers for diagnosing and treating anything other than full-blown diabetes. Doctors are not expected, trained, or paid to diagnose and treat the single biggest chronic disease in America.
In The Blood Sugar Solution, Dr. Hyman tackles this worldwide health care crisis. He provides a revolutionary six-week healthy-living program that will help all individuals, whether or not they are obese or diabetic, to enable their bodies to function at maximum level. With advice on diet, green living, supplements and medication, exercise, and personalizing the plan for optimal results, he teaches readers how to maintain lifelong health. Dr. Hyman describes and explains his seven keys to treating diabesity and achieving peak wellness:
- Boost Nutrition: Our current American diet is a problem for what it contains – too much sugar, processed fats, and salt, additives, hormones and pesticides, and genetically altered inflammatory proteins – and for what it doesn’t contain: omega-3 fats, fiber, magnesium, zinc, B and D vitamins, antioxidants, and more. “What is at the end of our fork is more important than what is at the bottom of any pill bottle,” Dr. Hyman asserts. “Our grocery store should be our pharmacy.”
- Regulate Hormones: All our hormones – insulin hormone, sex hormones, adrenal or stress hormones, and thyroid hormones – are interconnected, he explains. They interact with one another “like a big musical symphony. When this symphony is out of tune, problems arise.” A critical key to health is proper balance and regulation of hormones.
- Reduce Inflammation: Anything that causes inflammation will, in turn, cause insulin resistance. And anything that causes insulin resistance will cause inflammation. This “dangerous spiral is at the root of so many of our 21st century chronic maladies,” he says. Finding and eliminating the causes of inflammation along with supporting normal immune function is key to health and longevity.
- Optimize Digestion: Our diet has changed dramatically in the last 10,000 years, and even more so in the last 100 years with the industrialization of our food supply. This highly processed, high-sugar, high-fat, low-fiber diet has substantially altered the bacteria that historically grew in our digestive tracts, and the change has been linked to weight gain and diabetes. Modern inventions such as antibiotics, acid blockers, steroids, anti-inflammatory medicines, and more all injure the gut, alter our gut flora, and lead to systemic inflammation. Fixing the digestion is key to health.
- Enhance Detoxification: Everyone is focused on lifestyle, calories in/calories out and medication for diabetes. But scientific data shows that environmental toxins interfere with blood sugar and cholesterol metabolism and cause insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Specific strategies to enhance detoxification support health and weight loss.
- Maximize Energy Metabolism: Our metabolism turns calories and oxygen into the energy that fuels every cell in our body. This energy is made in little factories in our cells called mitochondria. When these are not working properly, we suffer all the symptoms of low energy: fatigue, slow metabolism, weight gain, memory loss, pain, rapid aging, and more. There are specific ways to protect energy system and boost metabolism.
- Soothe Your Mind: In the face of chronic stress, our levels of insulin, cortisol, and inflammatory compounds called cytokines all increase. This drives the relentless metabolic dysfunction that leads to weight gain, insulin resistance, and ultimately diabetes. Soothing the mind is a key strategy to maintain optimal well being.
Dr. Hyman offers a powerful manifesto to “Take Back our Health” – a call to action for us as individuals, families, communities, schools, workplaces, and faith-based groups in a diverse community-based movement, which he declares, “is the only way to effectively reverse the diabesity epidemic…to help not only ourselves, but our children and their children.”
MARK HYMAN, MD, was co-medical director of Canyon Ranch for 10 years, and is now the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and founder and medical director of The UltraWellness Center. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Ultrametabolism, The Ultramind Solution, and The Ultrasimple Diet, and coauthor of Ultraprevention.
THE BLOOD SUGAR SOLUTION:
The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight,
Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now
by Dr. Mark Hyman
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 978-0-316-12737-0 |Price: $27.99 hardcover |Publication: February 28, 2012
