Fun Stuff. Carol -- glad to hear you're creating excellent results!
I do the PowerPoint presentations for a Type-2 Diabetes reversal group in So Cal. We use bloodwork as the measure of success, and to tell us what to work on. And we use a Functional Medicine approach to restore normality to the body, after reviewing their blood and saliva results. Functional medicine focuses on the effects of nutritive-, attitudinal- and exercise-based- contributors to health and wellness/disease. Cordain is one of my heroes, and the Paleo (I know, Elder... but it's an easier shortcut than stressing the specifics) diet remains a staple of our approach to restoring health.
We get patients in with blood markers of inflammation, prolonged glycation, heart disease, etc., who complain of everything from aches and pains to erectile dysfunction. After 4 months on a table full of supplement, the paleo diet, and a guided activity program, their blood profiles improve dramatically, and with it their quality of life. The blood markers which are diagnostic for Type 2 are returned to normal. It's one of those diseases the medical community says can't be reversed -- that once you have it, you always have it. Even though we have demonstrated over and over that principle measures of insulin resistance, including venous doppler, etc., are restored to a non-resistant state.
Cordain does a presentation in front of a Multiple Sclerosis group... 10 minutes of your life to watch the first part, and the numbers ought to open your eyes. Also out there is a MD in the TED talks -- progressive MS, starts looking into nutrition as cause/solution, and switches to -- effectively -- a version of the paleo regime. Both findable on youtube.
Functional Medicine (FM) is a health-based model, in which any health outcome is the net result of the foods you eat, the thoughts you think, and the activity you give your body. These 3 dimensions influence risks in all of the major diseases of modern man. Nutrigenomics investigates the way gene expression is influenced by cellular environment, nutritionally. Lo and behold, a paleo approach creates potent longitudinal influences on the expression of oncogenes associated with GI tract cancers, blood cancers, and endocrine/gender-specific cancers. Whodathunkit.
Another hero of mine is Mark Hyman, MD. Authored a book on nutrition for the brain-body connection; heavily and meticulously annotated references with modern studies. In addition to some supplements, his main dietary recc's mirror those of the paleo type. He has some stuff on Youtube, too -- Blood Sugar Solution is basically a blueprint for what we are doing with our diabetes patients.
What typically gets dropped out are the influences of "the thoughts you think", and "the activity you give your body". We have a therapist who uses brief-therapy methods to help clients ID goals and strategies for the fulfilment of same to assist with the "thoughts" dimension (also provides classes in relaxation response and stress management), and a MPT/CSCS who works with them as a trainer for the first 8-12 weeks, ensuring injury-free compliance with exercise recommendations.
Big surprise is, we have a 100% success rate. We aren't doing anything new. As Cordain would say, trying to find food was an activity-rich problem for early man: We don't go tromping through marshes looking for a duck to hit with a rock, so we have to fabricate those activities in functional exercise. We rarely take time to chill and reflect, allowing the benefits of parasympathetic states to wash through our bodies -- so we have to fabricate downtime with guided visualization.
I'm writing a book on therapies for ADHD -- not to limit it or treat it, but to reverse it. One of the most interesting and recent studies found that, when kids dumped the sugar and fat from their diets, and ate something approximating a "healthy diet" (lean protiens, fresh fruits and veggies), they improved markedly. Small trials have been done putting ADD/HD kids and adults on paleo regimes... not surprisingly, they get better.
For those of you on high-protien versions of it, don't forget to monitor the CO2 levels in your blood -- even if they are in "normal" range, they can be functionally high or low, indicating an issue with the digestion and metabolism of proteins Break your servings down to a dose every 2 hours, and supplement with a Betaine HCL supplement. That's been one of the biggies we've seen -- guts stripped of the enzymes and probiotics needed for proper utilization. It shows in the bloodwork. Improves with Betaine HCL, and probiotics -- the best I've seen yet are by a recluse in Idaho, who is both odd and brilliant: living streams liquid probiotic.
Bon Chance!
D.