Diabetes Epidemic & You

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The above video is only 10 mins long

Definitely worth a look
Thanks

 

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Joseph Kraft and hidden diabetes
Discussion in 'Diabetes Discussions' started by LucySW, Sep 9, 2015.


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1. 
   LucySWType 1.5 · Well-Known Member
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   This is a long post. Sorry – it’s worth it. I do not know what to think and would realIy welcome input. @Spiker, @tim2000s, @Phoenix, @martykendall, @Brunneria, @Indy.
   
   I’m feeling a bit gobsmacked, having read the Joseph R. Kraft book, Diabetes Epidemic & You. He published it in 2008 after, presumably, frustration at his numerous papers in the 1970s and 1980s not getting anywhere. It’s available on Kindle. Here is a PDF of one of his papers giving a summary of his work.
   
   Anyway, the point is that at the University of Illinois medical school in Chicago, Kraft and others were using a technique that never took off anywhere else to measure blood insulin levels during the OGTT test. And what they found – what he documents – was that most of the patients who passed the OGTT with normal blood sugar levels were not actually normal. 78% of the normal glucose tolerance group had massively raised blood insulin levels, which were keeping their blood sugars normal. In other words, 78% of the ‘normal’ blood sugar patients who passed the OGTT test were already launched on the diabetes disease process, but it was invisible because it hadn’t shown up in the blood sugar yet.
   
   There are a number of questions this raises, but first here’s a sketch of what Kraft did.
   
   He was a Chicago MD and clinical pathologist who in the 1950s (he's 95 ! but still alive) worked at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies in Tennessee. He was trained there, with some other clinical pathologists, to use radioisotope technology for laboratory examinations. This was because existing lab test techniques were considered unacceptably inaccurate.
   
   Then he went to teach at the Pathology Dept in the University of Illinois medical school in Chicago. Some others in that department had a research interest in measuring plasma insulin. This had been done a bit in the 1950s but was difficult. So when a new insulin testing substance was released in 1970, the department started to run radioisotope insulin assays as a part of the OGTT tests they ran on patients referred to them. This procedure began in 1972 and continued till 1998. (Kraft retired then.) It seems it was a particular research interest of the Illinois U. medical school, and it doesn’t seem to have been done anywhere else. (There are other tests for insulin plasma levels, but Kraft says they are much less informative, and that it’s useless to test fasting insulin levels, because they’re low in everybody including full-blown T2Ds.)
   
   So he conducted the OGTT together with a radioisotope insulin assay on 14,000 patients between 1972 and 1988. He says, “The 14,384 subjects were healthy persons submitted by their physicians for oral glucose tolerance with insulin assays, 100-g glucose load. This was for the purpose of excluding or identifying diabetes mellitus. The age span was from the very young (less than 14 years of age) to the elderly (greater than 80 years of age). “
   
   He developed three types of insulin profile:
   
   1. A normal profile: insulin peaks at half to one hour, then falls quickly (with the sum of the 2hr and 3hr levels <= x2 the normal fasting range) and is back to fasting levels by 4hr.
   
   2. Three profiles indicating very highly increased insulin levels: insulin peaks later at 1-2 hrs and at much higher levels, back to fasting levels only at 5 hrs.
   
   3. A level indicating very inadequate insulin production, predicting T1D.
   
   The OGTT test classified the subjects as having Normal Glucose Tolerance, Impaired Glucose Tolerance, or DM (Diabetes) Glucose Tolerance. But of the Normal Glucose Tolerant group, 22% showed what he defined as a normal insulin response; 74% showed abnormal insulin profiles; and 4% showed the T1D-predicting lowered insulin profile.
   
   Kraft sees the abnormal insulin profiles as indicating the early stages of the T2D disease process, what he called the ‘occult’ stage (because hidden, because blood sugars were still in the normal range). The blood sugars were kept normal at the cost of vastly escalated insulin production, because of insulin resistance.
   
   These 15,000-odd included 117 children aged 3–13. 45% of these had normal glucose profiles but had hyperinsulinemic profiles. And 651 teenagers aged 14–20, of whom 67% had normal glucose tolerance but hyperinsulemic profiles. And on and on – more in the older age groups, of course. As he says, diabetes is an age-related risk.
   
   The patients were not tracked over time, but Kraft says it is beyond doubt that the hyperinsulinemia was the very early stages of the diseased metabolism that leads eventually to full-blown T2D after some years. High BG levels would only show at the end of this process.
   
   He makes a couple of points:
   
   1. That monitoring BG levels catches only a very late stage of the disease process. So if we tested in a different way, the process could be caught earlier, while we can still reverse it with dietary change, etc.
   
   2. That within the bodies of these apparently healthy people, including the 117 children and the 651 teenagers, the pathology of diabetes was already unfolding, causing atherosclerosis aka heart disease and complications throughout the body. He says, “The pathology of diabetes mellitus is vascular. This includes all major arteries, all minor arteries, and all capillaries.”
   
   3. He is actually saying - on the basis of his autopsies, he was a real autopsy fiend, at least 3,000 - that the cause of atherosclerosis and heart disease is diabetes. Not LDL cholesterol, but diabetes. He argues that insulin causes inflammation in the endothelium, and there you are.
   
   Edit Sept. 2016: Others would say that rather than diabetes (and it was never tracked which patients went on to develop diabetes), it is hyperinsulinemia, raised insulin circulating in the blood, that should be seen as having these effects.
   
   Back to original post:
   
   My questions are different. What does it mean that there were so many diseased insulin profiles among these patients and among the children too? Does it mean the children inherited these faulty metabolisms from diabetic parents? Could the American diet of the 1970s/1980s really explain this crazy dysfunctionality? Or does it mean that actually we have to regard insulin dysfunction as a physical deterioration that’s part of the ageing process, something that was always there and we didn’t know about it? (But then if this pattern had always existed, the lifestyle diseases associated with insulin resistance – diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, some cancers – shouldn’t have peaked in the twentieth century.)
   
   Jason Fung refers to this work recently. I've linked a PDF summarising Kraft's work at the top. Otherwise, the book is available on Kindle for £5 and there are a few posts by Ivor Cummins (The Fat Emperor) about it including an interview. Otherwise, nothing.
   
   As I said, gobsmacked.
   
   Lucy, and thanks to @Indy for flagging this.
   
   Oops, perhaps this should be in Discussions.
   
   Edit: If you watch the video of Ivor Cummins interviewing Kraft, you get to see Kraft talking about his colleague's love affair with the kidneys ...
   
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