Mar
Diabetes Book Reviews: Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes without Drugs
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes without Drugs (Paperback)
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Rodale Books; 1st edition (April 1, 2008)
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes is not really much of a “program”, beyond his suggested change of diet. In short, Dr. Barnard suggests that all diabetics switch to a completely vegan diet. Vegan, as opposed to vegetarian, means no animal products of ANY kind in one’s diet. So, in addition to meat, you are not allowed to consume eggs, dairy or pretty much anything that did not get its ingredients from fruits, vegetables or legumes.
Most of the book is dedicated to explaining why the diet works and presenting evidence to support his findings, since the diet itself is not very complicated to understand. A good part of the book is also devoted to vegan recipes and references.
While evidence to support the theory that an all-vegan diet will most likely vastly improve the health of anyone switching to it is compelling, the book makes surprisingly few references to diabetes itself. In fact, other than switching to a vegan diet and taking a daily multivitamin, not much attention is paid to other factors that may improve one’s diabetes. The entire subject of exercise, for example, is pretty much brushed aside. According to Dr. Barnard, changing one’s diet has a far greater effect on diabetes than exercise or any other form of treatment.
This brings us to the choice of book title. The “program” doesn’t really make any specific promises as to reversing diabetes or include any significant medical claims beyond data from clinical trials. The book’s simplicity is as much it’s strength as it is it’s weakness… With no real “program” to follow other than not to eat animal products, there is really very little direction for the author to go, which is likely why the book is so short. There are no real benchmarks to hit, calories to count, meetings to attend or any kind of ongoing support structure. Once you’ve gotten the message “don’t eat meat or dairy”, you are pretty much on your own.
While the advice given to diabetics in the book is certainly medically sound, it doesn’t exactly deliver on its promise to provide a program to reverse diabetes. It definitely provides a point of view that should be investigated by anyone who is trying to better control their diabetes though.
- Reviewed by the editors of FreeDiabetesTestSupplies.Com
Update: June 8, 2010 - For some reason, it seems that the majority of the people landing on this page are entering search phrases similar to, “Dr. Neal Barnard Scam“, “Dr. Neal Barnard Fraud“, or something similar. We ran into this rather unexpected “effect” while going through a report that we receive regularly from Google. We certainly wouldn’t label anything that Dr. Barnard is doing a “scam” in any way, so we have no clue as to what the searches on Google are all about. Apparently, there are an awful lot of people who seem to be curious if he is running some type of scam though.