This insulin assay is the earliest method to identify someone who is diabetic BEFORE their glucose levels start rising sometimes decades before. By the time your doctor sees that your blood glucose is starting to rise and tells you that you may be prediabetic … you have already been doing the damage to your blood vessels that causes all the diabetic symptoms. It is also a lot easier to divert the course of your health earlier in the progression of this disease than later.
Dr Kraft: Father of the insulin assay
Fiorella
#2
I saw this video when it first came out. It blew me away. I couldn’t believe the wealth of relevant knowledge that has sat almost dormant for so many years. How much more of this high caliber of info is out there?
stacy
(Keto in Katy)
#5
Is there such a thing as a Nobel prize for Investigative Dogma Killing?
If so I nominate Ivor Cummins.
Shaza
(Shannon Woollett)
#6
Amen to that! Dr Kraft has passed the baton on to Ivor and he is doing a magnificent job!
Shaza
(Shannon Woollett)
#7
Bless his humble heart RIP Dr Kraft. And may ivor Cummins continue to carry the Kraft test forward as Joseph Kraft has so smartly passed the baton on to Ivor …
Mike_W_Ellwood
(Michael Wallace Ellwood)
#10
I’ve watched all the interviews that Ivor did with Dr Kraft, and have been as impressed as everybody else.
I recently received his book and read through it fairly quickly. I need to read it again, but I got the impression that he wasn’t exactly a low-carb kind of guy. In fact, in some ways, other than the truly impressive concept (and execution) of the insulin assay, his views on diet and nutrition seemed fairly orthodox, at least at the time he wrote the book.
And for example, on page 108: Challenge #6:
[…]
If your blood sugars are not under control after two to three months of diet, exercise, and oral medications, Absolutely, YOU need the addition of insulin.
hmm…that’s not the general message that Ivor is preaching, is it?
Why would Dr Kraft, having recognised that high insulin is the real problem, be advocating giving (type 2) diabetics insulin? (Unless he thinks it is actually high glucose that is the more serious problem. Again, I don’t think that is what Ivor thinks.
Of course, he may have developed his views a bit since writing the book, and maybe Ivor might have had some influence on him in his latter days.
Page 70:
For most people with high cholesterols, prescription medicines are safe and effective. Eating a heart-healthy diet is also safe and effective, and is the very best non-prescription therapy.
[he does not specify what constitutes a “heart-healthy diet” though].
Page 104:
The diagnosis of diabetes may come as a surprise to persons in this 80-90+ group. This was true for my grandmother K, who was first diagnosed as a diabetic at 82 years of age. The insulin therapy was helpful; nevertheless, she expired due to congestive heart failure two years later.
So the insulin therapy was helpful, how, exactly? She had hyperinsulinemia, so was given more insulin. It may have controlled her glucose, but it didn’t (presumably) help her hyperinsulinemia. surely this is the kind of point that Ivor is making over and over in his various presentations, but it’s not exactly what Dr Kraft is saying. Maybe dietary changes were made as well, this case, but if so, we are not told what they were. (So does Dr Kraft not think her diet was important?).
I’m slightly bemused, really.
carolT
#11
I’m guessing that in this case the T2D has progressed far enough to cause beta cell damage. Not everyone who is on insulin can remove it completely at this late stage of the disease. But I don’t have the book, so I’m just guessing at the context.
Perhaps he is using her as a cautionary tale? It looks like he revised the book in 2011 to include more about the link between insulin and heart disease.
Mike_W_Ellwood
(Michael Wallace Ellwood)
#12
Thanks for that link, which I hadn’t seen before. I don’t want to take anything away from him. clearly his insulin assay, and ability to predict diabetes 10, 15 years or more away was ground-breaking, and needs wider exposure.
His comments about the modern lack of autopsies (other than forensic - in fact anyone growing up now (what with the many graphic autopsy scenes portrayed in TV crime dramas) would be forgiven for thinking that autopsies are/were only ever used for forensic reasons. - are also very significant. How much modern doctors must be missing out on. (Perhaps they are squeamish, or more likely, it’s more difficult to get permission, and also probably the process is costly).
On quickly re-reading the book (it is short) I couldn’t actually find any specific dietary recommendations, only a mention that dietary treatment was important, perhaps alongside drug treatment.
Actually, I can see that treatment with Metformin is reasonable, if the person’s glucose is getting out of control, since this will hopefully reduce the glucose level, and with it the destructive effects of glucose, and it will hopefully also bring down the insulin. (I have even read that, statistically, Metformin is associated with longer lifetimes).
However, the use of injected insulin (by type 2’s) I have more problem with. Presumably the hope is (with suitable dietary changes) the insulin dose can be gradually reduced and eventually eliminated. However, he does not actually mention that in the book. Perhaps he felt it was too controversial to commit that to writing, even if that’s what he actually believed. And maybe in practice, he did actually use low-carb diets, but knowing the controversy, did not write about it. I need to go back and listen to the interviews with Ivor, and hear exactly what he said about that.