• Years of diabetes care focused on glucose targets, medication adjustment, and newer drugs while patients remained under escalating medication burden.
• Standard advice about the gym, whole grains, lean meats, fruits, and vegetables did not get patients off medications.
• Type 2 diabetes can be reversed when insulin resistance is the root cause. Mechanism and diet
• Type 2 diabetes is the body reaching a limit with sugar and carbohydrate load.
• Carbohydrate removal removes the offending agent and diabetes fades.
• Carbohydrates are not essential nutrients because the liver makes the glucose the body needs through gluconeogenesis.
• A well-formulated low-carbohydrate diet is rich in natural proteins and fats.
• Blood sugar goes down, normalizes, the body heals, and medications are peeled away. Patient impact
• The first patient on the protocol lost 60 pounds in 6 months, dropped A1C from 10 to 5.4, and stopped every medication, including insulin.
• The deeper change is fear lifting, hope returning, and health no longer feeling like a personal failure.
• Seeing that change makes return to the earlier approach impossible.

Scaling and evidence

• Ketogenic diet use or therapeutic carbohydrate restriction reached about 4,000 patients before Ona Health was founded to scale the work, especially for Medicaid patients.
• This approach reverses diabetes at a fractional cost of traditional therapies.
• The country carries tens of millions of diabetes and prediabetes cases plus downstream costs from amputations, heart attacks, dialysis, depression, and the rest of the burden of type 2 diabetes.
• Ketogenic diets are therapeutic, medicinal, and curative.
• The evidence is strong enough that this approach would have received FDA approval long ago if it had been a drug.
• ADA consensus language puts carbohydrate reduction at the top of the evidence base, and Tracey Brown reversed her own diabetes with a ketogenic diet.

Policy and access

• A humane and affordable option already exists that targets root cause, gives energy, lowers sugar cravings, and creates lasting satiety.
• Federal and Medicaid pilots can spread this model across the country.
• Food as medicine can expand access to healthy food and reverse chronic disease at scale.
• The evidence is already in hand, the tools already exist, and the time is now.

References

• [01:40] Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids — https://doi.org/10.17226/10490
• [04:18] Nutrition Therapy for Adults With Diabetes or Prediabetes: A Consensus Report — https://doi.org/10.2337/dci19-0014
• [04:25] Podcast Episode 56: American Diabetes Association CEO Tracey D. Brown "A Low Carb Diet Worked For Me." — https://fastinglane.com/blog/2020/5/18/podcast-episode-36-american-diabetes-association-ceo-tracey-d-brown-a-low-carb-diet-worked-for-me