Rethinking Diabetes is about the history of diabetic treatment, and the various back-and-forths about diet for diabetic patients over the years, pre-insulin and post-insulin. Pre-insulin type 1 diabetes was pretty much a death sentence, with children not living much past single digit years if at all. Type 1 was mostly unresolved except through a diet that pretty much excludes carbohydrates.
The history of how insulin was invented, and how it effected survival of patients with type 1 diabetes was described. For type-2 diabetics this enabled diabetics to eat carbohydrates. The author spends a lot of time complaining about how this switch was not accompanied by evidence, and how the promulgators of this approach basically used their standing within the medical community to shut down dissent.
In many ways this is a book with an agenda about how the medical community basically ignored the possibility of using a high fat diet to reverse diabetics and reduce insulin needs. To some extent this book is about the history of the keto-style diets and how they eventually came to be embraced despite the opposition of the medical community.
To some extent I think you have to take the book with a grain of salt. Science isn't easy, and if there's anything I've learned from Outlive, it's that the evidence for one diet over another is really slim and not as obvious as say, the dangers from smoking. So it's not through ill intention that the medical community was making high carbohydrate diet the default, but just that nobody really actually knows anything about nutrition.
In any case, I enjoyed the book. It got a bit repetitive at times, and the author seems to believe that the keto diet is the ultimate cure for diabetes. But that might still be a bit too optimistic as variation in human responses to diet seem to swamp our ability to do good studies on nutrition.
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