Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2011

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Forward to Zion

Reengineering Genetic Risk

Wes Youngberg

How to Turn Good Genes ON & Bad Genes OFF!

How to Evaluate, Prevent & Reverse Diabetes and Pre-Diabetes Naturally

Natural Ways to Optimize the Immune System

Optimizing Brain Wellness: How to Promote Emotional and Neurologic Healing

It has been my pleasure and opportunity to conduct diabetes management workshops and seminars now going on 20 years.

This began in Guam while I was a medical missionary with the Guam SDA Clinic and Wellness Center.

And around 1995, we had the privilege of convincing a doctor from California, Dr.

Charles Brinegar, who had been the director of the Diabetes Treatment Center at Loma Linda University for many, many years to come as a medical missionary to Guam.

And I remember I asked him once, I said, Dr.

Brinegar, what motivated you to become a medical missionary and come to Guam.

And it made me realize that we should never underestimate the power of simply asking people for help.

He'd been in Loma Linda very comfortably for decades, and then 1 day somebody called him up and said, hey, would you be interested in coming to Guam as a medical missionary?

So don't ever hesitate in asking people to get involved in programs, because many times they will come and they're waiting simply to be asked.

A cousin of mine who had left the church, and then after many, many years came back into the church, and now is a minister in the church, recalls that he went for many, many years without being asked if he wanted to come to church.

And he says, you know, I would have come if somebody would have just asked me.

So sometimes we second guess ourselves and second guess other individuals.

Well, at that time, we wanted to put together a strong diabetes management program.

All he did was see patients with diabetes.

And so we developed a comprehensive lifestyle medicine program that focused on diabetes.

So I had an opportunity to learn much from him.

And keeping up with the literature is, boy, that's a challenge in any field.

But in diet, there's so much information available to us in the area of diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypoglycemia, and all those conditions are very open to management.

The complications that arise from these conditions are entirely avoidable.

And many times, people with type 2 diabetes can actually reverse that condition and in the majority of cases, the vast majority of cases, individuals with pre-diabetes should be able to reverse those as well.

But the key is that most people don't know it.

And you'll see from statistics that after the age of 40, you're more likely to have pre-diabetes or diabetes than not have pre-diabetes or diabetes.

In other words, if you're 40 or over and you don't have pre-diabetes or diabetes, you are in the distinct minority of individuals.

Once again, the problem is that most people who have pre-diabetes in particular have no idea that they have it.

Just last week I was working with a patient in her early 50s who appeared to be very healthy and had actually come in to see me for other health concerns.

There was no concern about heart disease or diabetes or pre-diabetes or high blood pressure.

It was just some other concerns that she had.

And so as we talked, I became a little bit concerned that she might have problems with low blood sugar.

There's low blood sugars, depressed immune system, low blood sugars actually are associated with weakened adrenal glands, which then leads to increased risk of disease, of autoimmunity, and we feel really bad when we have low blood sugars.

And so I suggested that we do a glucose tolerance test, which we'll look at in a little bit.

And so where she would come into the laboratory, have blood drawn initially, and then after the fasting blood test, would drink a sweetened drink.

It's about twice as sweet as a regular soda.

About 75 grams of pure glucose that's carbonated and so it doesn't taste too bad, but it's, you know, it still takes a little effort to drink that down.

And then 1 hour later, we checked the sugar, the blood sugar again, 2 hours, 3 hours, and 4 hours.

I was expecting to see some potential low blood sugars, and we found them.

Dramatic drop in blood sugars at 3 and 4 hours, which was a key problem.

But what I hadn't expected to see was her blood sugars above 200 at the one-hour mark, which places her in advanced prediabetes.

Now, the 1 hour blood sugar is not diagnostic.

In other words, many times in medicine, they don't even measure the 1 hour blood sugar because it's not diagnostic.

The doctors and researchers who kind of came up with the rules of how do you diagnose the problem did not include the 1 hour.

But in doing so, they made a decision that greatly weakened the power of educating their patient because the most sensitive blood test for blood sugars is at 1 hour after consuming a food, 1 hour.

And I have many people that have patients who have a completely normal blood sugar before they eat.

Completely normal, I should say healthy, because normal is not the same thing as healthy.

Remember, I just got done saying that the majority of people 40 and over have prediabetes or diabetes.

So in a statistical sense, that's normal.

It's normal to have prediabetes and diabetes.

So at 2 hours, many people have Completely optimal blood sugars before and at 2 hours.

But the 1 hour can be sky high, can be at 200 or higher.

And in her case, even though she didn't have any of the other signs or indications of a metabolic problem, we caught that.

But we caught that early because she was willing to be evaluated.

She was willing to take a risk and be open to criticism, if you will.

You're opening yourself to criticism, constructive criticism.

But whenever we do these blood tests, whenever we do any medical evaluation, we're essentially experiencing a close evaluation, a close criticism of what's going on, right?

So it's very similar in our spiritual lives, as long as we're open to criticism.

When's the last time you've asked somebody, hey, you know, evaluate me, how am I doing?

You know, we don't tend to do that naturally.

But, done properly, especially with a close friend, especially with a spouse, with somebody that you spend time with.

Being willing to be constructively criticized can be very valuable, a learning experience for us.

And so this testing phase that she went through made her aware of something she had no idea was going on.

But as we looked at the data, we started putting the pieces together and recognizing that 1 and recognizing that 1 of the driving factors in migraine headaches actually is an abnormal blood sugar metabolism.

When was the last time you read anything about that?

I was seeing patients in Sun City, California once a week with Dr.

It was part of the Loma Linda Faculty Medical Group extended offices.

And while there, I had a neurologist from Europe come spend about a week with me.

She was working on a second doctoral degree at the School of Public Health at Loma Linda and wanted to just spend some time shadowing me.

And so I encouraged it and I had a wonderful time dialoguing with her, because being a neurologist, I was interested in what she could teach me as well.

But something interesting happened on the days that she was there.

I would work with patients who had diabetes or gout or high cholesterol or high blood pressure and go through a comprehensive lifestyle nutritional medicine strategy so that they could accomplish their goals.

And as they would come back after a month or 2 of following these strategies, they would see.

We'd criticize them, if you will, before and after.

And they could see, wow, when I actually followed this plan, my cholesterol dropped 50 points, my blood pressure dramatically improved, my blood sugars dropped substantially, everything was getting better.

And this 1 particular day, I was kind of bragging on these patients a little bit.

I said, wow, look at your cholesterol, look at your blood sugar, look at your uric acid and your gout's no longer there.

And 4 of the patients that I was kind of bragging on, 4 of them that very day that I was working with this neurologist said, we're kind of dismissing all that as if it was unimportant.

I would say like, aren't you excited about this?

I mean, I'm excited about what's happening to you, aren't you?" He says, well, yeah, no, no, this is good, but what I'm really happy about is that I'm not having those headaches anymore.

And at the time, I didn't get it, you know, Because I kind of knew that you do 1 thing right, everything tends to work better.

Susanna Bick, as a neurologist, she was intrigued.

Series

Reengineering Genetic Risk

How to Evaluate, Prevent & Reverse Diabetes and Pre-Diabetes Naturally

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Living Free: Freedom from Stress

55m

Personal Health

How to Deal With Anxiety

1h

Eye Care

Vision for Life: How Lifestyle Medicine Protects Your Eyes and Health

35m

Health, Science, and the Bible: Making Good Soup

01 Disease

1h

Track 1 Seminars

Win! Wellness Homes of Hope & Health, Part 6

1h 2m

Users Guide to Natural Remedies: Simple Treatments for Common Ailments

01 Natural Remedies for Metabolic Diseases

52m

Gardening for Health

Agriculture, the Gut Brain, Health & Happiness

1h 1m

Track 1 Seminars

WIN! Wellness Homes of Hope & Health, Part 1

1h 23m

Secrets of Wellness

01 How to Live Longer, Healthier & Happier

1h

Food for Thought

46m

Imagine a Healthy 100

A Healthy 100 Life Changing Choices

48m

Sound Doctrine