Frustrated and feeling hopeless, he asked his doctor if he would ever live a life without daily medications. He tried to improve his health by lowering his carb intake and exercising, but he soon found himself on daily insulin injections and four other medications.

As a young adult, his mother and six of his siblings battled type 2 diabetes and suffered through side effects, including kidney and pancreas transplants, amputations, and dialysis. Growing up, Marc Ramirez thought that diabetes was inevitable. A plant-based diet is low in fat, which allows insulin to function properly. Instead of powering our cells, the glucose remains in our bloodstream, eventually leading to diabetes. These fat particles interfere with insulin’s ability to move sugar out from our bloodstream and into our cells. Studies show that eating a diet high in fatty foods can cause fat particles to build up inside our cells. In some cases, you would never know they’d had the disease to begin with. They lost weight, insulin sensitivity improved, and HbA1c levels dropped.

Within weeks on a plant-based diet, participants saw dramatic health improvements. In a 2003 study funded by the NIH, we determined that a plant-based diet controlled blood sugar three times more effectively than a traditional diabetes diet that limited calories and carbohydrates. In our clinical research studies here at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, we’ve put a plant-based diet to the test with thousands of patients who have type 2 diabetes.

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