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https://www.drmcdougall.com/2013/12/31/ ... rice-diet/

My friend went on the Kempner Rice Diet for just 15 days as soon as he was diagnosed with Diabetes. He never used any drugs. His glucose levels were at 165 mg/dL the morning he started on the diet. By the end of the 2nd day, it was down to 109. From there, it kept on decreasing and his lowest was 76 at which point I begged him to eat MORE fruits to avoid hypoglycemia. After 15 days, he is now on a maintenance diet of low fat everything along with fruits and veggies and going like this for over 2 months now. His glucose level is hovering around 89 - 120 mg/dL almost consistently, except for days when he is stressed. Stress forces his glucose levels to reach 140+ mg/dL but still below 145 mg/dL. He will get his hbA1C tested at the end of 3 months to see if he is still diabetic.

This study shows that Diabetes is a direct result of fat build-up in the pancreas. Since fat intake is minimized in the Rice diet, the body has no choice but to start stripping away the layers of fat accumulated inside the body, especially in and around internal organs such as the liver, the pancreas and the kidneys. Once sufficient fat is removed, these organs spring back to life and recover their lost functionality that was compromised due to excess fat buildup. If you have a loved one who is facing severe diabetic complications, I urge you to save their life with this diet. Please do consult with your doctor and try to follow this diet under his/her supervision to avoid complications.

I'm throwing the BS flag on this. Not all rice is equal! In fact directly from the article I am highly skeptical:

White rice, as opposed to brown whole-grain rice, was used because it was considered more palatable to the general public and was more readily available. Plain white rice contains about 8% of calories as protein. The addition of simple sugars brings the protein content of the Rice Diet down to 5% or fewer of total calories. The body only needs a small amount of protein daily (fewer than 5% of calories from food). The liver and kidneys must process and excrete any protein consumed beyond the basic requirements, causing extra work and often organ damage.

Again all white rice is not equal. What kind of white rice needs to be specified. Ever wonder how Sumo wrestlers pack on the weight? Well its predominately a heavy diet of Calrose and other medium grain rice which is a white rice! Non-Asians refer to it as Sticky Rice.

tanker27 wrote:

Again all white rice is not equal. What kind of white rice needs to be specified.

Whatever white rice the patient prefers. If there is no improvement in the blood glucose level by the end of 3rd day, the patient may abandon the diet and resume the previous Diabetes management routine. By the way, my friend's blood pressure hovered around 130/90 for two years. After the 15 day rice diet, his blood pressure reading was 109/76. Were it not for my friend's positive experience, I would not be advocating this diet plan.

By the way, as mentioned in the article, rice diet is more of a desperate last ditch effort to regain health. If the patient is in no hurry of immediate results, he/she may try the McDougall Diet over a period of 4 months to see health benefits.

I tend to stay away from most medical/diet discussions (as I lack any qualifications), but I do know that Type 2 can usually be reversed if caught early enough and the person makes the appropriate lifestyle changes. If your friend is making a sudden and concerted effort to fix the situation, (exercise, carefully controlled diet) then his improvement is likely just a matter of eating better in general, rather than one specific food item. Just for the purpose of an example, switching to almost entirely complex carbohydrates (like rice) is going to show a marked improvement over a situation where the person was previously slamming 200+ grams of sugar a day. Doesn't mean there's anything special about rice, just that their diet was previously that poor.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Whatever white rice the patient prefers.

That makes no sense. The glycemic index of white rice varies from low to high depending on type of rice and how long it is cooked.

95% of daily calories from white rice and refined sugar?!?? That is simply NOT good for you, diabetes or not.

Really sounds like just one more potentially unhealthy (maybe even dangerous) fad diet.

The page you linked even mentions that he refused to do randomized trials to test the efficacy of the diet. And Wikipedia claims he physically abused patients who didn't stick to the diet.

JBI wrote:

And Wikipedia claims he physically abused patients who didn't stick to the diet.

"....but he gets results!"

I think rice diet was just a temporary measure until the patient's blood pressure and sugar levels were under control. Also the patients effectively served as their own controls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQb5Fe6hZXw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KATXe2ESsto

Antimatter wrote:

Also the patients effectively served as their own controls.

Remind me not to choose you to design a clinical trial.

So, your friend is treating diabetes type II, caused by insulin resistance (as a result of chronic excessive carbohydrate load), by maintaining a chronic high carbohydrate load.


OK... Good luck to him.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Whatever white rice the patient prefers. If there is no improvement in the blood glucose level by the end of 3rd day, the patient may abandon the diet and resume the previous Diabetes management routine. By the way, my friend's blood pressure hovered around 130/90 for two years. After the 15 day rice diet, his blood pressure reading was 109/76. Were it not for my friend's positive experience, I would not be advocating this diet plan.

By the way, as mentioned in the article, rice diet is more of a desperate last ditch effort to regain health. If the patient is in no hurry of immediate results, he/she may try the McDougall Diet over a period of 4 months to see health benefits.

Again BS! I'm here to tell from experience and from being Asian that it is not good for you! Asian's are realizing that our rice intake is one of the reasons we have high occurrences of Hypertension, Type II Beetus, and high Cholesterol! ANY doctor worth their weight will ask how much White, Short grained rice you are eating and reduce that ten fold!

tanker27 wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Whatever white rice the patient prefers. If there is no improvement in the blood glucose level by the end of 3rd day, the patient may abandon the diet and resume the previous Diabetes management routine. By the way, my friend's blood pressure hovered around 130/90 for two years. After the 15 day rice diet, his blood pressure reading was 109/76. Were it not for my friend's positive experience, I would not be advocating this diet plan.

By the way, as mentioned in the article, rice diet is more of a desperate last ditch effort to regain health. If the patient is in no hurry of immediate results, he/she may try the McDougall Diet over a period of 4 months to see health benefits.

Again BS! I'm here to tell from experience and from being Asian that it is not good for you! Asian's are realizing that our rice intake is one of the reasons we have high occurrences of Hypertension, Type II Beetus, and high Cholesterol! ANY doctor worth their weight will ask how much White, Short grained rice you are eating and reduce that ten fold!

It's certainly worth researching if he's sold on having it be such a large part of his diet. I use basmati for all the stuff I cook at home (which I believe is a little better than most as far as glycemic index) but that's more a personal preference than anything health-related.

Captain Ned wrote:

Antimatter wrote:

Also the patients effectively served as their own controls.

Remind me not to choose you to design a clinical trial.

I understand that you would want a randomized double blind placebo controlled trial to prove efficacy. But I wouldn’t consider rising blood pressure and sugar levels, on thousands of patients, before the diet and declining levels after the diet a coincidence.

Antimatter wrote:

But I wouldn’t consider rising blood pressure and sugar levels, on thousands of patients, before the diet and declining levels after the diet a coincidence.

Why wouldn't you think it was a coincidence? It coincides with something that's extremely important!

Which is, of course, the (not-so-obscure) "hidden variable" of people disrupting their previous dietary habits, full stop.

In short, if you are guzzling soda and cramming cheetos down your gullet, basically 24/7, simply reducing overall caloric intake and adopting a regular eating schedule can work wonders.

Someone already brought up this specific point:

The Egg wrote:

I do know that Type 2 can usually be reversed if caught early enough and the person makes the appropriate lifestyle changes. If your friend is making a sudden and concerted effort to fix the situation, (exercise, carefully controlled diet) then his improvement is likely just a matter of eating better in general, rather than one specific food item.

Oh look, another magical diet that's supposed to do magical things, and people believe it because they have no idea what's in their food. First everyone believes carbohydrates are evil and should be avoided at all costs, now there's some dude ranting and raving about a rice diet that supposed to be the best thing ever. I wonder how many people even take notice that those two things are at odds with each other.

I love food, and it's much more to me than just fuel, but what happens to our bodies when we eat it is not magic. Speaking of rice specifically I doubt there's very much at all we don't understand about its consumption given how well studied it is. It's one of the most heavily consumed foods on the planet! Any diet claiming miraculous results should be treated as extremely suspect.

I meant a random coincidence.

My friend was the biggest skeptic. He refused to believe that his body's insulin sensitivity increased due to the rice diet. He kept telling me, this is only happening coz I am following a specific diet. As soon as I veer away from this, my blood glucose levels will shoot up. Well, once the 15 days were over, I told him to start adding other foods not allowed by rice diet. And his levels are still more or less stable. If you are going to analyze this diet from a theoretical point of view, you will never be able to believe in it enough to try it. Because the thinking that starches or carbs cause Diabetes is wrong. It's the unhealthy amount of plant oils used to cook food. The rice diet has no fats other than the natural fats in white rice which leads to reduced fat burden on the body, allowing it to function more effectively.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

My friend was the biggest skeptic. He refused to believe that his body's insulin sensitivity increased due to the rice diet. He kept telling me, this is only happening coz I am following a specific diet. As soon as I veer away from this, my blood glucose levels will shoot up. Well, once the 15 days were over, I told him to start adding other foods not allowed by rice diet. And his levels are still more or less stable. If you are going to analyze this diet from a theoretical point of view, you will never be able to believe in it enough to try it. Because the thinking that starches or carbs cause Diabetes is wrong. It's the unhealthy amount of plant oils used to cook food. The rice diet has no fats other than the natural fats in white rice which leads to reduced fat burden on the body, allowing it to function more effectively.

Uh.....yeah. I'm just gonna bow-out of this conversation.

Fat has higher energy density than either protein or carbohydrate. It's a better fuel, and you need some amount of it in order for your system to function properly. A number of essential vitamins are fat-soluble meaning your system can't absorb them without it. However, consuming too much of it does bad things. I don't know where you're located, but here in the States it's usually a good idea to try to reduce fat intake because the typical diet meal plan often has plenty. With that said, there's no reason to think that reducing fat intake is always going to be a good thing no matter the circumstance. A balanced meal plan is usually your best bet, and that's the part that these diet fads always seem to get wrong.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Because the thinking that starches or carbs cause Diabetes is wrong. It's the unhealthy amount of plant oils used to cook food. The rice diet has no fats other than the natural fats in white rice which leads to reduced fat burden on the body, allowing it to function more effectively.

This is anti-scientific make-believe. You're not even attempting to pretend that this is remotely empirical.

My wife has diabetes and is on insulin. When she was pregnant with our son, she was on a VERY intensive monitoring schedule. Many finger pricks!

Rice (brown or white) spikes her glucose levels like crazy like any other carb. Because my wife was so frequently taking her glucose levels, I've seen the time graphs (interesting actually).

White rice is a "simple" carb, and brown rice is a "complex" carb. In simplified terms, white rice digests much faster than brown rice. Pretty much everyone that has eaten both can tell you that brown rice keeps you feeling "full" longer, and you feel like you're starving with in an hour or two after a white-rice-heavy meal. If you can power through that feeling of starvation and not stuff your face again until the next meal, then, like many other tactics to achieve the same result, the body begins to "digest itself." The fats go first. Simple. And from that perspective, it's effective. But depending on how diabetic you are, you need to be careful how high you're pushing your glucose levels for that first 1-1.5 hours of "fast burn" time. That could get dangerous. What's also/more dangerous is the severe lows you could experience once the white rice is burned off.

This technique may be working well for your friend, but it can't be blanket-applied to everyone.

Antimatter wrote:

I meant a random coincidence.

Uh.

I knew that you meant "random coincidence" when you said coincidence the first time---that's the colloquially connotation of "coincidence".

In fact, my entire response was predicated on that reading, because it presupposed that you were wrong about that and simply used the literal meaning of coincidence as wordplay.

----

So more simply put, it's not a "random coincidence" at all: you're saying it is the specific diet they changed to, but you are neglecting the fact that they (by direct necessity) changed away from a previous diet.

My point is that the change away from the previous diet, potentially towards any number of utterly different new diets, is what you are actually "tracking" here. Thus your "specific" diet is largely irrelevant.

Something like "my friend was previously on a strict low carb diet, and now they're trying this" would be an easier playing field to discuss. Getting diagnosed with the beetus can scare most people into [at least short term] adopting a significantly more healthy diet in general. Going from cheeseburgers and beer to a diet like this (even if it's not considered the best) would be plenty to produce positive results.

I simply need to stop eating two bowls Cinnamon Squares and Honey Nut Cheerios in the morning every day. The sugar content of both is rather high. At least I get plenty of activity to burn it off most days.

liquidsquid wrote:

I simply need to stop eating two bowls Cinnamon Squares and Honey Nut Cheerios in the morning every day. The sugar content of both is rather high. At least I get plenty of activity to burn it off most days.

Oatmeal is obviously better, but the Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is surprisingly average. https://www.generalmills.com/~/media/Im ... Crunch.jpg

31g of Cinnamon Toast Crunch has 9g of sugar. Or roughly 29% of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is sugar by weight. Roughly 2-teaspoons of sugar per serving.

In contrast, Kellogg's Special K cereal has: http://smartlabel.kelloggs.com/Product/ ... 8000787225

41g of Special K has 11g of sugar. That's 26% of Special K is sugar by weight, technically "better" than Cinnamon Toast Crunch but... still quite a sugar bomb. The serving sizes are larger, so its 3-teaspoons of sugar per serving. You're basically not going to win by eating any kind of commercial sweet cereal, they all have boatloads of sugar added... even with "healthy" cereal like Special K.

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Switch to a "low sugar" brand, like Grainberry, and you get: http://grainberry.com/wp-content/upload ... -facts.gif

30g of Grainberry is 6g of sugar, or 20% of Grainberry is sugar by weight. It seems like all prepackaged cereals are just loaded with sugar.

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Switch to Oatmeal, and as long as you use less than 2-to-3 teaspoons of sugar per bowl of Oatmeal, and you'll benefit (one teaspoon of sugar is 4-grams). Cold cereal has speed benefits, but I'll eventually experiment with "cold brew" oatmeal (put water+oatmeal in the fridge the day before, and apparently it comes out good by the morning). I'm still playing with my daily routine, I haven't really found something that works yet. In my experience, 1-teaspoon is enough for my tastes, but feel free to start with 3 teaspoons as you get your tongue used to the lesser amounts of sugar.

Oatmeal can be spiced up with cinnamon, banannas, blueberries (frozen is available year-round, fresh tastes better in the summer months), etc. etc. Eating a bowl of plain oatmeal each day gets boring, but it really doesn't take much to change the flavor profile dramatically. Added fruits have built-in sweetness, so you often don't need any additional sugar to have the oatmeal taste good.

dragontamer5788 wrote:

Switch to Oatmeal, and as long as you use less than 2-to-3 teaspoons of sugar per bowl of Oatmeal, and you'll benefit. Cold cereal has speed benefits, but I'll eventually experiment with "cold brew" oatmeal (put water+oatmeal in the fridge the day before, and apparently it comes out good by the morning). I'm still playing with my daily routine, I haven't really found something that works yet.

Steel-cut oats (not rolled), 3:1 water added, a teaspoon of vanilla enhance the flavor. Place in a slow-cooker overnight on low. The next morning you've got oatmeal. Portion into small cartons with your favorite seasonings and a small amount of sweetener, and you have a week's worth of grab-and-go breakfasts. We've been doing this regularly the past couple years and it definitely helps with controlling diet. (Oatmeal paired with a side of fruit and yogurt is also really useful for keeping small children alive in the mornings.)

This works best if you can get a 1980s or early-1990s vintage crock pot at the thrift store, i.e. the kind with a knob rather than a digital display, as the "low" setting is just shy of simmer where it should be. Newer slow cookers will do the job but they run hotter and tend to burn the edges of the pot.

Glorious wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Because the thinking that starches or carbs cause Diabetes is wrong. It's the unhealthy amount of plant oils used to cook food. The rice diet has no fats other than the natural fats in white rice which leads to reduced fat burden on the body, allowing it to function more effectively.

This is anti-scientific make-believe. You're not even attempting to pretend that this is remotely empirical.

I admit that I am no doctor. However, it wouldn't hurt to read this:

https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/cpb/

I wish you better understanding of how we all have been duped into believing falsehoods by the food industry. And that is written by a doctor, not a quack.

Interestingly, it seems no one checked out the New Castle University "Reverse Diabetes" research in the original post which clearly shows how fat in the pancreas was reduced in the MRI taken after their own formulated strict and low-calorie diet:

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/d ... nformation

In my mind, this implicates fat as the Diabetes culprit, not carbs or starches. Unhealthy levels of body fat interfere with normal carb metabolism. Blaming then the carbs for Diabetes is like blaming the poor car for not starting after filling it up with sub optimal fuel.

I counter your doctor of questionable repute with web comics!

https://xkcd.com/258/

I win. The end.

This isn't the first pseudo-scientific crap OP's credulously posted about here.

I would echo the wariness around the decision to treat early T2 Diabetes with carbs. Fatty pancreas may be a risk factor for diabetes, but most nutritionist and nutritional biochemists would agree that the best way to eliminate fat reserves is to get your body to burn fat. This is best accomplished by 1) Strenuous exercise 2) eliminating as much external sources of glucose (e.g., carbs) as possible (as then the body does not have a readily available energy source and starts burning its own). I'm not going to necessarily suggest a full on ketogenic diet (which minimizes carbs and is high in fat) or something even more extreme in that direction, but if I found myself suddenly struggling with early T2 diabetes, I would be giving those some serious consideration - which seems pretty much the opposite of a rice diet.

Also metformin seems to be a pretty well tolerated glucose controlling drug. I would definitely be looking into it as well if I was in their situation if the lifestyle modifications didn't sort out the glucose levels fairly quickly.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

This study shows that Diabetes is a direct result of fat build-up in the pancreas. Since fat intake is minimized in the Rice diet, the body has no choice but to start stripping away the layers of fat accumulated inside the body, especially in and around internal organs such as the liver, the pancreas and the kidneys.

This is making the false assumption that adipose fat is caused from consumption of dietary fat. Most body fat is created from an insulin response to simple carbohydrates, in which the simple carbohydrates are converted to body fat by this response. Dietary fat does not cause insulin spikes, so consumption of fat only leads to body fat if you eat more than you burn off.

Also, it's worth noting that not all fats are created equal. There have been some preliminary studies indicating that the body handles fats from natural food (meats, avocados, etc.) well, likely as a result of evolution. OTOH, the body does not necessarily know how to handle fats not found in nature (e.g., hydrogenated vegetable oils), as we are not evolutionarily prepared for this. So just talking about "fats" as either good or bad is incorrectly framing the issue.