A former intern just sent me an email like this:

Frank, I see allot of patients w/diabetes & related problems.........
They all ask for diet advice for diabetes concerning sugars, fats, starches etc.
some info says no to rice/grains, fats, & others say yes...........................
What is a good basic TCM diet to prevent & reverse diabetes or where can I find reliable info?

His questions reminded a friend of mine, Dr. Michael Forster, MD who is a specialist in diabetes from Germany. Ten years ago, he gave a workshop on diabetes at Five Branches University in Santa Cruz. The most impressive part of his lecture was his quote from Bible~"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." I know where we come from and where we return have been and will remain arguable. However, the first part of the quote surely deserves our attention and thoughts. I wonder, nowadays, how often we eat our food by the sweat of our brow/face (not brain). Apparently, not everyone has the opportunity to sweat in the corn field every summer as I do.

The inconvenient truth is we must sweat before we eat or we must maintain a certain amount of physical activities before we eat. Looking at the geographic distribution of diabetic populations, we can easily conclude that we have NOT sweated for a long time. We eat more than we physically need or we do not consume all we eat. Sweating is a normal physiological response to hard work, even if we are just programming in the cube.

So let's turn off the AC and sweat a pig before we eat!

Let me get back to his questions-It's not only about what your patients eat but what they do before and after they eat.