Rethinking Diabetes

An eye-opening investigation into the history of diabetes research and treatment, arguing for a diet-based alternative to medical treatments, from the best-selling author of The Case Against Sugar.

Over 400 million people around the world have been diagnosed with diabetes. Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was treated through diet, from eating purely meat to the reliance on fats, and repeated fasting. After two centuries of conflicting medical advice, most authorities today believe that those with diabetes can have the same dietary freedom enjoyed by the rest of us, including the occasional ice-cream, leaving the job of controlling the disease to insulin therapy. However, this guiding principle has been accompanied by an explosive rise in diabetes over the last fifty years, and the expectation that sufferers' health will deteriorate steadily over time.

In this ground-breaking book, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes explores the history of the treatment of diabetes, elucidating the way that badly conceived research influences the guidance that doctors offer today, at the expense of patients' long-term well-being. Passionately argued and deeply researched, Rethinking Diabetes reimagines diabetes care with diet at its centre, and is hugely persuasive in its questioning of the established wisdom that may have enabled the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity.

About the Author

Gary Taubes is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar, and The Diet Delusion. An award-winning science and health journalist, his writing has appeared in Discover, Science, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Nature and the British Journal of Medicine. He has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the U.S. National Association of Science writers, an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and is a co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative. He lives in Oakland, California.