Gastric bypass is touted as a sure cure for type 2 diabetes. After all, diabetes is caused by weight gain and losing weight cures diabetes. Or does it?

An article in the 25 March 2010 edition of the medical journal Gastroenterology reports that medical researchers now understand what doctors have been observing for a long time… relief of type 2 diabetes does not follow drastic weight loss. Drastic weight loss follows relief of type 2 diabetes.

How can this be?

When people have a large part of their stomach removed or made inaccessible to the digestive process, they simply can’t eat as much. That’s why gastric bypass surgery results in loss of weight.

But improvement in blood sugar levels occurs almost as soon as the patient wakes up from the surgery. That’s because of the much smaller amount of food that the gastric bypass surgery patient is able to eat, a significant portion passes through to the large intestine without getting digested.

When the gut senses digested food, it acts as if there were such an abundance of food coming down from the stomach that the stomach couldn’t digest it all. This is of course exactly what is happening, even though the total amount of food is very small.

The way the body prepares for a large load of digested food is to secrete a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, commonly abbreviated GLP-1. This hormone is secreted into your bloodstream by your intestines and does a number of things to help lower blood sugars:

• it stimulates your pancreas to secrete more insulin, and it has a stronger effect on the pancreas when blood sugar levels are high
• it decreases the glucagon secretion. This is the hormone the pancreas secretes to make sure blood sugar levels do not go too low while your bloodstream is waiting for the digested food
• it encourages the beta cells in your pancreas to grow larger and it also causes insulin to be expressed
• it stops your stomach from producing acid so food stays in your stomach longer, helping you feel full
• it increases your sensitivity to insulin.

The arrival of partially undigested food into the colon sends out signals a load of glucose is about to arrive at the hepatic portal vein. Of course this is meant to be sent into the bloodstream. But there really isn’t a lot of food, so the extra production of insulin is what sends blood sugars low. This all happens whether or not the gastric bypass patient has lost any weight yet.

If you think about this process, you probably surmise there just has to be an easier way to get this effect than to have major surgery. Of course, the drugs Byetta and Victoza do the same thing, only not nearly as well. And if you run into problems with the medications, you can just stop taking them. You can’t easily undo weight loss surgery, if it can be undone at all.

A much better way to get the same effect is simply to eat a vegan, raw foods diet. Eating a lot of fresh, green foods and fruits also sends undigested fiber to the large intestine, and also stimulates the release of GLP-1. And although you can have a bad experience with too much fiber, the effects are quite minimal compared to bypass surgery or diabetic hormone replacement.

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