The idea of feeding of extra sugar is a pretty good one. Ray Peat talked about French doctors in the 1800s using extra sugar to sustain the weight of diabetics that were wasting away-
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glucose-sucrose-diabetes.shtml
In 1857, M. Piorry in Paris and William Budd in Bristol, England, reasoned that if a patient was losing a pound of sugar every day in 10 liters of urine, and was losing weight very rapidly, and had an intense craving for sugar, it would be reasonable to replace some of the lost sugar, simply because the quick weight loss of diabetes invariably led to death. Keeping patients from eating what they craved seemed both cruel and futile.
After Budd’s detailed reports of a woman’s progressive recovery over a period of several weeks when he prescribed 8 ounces of sugar every day, along with a normal diet including beef and beef broth, a London physician, Thomas Williams, wrote sarcastically about Budd’s metaphysical ideas, and reported his own trial of a diet that he described as similar to Budd’s. But after two or three days he decided his patients were getting worse, and stopped the experiment.
Williams’ publication was presented as a scientific refutation of Budd’s deluded homeopathic ideas, but Budd hadn’t explained his experiment as anything more than an attempt to slow the patient’s death from wasting which was sure to be the result of losing so much sugar in the urine. The following year Budd described another patient, a young man who had become too weak to work and who was losing weight at an extreme rate. Budd’s prescription included 8 ounces of white sugar and 4 ounces of honey every day, and again, instead of increasing the amount of glucose in the urine, the amount decreased quickly as the patient began eating almost as much sugar as was being lost initially, and then as the loss of sugar in the urine decreased, the patient gained weight and recovered his strength.
Drs. Budd and Piorry described patients recovering from an incurable disease, and that has usually been enough to make the medical profession antagonistic. Even when a physician has himself diagnosed diabetes and told a patient that it would be necessary to inject insulin for the rest of his life, if that patient recovers by changing his diet, the physician will typically say that the diagnosis was wrong, because diabetes is incurable.
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I’ll link a second Newsletter below.
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