1. Your doctor didn't learn nutrition in medical school (and it's not their fault!).
2. The carbohydrate-centric diabetes model is an incomplete, flawed, and overly simplistic view of diabetes biology that keeps people with diabetes at a high risk for future complications.
3. Insulin is not your enemy — excess insulin increases your risk for metabolic dysfunction in many tissues over time.
4. Insulin resistance is caused by the accumulation of excess fat in tissues not designed to store large quantities of fat.
5. High-fat diets cause whole-body insulin resistance that causes insulin rejection in your liver, muscles, and adipose tissue, in addition to promoting beta cell death.
6. Insulin resistance can affect even if you are slender, have a normal BMI, or are living with type 1 or type 1.5 diabetes.

The most important things to understand when it comes to dietary fat are:

1. The most effective way to increase your insulin sensitivity through diet is to reduce your total fat intake to a maximum of 15 percent of total calories.
2. The second most effective way to increase your insulin sensitivity is to replace foods that are rich in saturated fat and trans fat (including meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, oils, and processed foods) with carbohydrate-rich whole foods that are low in saturated fat and trans fat.
3. High-fat plants like nuts, seeds, avocados, coconut, and olives are nutrient-dense foods rich in PUFAs, but will contribute to increasing insulin resistance if your total fat intake exceeds approximately 15 percent. Feel free to eat these foods, but be aware that a little bit goes a long way.
4. All whole foods contain fat, even if they have a sweet flavor. To calculate your total fat consumption from whole foods, add up the total fat from each food you've eaten throughout the day using diet-logging software that we describe in Chapter 8.

1. All meat products (including chicken) increase your level of insulin resistance and therefore raise your risk for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, while complicating your blood glucose control in type 1 and type 1.5 diabetes.
2. Eggs increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cuase mortality in people with diabetes.
3. Leucine, heme iron, nitrates and nitrites, sodium, and AGEs in meat contribute to the development of insulin resistance and increase your risk of chronic disease.
4. MAP in meat and dairy products is strongly suspected to play a causative role in the development of autoimmunity in type 1 diabetes.
5. Persistent organic pollutants like mercury, dioxins, PCBs, PBDEs, and organic pesticides in fish significantly raise your risk for diabetes and other chronic diseases.

1. All carbohydrate-rich foods do not cause insulin resistance — differentiating between the type of carbohydrate is essential in understanding a food's metabolic effect.
2. Refined grains, refined sweeteners, and artificial sweeteners can overload your liver with excess glucose in a short period of time, causing a cascade of adverse metabolic reactions in many tissues.
3. Carbohydrate-rich whole foods including fruits, starchy vegetables, legumes, and intact whole grains come prepackaged with a collection of micronutrients that protect against insulin resistance, rapid blood glucose elevations, and the secreation of excess insulin.
4. Carbohydrates in plant-based whole foods are contained in a three-dimensional matrix with fat and protein, as well as vitamins, minerals, fiber, water, antioxidants, and phytochemicals tha slow the rate of glucose absorption into your blood.
5. Micronutrients are essential compounds that act as information that tissues use to digest, absorb, transport, uptake, and oxidize nutrients from the food you eat.
6. Phytochemicals are found only in plants and are some of the most powerful disease-fighting compounds in all of nature.
7. Contrary to popular belief, your liver does not convert carbohydrates into fatty acids via DNL in large quantities unless you massively overeat carbohydrates to the tune of 4,500 calories per day for 7 to 10 days at a time.
8. Your brain, liver, and muscle have a strong preference for glucose as a fuel, and are capable of utilizing glucose very effectively when you eat whole carbohydrate-rich foods.

1. In the short term, evidence-based studies show that a ketogenic diet is very effective at promoting rapid weight loss, reduced fasting blood glucose, reduced A1c, reduced medication needs, and reduced triglycerides in patients with type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, but often raises LDL cholesterol significantly.
2. In the short term, a low-fat plant-based whole-food diet is an excellent for simultaneously maximizing your overall metabolic health, reversing insulin resistance, and cutting your chronic disease risk, independent of weight loss.
3. Large-scale studies show that consuming animal products worsens long-term heatlh, increases the risk for many chronic diseases, increases the risk for infectious diseases, and reduces life expectancy.
4. Large-scale studies show that people who increase their intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains improve their diabetes health and dramatically reduce their risk for chronic disease in the long term.
5. Researchers and doctors have known since 1926 that a low-fat diet is an extremely powerful way to increase insulin sensitivity, yet this information remains largely hidden from public.
6. A low-fat plant-based whole-food diet is the only diet known to prevent and reverse heart disease, the leading cause of death for those living with diabetes.
7. There are many examples of long-lived societies around the world who eat plant-based diets, and zero examples of long-lived societies who eat a low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet with a high intake of animal products.

1. The speed at which you transition to a low-fat plant-based whole-food diet is less important than developing sustainable daily habits and becoming as consistent as possible.
2. Before beginning the program, take some time to write down your why so that you become crystal clear on what you are trying to achieve.
3. Before beginning the program, log your diet for three days to get a clear picture of your baseline food intake.
4. For best results, eat green light foods in abundance (including fruit!), limit your intake of yellow light foods, and do your best to completely eliminate red light foods from your diet (especially animal products and oils!).
5. All whole foods contain carbohydrate, protein, and fat, without exception.
6. We recommend eating 1 tablespoon of freshly ground flaxseeds or chia seeds per day to ensure that you are meeting your omega-3 EFA requirements.
7. The Mastering Diabetes Method is likely to reduce your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio to between 4:1 and 1:1, to reduce chronic inflammation and increase your production of EPA and DHA.
8. To maximize your Vitamin D status, expose as much of your body to the sun as possible between the hours of 10 A.M. and three P.M., at least three times per week, for fifteen to thirty minutes per session. Work with a plant-based physician to determine if supplementation is necessary.
9. Eating a wide variety of green light foods provides sufficient dietary fat to efficiently absorb fat-soluble vitamins from your food.
10. Working with a doctor who supports a plant-based diet will increase your chances of success.