This classic interview was originally published in October 2010.
On Sunday, Diabetes Daily spoke with the controversial diabetes icon, Dr. Richard Bernstein. You may know Dr. Bernstein as the father of home blood glucose testing, author of many books, or chief advocate of a very low-carb diet (12g of carbs per meal).
In our conversation, 
Dr. Bernstein talks about:
How you can have (and deserve) normal blood sugars
How he developed his low-carb diet
The key to stopping food cravings
Problems with modern insulin
Why he doesn’t recommend insulin pumps
Why he’s only prescribed statins twice
Advice for the FDA on meter accuracy
For a little background, read his Wikipedia page and personal website.
You have a lot of fans on Diabetes Daily. Late last night, I asked the community for questions and 20 responded. They provided a wonderful outline for the things I’d like to ask you. To get a little background, would you share your philosophy in 60 seconds?
My philosophy is that diabetics are entitled to the same blood sugar as the non-diabetics. This is exactly the opposite of the policy of the American Diabetes Association. I have related philosophy that to get normal blood sugars you have to do certain things. And one of the key things is a very low-carbohydrate diet. Because nothing else works. I’ve tried it all. I’ve had 64 years of diabetes.
I got my first meter in 1969, so I’ve had plenty of time to experiment and see what works. There’s no way the ADA diet or any high-carbohydrate and low-fat diet enable you to control blood sugars.
It turns out that the kind of diet I recommend is essentially a paleolithic diet – what humanity evolved on. Our ancestors did not have bread, wheat, sweet fruits, and all of the delicious things that we have today. These have been specially manufactured. Our ancestors had a paucity of roots, some leafs, and principally meat to eat. If they lived near the shore, they had fish.
My dietary recommendations boil down to what our ancestors ate. The American Diabetes Association repeatedly says that while low-carbohydrate diets may work, it’s an experiment and we haven’t enough years of trial of these diets to see if they do any harm. But the ADA diet is an experiment. It was never based on any history. In fact, it is the cause of the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Whereas the original diet, the paleolithic diet, has been tested for tens of thousands of years. And it’s only when you deviate from it that you end up where we are now.
When you’re sitting down with someone to make a daily meal plan, what components do you bring into the diet?
Okay, I have in my office models of protein portions. I’ve got them from a company that sells supplies to nutritionists. So that people can estimate what size sample protein is and I say okay let’s look at breakfast. What kind of protein would you like for breakfast? One lady said to me, “Well, my favorite food is hotdogs. Can I have hotdogs for breakfast?” And I said, “Sure.” I said “How many would you want?” And she said she would like two. Well, some people like eggs, so I ask how many. Some want bacon and eggs, etc. Some people are afraid of bacon and they say they like turkey burgers and I asked them how many? Some of them want a mix of different protein foods.
I then say, if you wish to have a carbohydrate, you’re allowed to have 6 grams of very slow-acting carbohydrate. That could be some vegetables or it could be bran crackers. (I don’t push bran crackers because there is a question about whether they’re really healthy or are just irritating to the intestines.) If someone likes chopped vegetables, then I’ll decide the maximum amount of vegetables based on the carb content, and they’ll decide how much protein they want.
We go little by little like that. For lunch we give twice as much carbs, which may add up to two cups of salad for example, and we’ll negotiate the type of salad dressing – the best salad dressings is vinegar and oil – and they’ll pick how much protein they want. And the same goes for dinner. And with each meal you can vary the type of carb provided that the carb is slow-acting, not a glucose tolerance test.
How did you settle on 6 grams of for breakfast and 12 for lunch and dinner?
It was born of a theory that I had that might be incorrect. The theory is based on an observation that during the 20th century, it appeared that a new vitamin was being discovered every 15 years. And in 1971, I started scratching my head about diet because I had a meter now and saw that everything I was eating was sending my blood sugars sky high on the ADA diet. I said, “Gee, if new vitamins are being discovered so rapidly maybe the people should eat vegetables on the theory that there are things that we’ll find in vegetables that are necessary that you can’t get in the vitamin pill.” And of course this actually has come to pass.
There is a big question, of course, as to how much you really need. From what I have read recently, the amount of vegetables a person needs is relatively minimal. Nevertheless, I said, “Okay, I probably should have two cups of salad for lunch”, and I converted that to grams of carbohydrate. Now, if you have low-carbohydrate vegetables in the salad, it’s really not two cups it would be four cups. But I had discovered something way back then that is extremely important. The blood sugar is not just dependent on the amount of carbs and the amount of protein, but also on the bulk the physical bulk of what you’re putting on in your gut. When you stretch your gut you raise your blood sugar if you’re diabetic.
In my books, we go in to the details of why this happens. That salad is going to stretch your gut and, even if it where newspaper, your blood sugar would go up. By trial and error, I found that the salad would raise my blood sugar twice the amount that you would think it would go up. So if a cup of salad had 3 grams of carbs, I set it to 6 grams. So I say that 2 cups of salad is 12 grams. That’s how I got to the 12 grams at least 2 cups of salad should be enough. And I have no signs of malnutrition.
When I was on the ADA diet, several specialists in nutrition told me that I was malnourished by looking at my gums. And I see that a lot now in diabetics. On a high-carb diet andhave high-blood sugars, you’re going to pee away water and the soluble vitamins and suffer from malnutrition.
What does y
ou had for breakfast today?
TToday, I had an egg with about an ounce of cheese and a fiber cracker with about an ounce and a half of cream cheese on it.
And for lunch?
Lunch, I got up late today so I’m skipping lunch. On a regimen where you’re taking insulin for meals, you don’t have to eat every meal. That’s unlike the ADA regimen where you get one or two shots of insulin a day and you have to eat all day to cover the insulin to avoid hypoglycemia.
My wife and I had a big problem when she was you know in a Lantus while eating to combat low blood sugars. Just continuously whether you’re hungry or not eating which was a very frustrating experience.
We don’t use Lantus for a variety of reasons but we do use Levemir.
Do you split doses?
We split it three ways. None of the long-acting insulins last the night and it leads the to dawn phenomenon. People already making substantial amounts of insulin may get away with it. For many years, we had type 1 diabetics use two shots of Ultralente: one on arising and one at bedtime. With Lantus and Levemir, I found that the one at bedtime doesn’t last. So we tried to get people to get up four hours after their bedtime shot for a second shot. That’s what I do. I take one-and-a-half units of Levemir at bedtime and one-and-a-half units four hours later. It’s a pain in the neck, and it wouldn’t be necessary if Lilly had not discontinued their Ultralente insulin.
Lily’s earlier insulins had different active insulin graphs?
Yes. Levemir and Lantus were put through the FDA as once-a-day insulins by what I call fraudulent clinical trails. They gave people mega doses of insulin, larger than they needed, forcing them to eat all day.
30 years ago, John Galloway of Eli Lily did an experiment where he gave a non-diabetic man an injection of 70 units of regular insulin into his arm. They gave the patient an IV drip of glucose and checked the blood sugar every half hour. If his blood sugar was going down, Galloway would increase the drip. And if were going up, he’d slow the drip. And that way, he’d clamp his blood sugar to 90.
How long do you think he had to keep dripping in glucose to prevent this guy from getting hypoglycemia? Remember, this was the fastest acting insulin we had.
I couldn’t even guess.
He had to do it for a week. He demonstrated that the length of time that the shot lasts is dependent upon how much you inject in one place. The drug manufacturers of this new long acting insulin’s wanted to pretend that their insulins last 24 hours. So they gave them real big doses of insulin, more than was needed to keep people’s blood sugars level. But enough, so that it’s absorption would last 24 hours. They were not getting true basal insulin. Basal insulin is supposed to cover only the fasting state. These people got enough insulin to cover much of their meals and snacks also.
That sounds like too much insulin if you’re on a basal bolus regime.
That’s right. By the way, this is not the only sleazy thing that’s going on in the diabetes industry. Almost anywhere you turn, there’s something that’s not to the benefit of the patient going on. I’ll give you an example.
The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists are now recommending that regular and NPH insulin be taken off the market as unnecessary and that diabetics are only entitled now to the analog insulins. The insulins that are not true human insulins. There are at least two big disadvantages to this.
Number one, regular insulin is far more predictable in its effects on blood sugar than any of the analog rapid-acting insulins. It’s more reliable.
Number two, it’s less potent than HumaLog, NovoLog, and Apidra. If you want to get two units, it’s harder to measure. It’s easier to measure with regular because it’s a weaker insulin. If you want to measure a unit and a half, you can. But if you did a unit and a half of HumaLog, it would have two-and-a-half times the effect. It would be like, measuring three units of regular. So you get more precision in your measurements in regular because it’s less potent. .
Another problem is that, for little kids, full strength of any of the rapid acting analog insulins are far too potent. For example, one unit of regular will lower my blood sugar by 40 but in a 20-pound kid, it will lower him 240. Half of a unit will lower him 120. How could you give him a precise dose of insulin? Even with the weakest insulin we have, regular, you can’t measure it precisely enough. But you can dilute it. We have diluting solution for regular. We don’t have diluting fluid for Lantus and Apidra. We have diluting for NPH. For little kids, even though NPH is only an intermediate acting insulin, I’ll give them three or four shots of NPH a day and we’ll dilute it so that we can give them precisely what they need for their basal insulin. Not all of the analog insulins are dilutable. We can dilute Humalog and NovoLog. I don’t think they have it for Apidra. They don’t have it for the longer acting insulins Lantus and Levemir. So, with little kids, we are stuck with giving them industrial doses of insulin that are exceedingly dangerous and make meticulous blood sugar control impossible.
What are your thoughts on insulin pumps?
I spent sometime in a major insulin pump center and saw several things. Many of the female patients seemed to have wings on their sides where the pump tubing was inserted and they got lipohypertrophy. But that was the least of it. None of them had normal blood sugars. Of the new patients who came in using pumps, there was only one whom I was able to get near normal blood sugars. It was because he was still in his honeymoon period. After a year on the pump, his blood sugar started getting unpredictable. And why is that? I believe it is because of the scar tissue that forms where you have a foreign body inserted for days at a time.
We find that if we take people off of pumps and have them inject insulin, they cannot inject into old pump sides because they won’t get predictable absorption of the insulin. They have to find new places to inject. I assume that the reason I have never seen any pump user controlled, except this one guy where I was able to catch him in his honeymoon period, is because of the scar tissue that forms. For some people it may take several years. But I would say that after seven years, everyone who used the pump gets scar tissue at the infusion sites.
By the way, I looked at the pump salesmen, who are frequently diabetic, and you get an A1C on them and it’s sky high. I have an A1C meter here in my office so that I can get it from a finger stick.
How do you define normal blood sugars? Are you going by blood glucose reading variability or do you have an HbA1c target that you strive for?
We have both A1C and blood sugar targets. The A1C target for most people is 4.2 to 4.6. This is a non-diabetic range. The target blood sugar we seek is 83.
Now how on earth did I get such an odd ball number like 83? I got it because we used to be located on a major thoroughfare, and we had a sign outside that said diabetes center. All of the meter salesmen would stop by and want to demonstrate their meter. And I would say, “Yeah, I have had enough finger sticks today. It’s your turn.” So we would stick their finger. And what would we get? It was amazing. People in their twenties and thirties all were around 83. And I said, “My God, that must be what a normal blood sugar must be.” That was before the days when they started hiring diabetics. Most of t
he pump companies nowadays hire diabetics.
Since that time, I have looked at the epidemiologic studies. It looks like the cut off point for mortality and heart disease is around 85. Those above 85 have higher relative risks of overall mortality and also cardiac risks. So it looks like what I happened on by chance is pretty close to the cut-off point that the epidemiologic studies show.
Are you striving to get your patients in a perfectly normal A1C range? Or is 5.5 good enough?
No, my patients will be worried if they have a 5.5 and will say, “Hey, that’s no good.”
At what number do you say, “Attaboy”?
I try not to make patients aware of my own value judgment, as if they’re being graded. When they get under 4.8, I’ll say, “You are a poster boy.”
Fair enough I fully agree with that. We have a “Testing Blood Sugar” forum and it drives me nuts. We have so many links coming in over the years that I really don’t want to change the name, but I really think it should be “Checking Blood Sugar” because you are getting actionable information, not giving yourself a test.
Right. The reason for the information is to tell you what to do next. I have a few a patients, not that many, who are so stable because they are making fair amounts of insulin on their own. Their blood sugars are always around 83. I say, “Look. There’s no sense in you doing eight blood sugars a day anymore. You do eight blood sugars one day every two weeks. If they’re all near your target, forget about it for another two weeks. If you see that you are falling out of line, start collecting eight a day for a week, fax them to me, and we’ll talk about it.
It seems like a better approach than telling someone to test once a day because you may miss trouble spots at other times.
It’s not only that. If you don’t have a precise regimen of what to do if you are out of line, there’s no values in the blood sugar.
I have two patients who have extreme scenarios. They would have pretty much perfect blood sugars for a couple of weeks, then they would go up for a week or two, then they would come back down. It turned out that both of these people had inflammatory disorders. Here was a case where it wasn’t “what does the patient have to do”. We had to figure out what is going on. Those were rare situations. Although we do have people that get root canal infections. Blood sugars go up. With a cold their blood sugars go up and so on. And all of this is covered in my book. Have you read any of my books?
No, I haven’t. I have one an order on Amazon. I went to two local bookstores and could not get the Diabetes Solution. I wanted to read it before our call today. I feel kind of guilty because it’s a personal bibles for many in our community.
It would be extremely valuable for your wife because it really tells you step by step what you have to do to keep your blood sugars normal. We also have something in there that is extremely important. Most diabetics have a deficit of amylin, which is the body’s major satiety hormone. It’s made by the beta cells that make insulin. So if you don’t have beta cells, you’re not going to make amylin and you are likely to be snacking or overeating or craving carbohydrates. Now it is possible to replace the missing amylin. We tell you in the book how to do that so that you won’t be hungry all the time.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the ACCORD study and those who suggests that striving for a really low Hb1AC can be dangerous. How do you interpret the results of that study?
As I recall, these studies were done in people who already had cardiac disease. And what did they do to try to get their A1C’s down? They did three things. Number one, they put people on ADA-type, high carb diets. Number two, they gave them maximum doses of sulfonylureas, which in my book, we absolutely recommend against. And number three, if sulfonylureas didn’t work, they gave them large doses of insulin.
It has been known for many years that sulfonylureas increase cardiac risk. It has actually been known since the 1970s, but they still manage to stay on the market. If you search on the internet for “ sulfonylureas and heart disease”, you’ll see that they increase the instances of heart disease. You’ll also search for sulfonylureas and hypoglycemia, and you’ll see that they increase the instances of hypoglycemia. And where you’re giving large doses of insulin, you’re going to give these cardiac patients hypoglycemia. How well are they going to survive severe hypoglycemia? Probably not very well. You’re interfering with the longevity of these people. On top of that, large doses of either insulin or sulfonylureas cause obesity. So, you’re making these people fatter. You’re just stacking the cards up against them.
The ADA has always been against normal blood sugars, except back in ’75 when one president of the ADA favored normal blood sugars for diabetics. This kind of study supports what they advocate. Now, why do they advocate elevated blood sugars where the A1C is 6.5 or 7? I’ve asked a number of the ADA presidents over the years. Not recently, because I haven’t been in touch with them recently. But back in the old days before I became a physician, I knew a lot of them, including my own physician. And he gave the same answers that the other presidents gave.
“If a diabetic goes blind, dies of congestive heart failure, dies of kidney disease, that’s to be expected. That goes with the disease. If a patient of mine dies of hypoglycemia, it’s my fault and I get sued. So, I’m going to keep my patients as far from hypoglycemia as I can.”
Now, if you have them on high carbohydrate diets, where the blood sugars can vary by plus or minus 150 in a day, you want to keep their blood sugars certainly above 250. And 200 is an A1C of 7.
You were the first person to promote the idea of home glucose testing after you had your wife procure a three-pound blood glucose meter in 1969 for $650?
Yeah.
The FDA is having hearings on blood glucose meter regulations. Is there anything you would personally tell the FDA?
Virtually, every blood sugar meter on the market is inaccurate. In fact, the bestsellers tend to be least accurate. The one that we recommend for patients – which I won’t mention now, but people can call my office to find out – is very accurate in the vicinity of 80 to 100 where I keep my patients. That’s why we use it. The most accurate by far is the HemoCue, which is accurate at higher blood sugars. Even the one that we use here is not accurate at high blood sugars. When you get up to 160, 170, my meter is not accurate.
The lack of accuracy is caused by poor quality control on the strips. It’s easy to make an electronic device that’s consistent. But it’s not easy to make blood sugar test strips that are consistent from batch to batch or in the middle of a batch. I’ll give you an example.
For a number of years, we recommended a particular meter that was very easy to use and was quite accurate at blood sugars around 80 to 100. If you did five blood sugars in a row, they were the same, plus or minus one. Then, all of a sudden, the numbers didn’t make sense. You did five blood sugars in a row and, let’s say, the real blood sugar was 85, they would vary from 70 to 110. It made no sense. So, I called the salesman of the company and asked him to find out what happened with these strips. What’s being done different? And it turned it out that they had been manufacturing them in the USA themselves, and to save money, they farmed them out to Thailand.
I think that that poor quality control on the strips is the biggest problem today. And as I said, the HemoCue is extremely accurate, but it’s large. It doesn’t use plastics strips, it uses glass slides. It’s very hard to use and it’s costly.
So there’s not a lot of mass market appeal?
Right. But I have a few patients who are affluent enough to buy their own hemoglobin A1C machines at $2,500. And they buy HemoCues so they can test the meters that they want to use.
I want to also point out that although we have a very accurate A1C meter that has been recommended as the best in the industry. It was not recommended for use by commercial labs because you can only do one test at a time. However it’s very accurate. Now companies have come up with throw away systems for doing it at home or in doctor’s offices. I’ve tested them and found them not to be accurate. So, your users better rely on the clinical laboratory and not on do-it-yourself A1C kits.
I’d like to ask the next few questions on behalf of members of the community. First, are very low-carb diets safe for children? Is it something you recommend?
Most of the kids I see actually eat less carbohydrate. If they’re little, they can’t eat that much. Number two, the effect on blood sugar will be multiplied in inverse proportion to their weight. The smaller they are, the more a little bit of carbs will raise them. And what we see is that these kids initially on the ADA diet have fallen off their growth curve. When you put them on a low-carbohydrate diet and normalize their blood sugars, they come back to their old pre-diabetes growth curve.
What are your thoughts on statins?
I have only prescribed statins in one or two out of thousands of patients. And those were both cases where these guys had very high lipids and family history of early cardiac death. So I concluded that perhaps their early cardiac death was due to high LDL, since my patients had higher LDL’s, I thought maybe I better play it safe. But I haven’t introduced statins for any other patients.
First of all, there’s the cholesterol controversy were we don’t know whether that’s really the bad guy. I think it’s 75% of the people who die of heart attacks have normal LDLs. Now, my statistic may be a little wrong, but it goes something like that. So, it’s not a certain situation.
At least half of the diabetics who walk in to my office the first time come here with low thyroid function. And low thyroid function is a major cause of high LDL in the general population. So, the first thing I do is correct their thyroid. The next thing I do is normalize their blood sugar. and then, as a rule, their lipids normalize. And the patients are astounded, they said “Yeah, I read about this in your book but I couldn’t believe that it would happen to me.” And this is what happened to me. I now have low triglycerides and today my LDL is 53 and my last HDL was 123. This is because of low-carbohydrate diet, proper control of my thyroid disease.
By the way, I’ve also seen many people on statins get side effects. You read opinions in the medical literature saying that side effects are extremely rare. And in my experience they’re common.
What are the most common side effects?
Muscle cramps. Another thing to worry about with statins is that the epidemiological statistics are such that if you are started on a statin and then suddenly stopped, you triple the risk of a heart attack.
I did not know that.
There is also another statistic out there. If you started on aspirin and suddenly stopped, you triple the risk of a stroke.
So don’t stop aspirin and statins on the same day?
Exactly, right! There is nothing out there in the way of studies where they’ve tapered off the dosing. So there are no guidelines as to how do you taper them off. I don’t want to be the responsible guy, so if a patient comes in here and he is getting aspirin and statin, I say to him, “You can talk to your cardiologist, but I am not going to tell you to stop or to taper off because I don’t know how.”
Moving on to the kidneys. If someone needs to restrict their protein intake, how does that work within your diet? Is that something that’s come up?
The restriction of protein intake is old, old time. It was born of a study by Barry Brenner at Harvard back in the 80s. He did a survey of the diabetologists in Boston: “Where do you like to keep your diabetics? What blood sugar?” And they said 250. So he said, I’m going to clamp my rats at 250 and put half on ordinary rat chow and half on a high-protein diet. All the rats died of rat kidney disease, diabetic kidney disease, but those on the high-protein diet died twice as fast. He got funding that enabled him to travel around the country boasting of this discovery.
He went to the ADA people in New York and said: “Do you like to keep your patient’s blood sugars at 250?” They all raised their hands. But I stood up and challenged it. I said, “Diabetics are entitled to normal blood sugars.” And I got booed.
That was the end of it as far as the general medical population knows. But five years later, I was collaborating on a study with the top guy in hyper-tension in the New York area. Very famous fellow, he pushed development of the ACE inhibitors. And his research fellow and I were working on a study that involved kidney function.. He presented the results at a kidney conference in Washington DC. And on the agenda for the same day was Barry Brenner. Brenner repeated his study with rats and this time clamped their blood sugars at 90. No rats died of kidney disease – they all lived healthy rat lives. That got published in the abstracts of this meeting. Long gone, it never hit the general population. Harvard did not pay for press releases or for a tour around the country. But he proved that he was wrong.
I have a more amorphous, philosophical question. In our community, there’s often strong divisions over the issue of moderate-carb versus low-carb diets. People have certain lifestyles that they value. And if they can get their A1c to 6 – or some people have higher targets – and they can get there eating all the foods they enjoy, they’re satisfied. On the other side, you have the people who firmly subscribe to your philosophy or a very close variant on it: 30, 45, maybe 60 grams of carbs a day. And there’s often a lot of heated and occasionally less-than-friendly debate over the issue. Could you speak to that debate?
What I do is I tell my patients, “Look, you’re the guy who has to decide what blood sugars you want. If you want to get the kind of blood sugars that I have, you’re going to have to follow a low carbohydrate diet. Because nothing else is going to work. But if it’s not that important then you decide your meal plan. I’ll help you guess the medications. They’re not going to work. Your blood sugars are gonna vary too widely, so we are gonna have to shoot for a higher average blood sugar to keep you from hypoglycemia and that’s your decision.”
Rarely does anyone take me up on that offer. Now, some people will call and say, “When I go out to eat, I eat everything they put on my plate or I eat the rolls when they put rolls on the table.” And those are the people that I give incretin analogs to curb their overeating and they’re very happy with that. Some people like to snack between dinner and bedtime. I give them incretin analogs to cover that period of the day. These are people who want to have normal blood sugars, and we’re helping them get around the craving.
The people on your site who are talking abo
ut lifestyle and things like that are people who do not have enough amylin. They’re diabetic. So they’re giving you excuses for a physiologic problem that they don’t even know about. They’re craving carbohydrates or food in general..
You give a hormone analog to make up for the absence of amylin?
The hormone analog that I like the best right now is called Victoza. The only problem is that it takes about two hours to get started working. But it lasts just about all day. The other hormones that we have like Byetta and Symlin are easier to focus on different times of the day. So, it’s just like using long and short-acting insulins and intermediate insulins. People are very grateful for these things. It literally turns their lives around.
Those cravings are one of the most difficult things that people have to deal with.
I remember when I started in practice, and I would talk to my wife about my patients. I had some fat patients and some that were type I but overeating. She said, “I don’t know how people can do that to themselves” as if it were a flaw in their character. And now I know that it’s biologic. They don’t have enough amylin.
I’ve had people who came to me only for weight loss who were not previously diagnosed with diabetes. But of course, I do an A1c on every new patient and a fat lady comes in and she has an A1c of 5.6. I examine her and I’ll find 20 different diabetic complications in early stages. So even an A1c of 5.6 is going to do a lot of damage over time. And we see that in the epidemiological studies at 5.6 and a average blood sugar of 124. That’s pretty far up.
It’s better than 250 if we can…
Well, the ADA would say the 250 is better than the 124!
It’s my sense from doing a lot of interviews that that philosophy is changing. If not fully at the organizational level, certainly amongst a lot of people within the organization. So that’s my positive take.
The lady who runs my office talks to prospective patients and almost without exception if they’re seeing an endocrinologist, he comments that their A1cs are too low.
Really?
An A1c of 5½ is too low. For many, a 6 is too low. I interviewed the director of the diabetes clinic at my hospital because I run the peripheral vascular disease clinic and I discover a lot of diabetics. I was trying to figure out if I should send them to him. And he said, we will not see a diabetic whose A1c is lower than 6½. and if anything, we would try to raise it.
That’s very frustrating to hear.
I run into this all the time. And the lady who runs my office gets these stories from the prospective new patients. I want to go to Dr. Bernstein because my doctor doesn’t want me to have normal blood sugars.
Dr. Bernstein, you’ve had quite a marvelous career, and I really want to thank you for answering these questions and sharing your time. From seeking a blood glucose meter in the 1960s, going to medical school in the middle of your life, and now doing what you’re doing: I think you’re a wonderful voice to add to the mix of people advocating on behalf of people with diabetes.
Thanks a lot David, it’s good to be talking to you.
To learn more about Dr. Richard Bernstein’s treatment approach, check out his book Diabetes Solution.