How I Beat Diabetes By Naturally Mastering My Blood Sugar With Chris Reade

In this episode, Adiel Gorel is joined by Chris Reade; entrepreneur, technologist, and author on a mission to change how we think about diabetes and food. After having a serious scare with diabetes, Chris refused to accept it as a life sentence—he took control, reversed it. Today, Chris shares his science-backed, practical approach, also featured in his new book, Beating Diabetes. Get ready for an eye-opening conversation on breaking free from medications, mastering blood sugar control, and living healthier—without extreme dieting.

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How I Beat Diabetes By Naturally Mastering My Blood Sugar With Chris Reade

Chris Reade’s Journey Of Breaking Free From Medication And Living A Healthier Life

It’s nice to be back here with you again. I’m very excited. We have Chris Reade, who can enrich us by teaching us about one of the most important things we can do for our health, to not get and handle one of the most rampant conditions that we have in the world, in general, and in the US in particular.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

How A Botched Insurance Renewal Led To A Shock Diagnosis

For us to be on the same page as well as our audience, maybe you can tell us your path and what led you to come to this point.

That’s a great way to start. For me, the whole journey to writing my book started in 2017, with the way things work out in life. It was a botched life insurance renewal that changed my life, of all the things that could change it. I had a standard life insurance physical thing, as you do when you get life insurance. My agent switched companies, and the renewal got screwed up. A year later, I had to do a second round because it never got renewed. I had to go to the second thing.

When I did the second one, my sugar had gone from pretty much normal, and in fact, all my stuff was normal, to an A1C, which is the average amount of blood sugar in your blood at any given moment in a month. 5.7 or lower is normal, and 7 or higher is pre-diabetes and diabetes. I was at 9.1 that morning, which is very high. I thought it was a mistake.

I did a whole lot of explaining away why this was. I went to a doctor, and she said, “Here’s a prescription for metformin. If that doesn’t work, we’ll get you on some insulin, and we’ll go from there.” I was like, “What?” I’d always been a healthy person. I was like, “I’m not diabetic.” She was like, “Let’s treat it like you are. This is a progressive incurable disease. You will have it for the rest of your life.”

I was very unhappy with hearing that, to say the least, as I’m sure many people who have had that happen. For me, it was a big shock because most people get this whole thing, like, “Adiel, your sugar is a little high. You should probably cut back a little bit.” That goes on for a few years. Your sugar gets a little higher, and then finally, you tip over into diabetes. In my case, it went from normal to completely elevated.

I did a lot of research and a lot of experimenting on myself. I tried different things. Ultimately, I discovered what I described in my book, which is a way to live without drugs that gets rid of Type 2 Diabetes. I hate using the word cure because I don’t think that’s an appropriate word in this case, so I would say put it in remission or beat it, however you want to look at it. For me, it was a botched life insurance renewal.

The “Italy Cure”: Why Dr. Ben Carson’s Friend Beat Type 2 Diabetes

I see. We are going to learn all about it. It’s interesting that I was driving and listening to Dr. Ben Carson.

He ran for president a number of years ago.

I believe he was Secretary of HUD in one administration.

That’s right.

He’s back with the health department. He was talking, and one of the things he said right off the bat got my ears perked. I want to see what you’ll say about this. He simply said, “I have a friend who had Type 2 Diabetes. He recently went to Italy. In two months of living in Italy, his diabetes was in remission or gone.” What he was trying to say is that in Italy, the percentage of highly processed food is low. When I think of Italy, I think about pasta. What do you make of that statement by Ben Carson?

To be honest, I don’t think you need to go to Italy to do that. You can do that at your grocery store.

The Italian grocery store or anything?

No, a regular world Safeway. I love Italy. I’ve traveled there a few times. It is notable whenever I’ve been there how much more natural food they serve. There’s very little highly processed food, certainly a lot less than Americans get. They do focus on a few things that are in my book and are spot on. Science has shown what this is.

The big thing for me is soluble fiber. That is the change that I made in my life that makes the difference. If you take nothing away from this episode, it’s that soluble fiber can defeat Type 2 Diabetes, full stop. The big difference is that there are a lot of beans and a lot of natural vegetables that are cooked in Italian food.  You end up with a lot of that. They also pace their food in a way that Americans do not.

Lastly, and this is one that’s only been scientifically examined a few years ago, is taking a stroll after dinner, which is an Italian staple. Every Italian does that after dinner. They get up and stroll around. For them, they’re very obsessed with digestion. Everything is for good digestion. It also happens to knock your blood sugar down by a substantial percentage. It’s just walking. I agree with Ben Carson in that sense. I don’t know that I need to go to Italy to do it. I’d like to. He’s spot on. That’s right down the fairway with everything that is in my book.

In my own experience, living this particular way of eating for eight years, I haven’t done a lot of extreme stuff. I don’t preach drugs. I don’t sell a lot of gadgets or special anything. Long before the book, I was trying to get drugs out of my life and be able to live like a normal person again. That’s all I wanted. In the end, it turned out to be concentrating on soluble fiber and treating myself better, and cutting added sugar out of my life. That was it. It takes discipline, but it’s not crazy amounts of discipline.

The Science Of A Post-Meal Stroll: Better Than Intense Cardio?

Even from what you’ve said so far, there’s a lot to unpack. I’ll start with the light stuff. I was talking to a Chinese friend. She told me that her parents used to say, “If you walk 100 steps after your meal, you’ll live to be 100.

That’s exactly what the studies showed. It blew me away, frankly. I play a lot of volleyball. After this interview, I’m going to go play ball for two hours. That intense exercise is not as useful, weirdly, as the stroll I take. I’m a big habit stacker. When I read about this study, I said, “I know what I’ll do.” We have two dogs. I was like, “I got to walk the dog anyway.”

I moved the dog walking time from before bed to after dinner. It’s a little more than 100 steps, but the idea is similar. I walk the dog around the block like lots of people. That’s more beneficial for my blood sugar than the two hours of intense cardio I’m going to do, playing volleyball. It’s amazing that it’s better, but timeliness matters.

I heard it throughout my life about walking after a meal. Some people say, in the most simple-minded thing, that it settles down your digestive whatever it is. One hundred is very little. While we were talking, I heard lunch crying out in the back of my head, saying, “What about me? Why are you talking about dinner?” Breakfast was also whining.

I’m big on habit stacking. For your audience, habit stacking is when you take a thing that you aspire to do or that you want to do, and you pair it with a thing that you are going to do. In my case, in the morning after breakfast, my wife and I walk to a coffee shop, and we get coffee there. Sometimes, we take the dog. Sometimes, we don’t take the dog.

The point is, we’ve made this a habit. It’s a nice time for us. It’s early in the morning. We walk together, go get some coffee, turn around, and walk back. It has the same pattern that you were talking about, where it gets us up after we eat to go do something that’s good for us, both in blood sugar and exercise. It’s good for you all over the place. Since we’re talking about blood sugar, it’s a good move after every meal. Certainly, lunch, too.

I’ve seen it in the media. It started to hit the media about walking after. When I encountered it the first time, it had a very bizarre and not the most savory name.

What was that?

I’m the messenger. Don’t kill me. They called it a fart walk. It was the media.

Whatever you want to call it. If it gets you up and gets you walking, that’s good for me. I’m a very practical person. Everything that’s in my book is about practicality because I can’t live on extreme diets, and I can’t live on extreme foods. If a fart walk is what it takes to get my blood sugar going and get my body to use it as food instead of storing it away in my bloodstream, then rock and roll. We can call it the fart walk, also. I don’t know if I’m going to put that in the book in version two, but I agree with you.

You said that it was a Chinese friend of yours. We mentioned Italy. A lot of cultures have that practice that we have learned in the West by studying it the way we study things scientifically. Why? That is a good idea. It is something that has been present for people for a very long time. Even if they weren’t sure, like, “It’s going to lower blood sugar,” when they didn’t even know what blood sugar was, they knew it was good for them, and they’ve been doing it. A lot of cultures that are in touch with their roots in that way have that habit. It’s a good one.

Soluble Fiber 101: The Key To Slowing Down Sugar Absorption

Let’s go into the soluble fiber. First, if you can define it and give examples. I know that most of our readers know about it, but maybe there are two people who don’t.

It doesn’t hurt to reframe it in case it can get a little specific. Let’s start with fiber. We all know what fiber is. It’s plant matter that is digestible or semi-digestible. That’s the big difference. Insoluble fiber, the fiber that you cannot digest, is whole wheat and corn. They’re all of those sorts of heavyweight, very fibrous things that you can’t digest. They go through you. They’re great for your gut. They’re great for digestion.

Soluble fiber, though, which is Brussels sprouts, broccoli, beans of all varieties, chickpeas, chia seeds, and is in lots of things, is the fiber that your body can digest, but it takes a long time to digest. Oatmeal is a classic example. That’s making the rounds on TikTok. Those are the fibrous types that will slow down the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream.

What this does and the reason that this is helpful for you if you were a diabetic is that it slows down the spike. What makes diabetes a dangerous disease to people is that their blood sugar starts at a level, and then they eat something that either digests into sugar or is sugar, and their blood sugar spikes up. When that happens, damage to your internal organs occurs. That’s what the A1C number is. That’s telling you how much spikiness you’ve had in the previous 30 days.

Let’s take edamame at a sushi restaurant. Soluble fiber slows down your digestion. When you have the white rice that you get in the sushi, which effectively becomes sugar, it’s slowed down. Since it is slowed down, a couple of things happen. One, you feel more full, which is great. Second, the sugar spike doesn’t happen, or it happens much lower. Over time, if you stay on a high soluble fiber diet, what happens is your blood sugar, on average, starts dropping.

In my case, I went from a 9.1, which is a pretty high number, all the way down to about 5.5 in about 3 and a half or 4 months. It can be very quick. It’s not something you have to be like, “I’ve got to be on this for a year to see what happens.” This function of eating or this way of focusing on soluble fiber knocks your blood sugar down because of what it does in the way your body digests it.

Let’s talk about those three and a half months. Let’s assume, for the sake of my question right here, that you eat three meals a day. You may not.

I do.

Here you are at breakfast. You are putting in soluble fiber. You had an oatmeal. Everything is good. At lunch, you put in chickpeas and hummus.

I had chickpeas and tomatoes for lunch.

You’re doing very well. At dinner, you went out with friends. You weren’t thinking so much because you were engrossed in conversation. There wasn’t any soluble fiber. It’s 2 out of 3. What happens?

If I were to go with your example there, which I will, in that restaurant, I’m going to get a spike. It’s not going to be great for me, but it’s not the end of the world. One of my chapters is on self-forgiveness. I don’t call this a diet because a diet is a thing you do for a while. With the way I eat, I’ve been eating this way for eight years, and I’ll probably eat this way for the rest of my life.

It’s background noise. I don’t even notice. It takes no effort. If I did, a better example for me in my life, because I live in New Orleans, and New Orleans is a very sugar-filled society, if it were Mardi Gras and there are king cakes all over the place when I go to somebody’s house, I’d be like, “I’m having some of that.” If I have that, I’ve got to get to the other side of that and forgive myself for falling off the wagon a little bit. If I don’t, then I’m going to end up feeling terrible the whole time.

This is what I do on my Instagram feed. I go to different restaurants around town here. I take their menu and show people what I eat on that menu. I have yet to find a restaurant in New Orleans that I can’t eat at and find soluble fiber on the menu. My daughter’s in college. We did parents’ weekend. Since it was parents’ weekend, we were being a little indulgent. I had dessert and all of that kind of stuff. Even when I was being indulgent, I did see the soluble fiber on the menu, and I did eat it. That helped me out when I decided to have a Chantilly lace cake at the restaurant.

If you do fall off the wagon, it’s not the end of the world because it’s a system. What I wrote about and the way I live my life is that it’s a system that means I’m prioritizing soluble fiber and de-emphasizing added sugar as much as I possibly can. If I sometimes screw up or I sometimes indulge, I have to forgive myself for that and move on, because if I don’t, I’m miserable.

Learning From Sports: Forgive, Forget, And Press On In Your Health Journey

In New Orleans, you have a couple of sports teams. One very great life lesson from sports is this issue of not only forgiving yourself, but you must press on. Let’s say you and I watch a basketball game. It was the Golden State Warriors, my team, versus the Pelicans, which I’m assuming is your team. Here we are, watching the game, and one of the players on the Warriors makes a stupid mistake and gives up the ball. It’s a turnover, and the turnover becomes a basket.

I, as the viewer, am already frustrated, harking back to the last few seconds in regret and asking what would have happened if they hadn’t done it. They would be up 3 instead of 2. The player doesn’t have that luxury. If they want to perform at the level that they need to, they must not only forgive themselves, but they must forget about it, like it never happened. They reset and start at zero. That’s a great analogy to what you were saying.

That’s spot on. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of sports, but I play a lot of sports, and I agree. You can think about it this way. Federer gave this famous commencement speech. I want to say it was for Brown or somewhere like that. He says this great thing. This is arguably certainly in the top 2 or 3 players who have ever played this game. He says, “Do you know how many points I’ve won in my career? 54%.” Meaning, he lost almost half of all the points he ever played. If he tortured himself over the half that he was losing, he’d never be a guy who would give a commencement speech at Brown. He would be a nobody. Your point on that is well taken.

I do it in my own life. Mardi Gras is going to come around in February. When it does, I know that I am going to be a big wimp on occasion and go to town on some king cake. I know that’s going to happen. Knowing that, there are a couple of things that I do. It’s going to sound silly, but it’s like a sports game. I prep ahead of time.

If I’m going to my buddy’s house for the parades, I am going to have my chickpeas and tomatoes for lunch so I’m not hungry. When I get there, if I do have some king cake, I’m going to have a little bit of king cake. It’s not that big a deal. I’m going to forget about it, enjoy my time, and then go back home. It’s a system. Basketball players or soccer players are good at this. You stay in that system and work that system. If you work that system, over time, those plays will start falling your way.

I think this is the same thing. I don’t have to test my blood sugar every day, not for years, because the system keeps me in line. As long as I stay in the system for fun and to make sure that I’m not missing anything stupid, once a quarter, I’ll take an A1C test. I did one not long ago. It was the end of the quarter. It was 5.1 or something like that. I was like, “I got it.” That’s it because you’ve got to work the system. You’ve got to stay and forget that you did the bad thing. You’ve got to move on.

The Fiber-First Strategy: How To ‘Buy’ An Indulgence With Food Staging

To refine the point a little bit, here you are, having a meal, and the meal has hummus in it, which is chickpeas.

That’s a great soluble fiber.

Maybe there are some other beans. You got your soluble fiber. At the end of the meal, you have the beignets. How does that compute?

Speaking of TikTok, it’s going around a lot, but there’s good science on this. That’s why I always say you’re loading up with the soluble fiber first because it’s effectively buying you the things that you want. That’s how I think of it. It’s buying me the things that I want. That also helps me stick to it because it gives me a goal.

We’re out having steak dinners. We’re going to have a fancy steak dinner with a few friends or whatever. I happen to love baked potatoes. Baked potatoes are my jam. I love those things, but they’re also a big old source of sugar. Potatoes turn into sugar when you digest them. What I’m going to do is I’m going to order a big old side of broccoli. I’m going to throw down the broccoli, have the steak, and then have the potato.

There’s a lot of science that shows that staging will give me the sugar buffer, if you will, so that the baked potato doesn’t nuke my sugar. I do think about it that way. In your example, you said you got a nice soluble fiber, and then dessert comes along, and you have some beignets. You should be all right. I’d love to see the science on exactly how much, but who knows?

I do think that day-to-day life is an ongoing thing. Avoiding sugar in general is not a bad thing to do. It’s okay from time to time on a birthday to have a cake, but it’s not like, “I had my soluble fiber. I have a license to kill now.”

It’s not like that. That’s the big thing for me. I’m not a, “You must have discipline,” kind of person. I’m a big old pushover. I’m the easiest-tempted person in the world. The system that I live by and that I wrote about in my book is predicated on not having to have a ton of willpower. When I looked at some of the other candidate ways I could have approached the problem, one of the classics, being super high protein and paleo-style stuff, I didn’t think I had the discipline for that, honestly. I didn’t think I could hack that one. Instead, I found a different one, which works for me.

It’s not a license to kill. It’s a system. I work that system every day at every meal. It’s so much a part of my life that it blends into the background that I don’t even notice. That is what people want. It’s certainly what I wanted, which was something that I could live with and be a normal person. I didn’t want to have to order weird food at the restaurant.

One of my coworkers is our head of sales. When my book came out, she said, “I read your book. I’ve had 100 meals with you, and I never noticed you eating differently once. I noticed you eat healthy, but I didn’t notice you doing any of this stuff.” I said, “That’s exactly the point. This is a me thing, not a us world thing.” I wanted it to blend into the background that I knew about, but I didn’t need to bother anybody else with it.

That makes a lot of sense.

That, to me, is what all of us would like. It’s what I would call a normal life. I got to eat some different stuff and think about it a little bit more than other people, but I don’t have to be that guy at the dinner table with the family who’s like, “Chris can’t have that. He’s got to do this other thing.” I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to be normal. That’s what this has given me. It’s what I wrote about.

Top Soluble Fiber Sources: Delicious And Easy Meal Ideas

Let’s talk about some more stuff. Before we move on to more stuff, maybe you can rattle off your favorite sources of soluble fiber.

My wife makes this. I have the recipe for this in my book. It’s this oatmeal casserole. It’s like a baked oatmeal with fruit and a little bit of dairy in it. It’s freaking delicious. That’s pretty much breakfast every day. You didn’t ask about this yet, but I think it’s important. I’m a software developer by trade. In my industry, we say ease of use equals use. If it’s easy, you’ll do it. That breakfast casserole is good for you. Of the things you could eat for breakfast in my house, it is the simplest, fastest thing you could eat in my house for breakfast. Therefore, it is what we eat for breakfast.

Also, it’s delicious.

It’s good. It’s right there. It’s in a 9×9 pan. Whenever we run out of one, we make a new one. It takes 30 minutes. It’s not a big deal. That gives us the simple, quick, easy go thing that I can do and walk out the door. Oatmeal is a big one for me, especially that oatmeal casserole. It’s freaking delicious. The tomato, feta, and chickpea lunch that I had was a delicious one.

I happen to be a big fan of broccoli. I eat broccoli like it’s going out of style. A lot of people might like beans instead. In fact, a lot of your Central and South American foods are perfect. You got a lot of black beans, a lot of refried beans, and stuff like that. A lot of your Mediterranean diet stuff is beans. I love those, too. I’m a big chickpea and hummus person. The one that’s least common that I like the most, I’m trying to think what that would probably be. Those are my big hits. Oatmeal, chickpeas, broccoli, and stuff like that. I have a list in my book.

What would you throw in fresh salads? Here, you go to a restaurant. You’re going to have two things. One of them is a nice salad. What would you like there to be in the salad?

For the salad itself, the leaves are an insoluble fiber. They’re going to be delicious, and they’re good for my digestion, but they’re not going to do anything for my sugar. I’m going to say, “Give me the chef salad that’s got broccoli in it.” It might have cut carrots. That’s very common in restaurant salads. A lot of times, they’ll have either cut green beans or radishes. I’m going to look for those things. Those are what I’m going to want in my salad. A lot of chef salads you see at restaurants have that stuff in them.

Even chickpeas.

Those are very common.

The Doctor’s Dilemma: The Drug Bias And Life Sentence Mentality

How worrisome is it that many doctors, not all, still have the belief, which is a little bit old, that the minute you are declared Type 2 Diabetic, it’s a life sentence? What do you make of that?

For the doctor that I first went to, I understand why she said what she said because that’s some of the training. If you’re a primary care physician in the United States, you’re seeing 40-plus patients a day. She had ten minutes with me. She was probably not going to see me for another 6 months to 1 year. She’s like, “What can I do for this guy that’s going to do it fast and get it clean?” She said, “Here, have some metformin. Call me later.” I get that, but you are correct.

I wish, and it’s starting to be the case, that people are realizing that Type 2 Diabetes, not Type 1, is a very beatable condition. It is a condition that can be changed without drugs. That is becoming part of the understanding of the mainstream. I’m glad because when I first started writing this book, that wasn’t as much. It was still starting. People were starting to talk about that. Now, there’s a more receptive idea.

She is correct in that most people who go to the doctor and say, “I’m going to beat this without drugs,” don’t have a plan. This is why I wrote a book. They don’t have a clue as to what they need to do in order to beat that. They say, “I’m going to stop putting sugar in my coffee. I’m going to stop having dessert, and that’s going to do it.” You’re going to have to do a little more than that, but most doctors in America don’t get to see the patient long enough to have that discussion. That’s horrible.

Also, the drug bias.

It’s so much easier. So

From stories of doctors about medical school, I feel like maybe medical school has become an Excel spreadsheet. There’s the condition, and then the drug. That’s the expectation. You come in with the condition, and it’s like, “Let’s look at my Excel. Metformin here. That’s what I’m going to give you. Go away. I have another patient.”

That’s very accurate. That’s true. I was reading an Agatha Christie novel before bed. It’s right in there. She’s talking about Americans and their pills. Americans love, “Take a pill. Problem solved.” We love that in this country, and it’s not the right answer a lot of the time. Some of the time, it is. For some of the time that it is, it’s important. There’s no treatment for Type 1 except insulin and a handful of other insulin-like drugs. That’s it. For Type 2, though, there are a lot of ways you can beat that. I happen to write about one. There are a few others that you can do. I agree with you. It is so much easier.

If you’re an overworked doctor and your training tells you, “Here’s this condition. Here’s the drug that treats it. I apply that drug, and then we’re done,” that’s treating the symptom, not treating the patient. There’s a subtle but important difference between those things. I’m hoping that we can get to a place where we can treat the patient more and get them to understand how they can control these outcomes.

The mindset about taking a pill and it takes care of everything that you have is the get-rich-quick mentality, also. Get-rich-quick has been an American fantasy from the very beginning. This is the get-rich-quick in terms of your body. It’s like, “Take a pill. That’s all you have to do.” You can tell that I speak with an accent. I come from another country. I have to tell you. I used to watch all these movies that came out of Hollywood. One thing that I saw all the time is that most people in the movies have a scene in the bathroom where they open up the little door on their cabinet, and there are all these orange opaque bottles.

They’re prescription bottles.

I always felt, “Am I a weirdo? Why don’t I have all of these? Why do they have a million pills that they take all the time?”

It’s true. I was heading down that path. If I hadn’t changed my life in 2017, that’s where I would be. I would open the medicine cabinet, and I would have a giant pile of pills in front of me. I agree with you 100%. That is the traditional way that we handle things in America. One of the things that we can do better, for sure, is treat ourselves with exercise, diet, and attention to our own bodies.

I told my daughter, “You get one of these. This thing that I’m walking around in is the only body I get. If I don’t treat it decently, then it’s not going to treat me decently, and I don’t get another one. This isn’t the far future where somehow, I’m magically going to put my brain into a robot or something. This is it. This is the me that I get.” That’s why I was so hell-bent on not continuing down the drug route. Once you start that and open the medicine cabinet, the next thing you know, there’s a plate of these things every morning for you.

Not to mention, the health department is starting to address it. When you come from another country, you are amazed. Most people skip the commercials on TV. You don’t want to watch them. Sometimes, you’re busy and they run. You see that it’s a commercial for the regular person about some drug. Usually, you see them frolicking, playing with their grandkids, or running on the beach and smiling, and there’s a monotone voice saying, “The side effects could mean death.”

It’s always death and mysterious kidney damage.

When you see it for the first time, your mind explodes.

Especially coming from another country. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling in my life, and you never see that stuff in other places.

Your mind explodes. You’re like, “What is this?’ They’re trying to get rid of it because it’s deceiving. Most people only see the frolicking in the field. They don’t see the side effects. I’ve already seen commercials for a drug to treat the side effects of another drug. It’s like, “Have you taken so-and-so and you are feeling horrible? We have that.” Again, there’s the frolicking on the beach.

If you have elderly parents, you’ll start seeing it. One of the things that has landed my father in the hospital a couple of times is this drug that he takes for this condition. Another doctor talks to him. They add this drug, and then that causes this one to be bad, so he has to take a fourth drug. The next thing you know, they pile on top of each other. This is going to be a little controversial, but I’m going to say it anyway. To me, that kind of medical intervention looks like slavery. I felt like I was going to be owned. I would not be able to travel the way I wanted to in my life, go to other places, and do stuff without dragging behind me a pharmaceutical kid.

There’s another name for it that some people might use. Cash cow.

People are like, “Why is this not more popular information in the United States?” I’m like, “It’s because there’s $100 billion made selling people diabetes drugs. Of course, there’s nobody concentrating on diet and exercise.”

Circadian Biology & Blood Sugar: The Role Of Light, Sleep, And Stress

I want to go at it from a completely different angle. You may be familiar with the rather flamboyant Dr. Jack Kruse. If not, all the universe’s circadian biology, mitochondrial biology, and the relationship that the human body has with the light of the sun, the sunrise, the sunset, sleeping in the dark, non-native EMFs that come from our phones, and all of that.

I have been doing a deep dive into this on this show and otherwise. One of the things that comes up all the time is diabetes. Mainly, rather than being indoors and staring at the laptop, I will take the crazy step of walking ten yards, opening the door, going out in the yard, and walking around near all the plants in the sunlight, maybe without my glasses on. You can read books about the breakdown of the entire light spectrum, all the way from the short ones, like UVB, and what it does, UVA, and the long ones, red and infrared. We’ve had people here on this show talk about it, and diabetes keeps coming up.

The big thing that I think is true, and there’s a chapter on this in exercise and sleep, is that there are a couple of things that the science says are going to mess with your blood sugar. One of them is being stressed out. The other one is being short of sleep, sleeping in an irregular pattern, or all that kind of stuff. There were two things that you mentioned in the background. Get outside and do some walking. If I get a work call, as often as I possibly can, I will put on my headphones and go walk around either my house, the yard, or the neighborhood outside. I will get outside for that. I’m doing that to lower the temperature a little bit and get the sun, natural light, and all of these things into my life. That’s super important.

I also think, and there’s a lot of science on this as well, that if you are getting craptastic sleep, you’re probably going to be having blood sugar issues at some point. Stress is inflammatory to your body. Bad sleep is inflammatory to your body. There are a lot of arguments that a lot of your diseases that plague us in the modern world are inflammation-related. I don’t think just walking outside and getting more light is going to solve my blood sugar problem, but it will help, for sure. It’s part of the equation.

How Modern Food And Lifestyle Created The Diabetes Epidemic

Let’s go back a couple of hundred years. Back a couple of hundred years, the fields and the soil had all the minerals. When you ate vegetables from the soil, you got your minerals. Now, many times, they’re depleted. They’re not even there. Many years ago, you woke up in the morning and spent most of your day outdoors. The night came, and there was no television, and there were no cell phones. What would you do there? Maybe a little fire, but then you’d go to bed.

You’re spot on. The background of that story you mentioned or that scene that you painted is that the food did not have a lot of added sugar, if any, and it was not highly processed. Those two things are missing in there. I was born in 1970. If you look at people in the 1940s and ‘50s, even, you see lots of skinny people. You see very few Type 2 Diabetics, relatively speaking. As you go along in my lifetime, you start seeing more and more of that stuff, but you also see in the background lots of processed food and tons of added sugar.

I go to task with a lot of the healthy foods. I have a whole chapter on how to read a label in a supermarket. It’s super easy. You have to pay attention to three things. It’s not a big deal. It takes no time. When you go to health foods, you’d be shocked at how much added sugar is in these supposedly healthy foods.

A Twinkie is a Twinkie. You look at a Twinkie. You know what an Oreo is. You go, “There’s no artifice here. They’re selling me a whole load of crap. This is a sugary sweet treat that is shelf-stable until the end of time.” There is nobody playing games about what that is. When you go to the health food aisle and see 15 or 19 grams of added sugar per serving, you’re like, “That’s 6 packets of sugar added to this stuff. This isn’t a health food aisle?” That gets me mad because that’s a product being sold to people who are trying to do the right things by themselves and, in fact, are screwing them over.

The “Unsweetened” Fight: Why Are All Healthy Products So Sugary?

This is a pet peeve. I had a scientist on this show a few years back. He was talking about a very useful product. I won’t go into the details. They sell a lozenge that makes a difference. I was very excited and bought the lozenge. When I took it, I was shocked. It was unbelievably sweet. The assumption is that people are not going to want to buy it, not in this country anyway, if it’s not super sweet.

My position is to always let me have it unsweetened completely. If I want to add sweeteners, I can do it. They treat us like children. That useful product became unusable, for me at least. Let me have it unsweetened. If I want to add sugar, I can bring a sack of sugar and pour it. That’s up to me. It’s frustrating. I agree. As you see on the web, everybody tries to come up with the best protein bar. They’re like, “My bar is the best with only natural ingredients. Only this. Only that.” You read the reviews, and half of them talk about the taste. They’re like, “The taste is such a good taste.” Why is it a good taste? It’s because it’s sugary.

Added sugar is a plague on modern society, honestly. It’s hard to realize until you start looking how much of it there is. When you start looking and your eyes are open to it, it’s like, “Wow.” It’s everywhere. With natural foods, I’m with that. You can add stuff to oatmeal to make it unhealthy, and they do, but the base food itself is pretty darn good for you.

My first exposure to all of this was when, many years ago, I had a friend, and she recommended a little book, a very unassuming little paperback, called Sugar Blues. That was an eye-opener.

I’ll check that one out.

It’s a little bit old-fashioned. It’s from many years ago. It was talking about all the things that we know so well, like how you called sugar by different names.

All the games we play to name things what they aren’t.

Going to Italy and getting rid of Type 2 Diabetes in a couple of months, as Ben Carson said, also has to do with the fact that his friend went to the Amalfi Coast and was getting more sun and was walking or grounding his feet in the sand.

He was probably walking, getting some exercise, getting out in the open air, and eating food that was not processed and did not have a lot of added sugar to it. You get a lot of soluble fiber in natural foods like that. I don’t think you have to go to Italy to do that, but it sure can open your eyes to why it is that it’s so hard in the United States to live that way.

If people take the stance of, “I’m not even going to eat anything.” It could be extreme. That includes oatmeal. Nothing from the center of the store, only the periphery. No problem with that either. What else do we need to know?

We talked about forgiveness. I would also say that stress is a big raiser of your sugar level. I’m a big believer in getting a good night’s sleep, getting some exercise, and doing some meditation. Whatever meditation floats your boat. It doesn’t seem to matter. Science says any meditation that calms your mind will help your sugar level.

Also, the normality. If you’re going to beat diabetes without drugs, the only way you’re going to do that in the long run is if it becomes normal. That’s what the book is about. It is coming up with a new normal that works for you that you can do every day for the rest of your life. That will not only get rid of diabetes, but it will do a whole bunch of other good things for you.

My triglyceride numbers went down. My cholesterol numbers went down. Diabetes was the thing I was going after, but I also dropped almost 25 pounds. I didn’t do it by dieting. If you’re concentrating on eating whole foods, soluble fiber, and all of this stuff, a byproduct of that is all of these other good outcomes that you get. That is the last word of that. It’s not just your blood sugar, which is great and super important, but it’s so many other things as well.

You mentioned you come from software development. You are a very logical person. My background is in electrical engineering and computer science, so a lot of that, too. You are an entrepreneur. I’m going to play devil’s advocate. People are going to hit you and say, “Are you an MD? No? Why are you even talking to me?”

I have a whole chapter, which I should have mentioned earlier, called Studies I Bet My Life On. I call that chapter that because I agree 100% with the criticism you imagined. Read it yourself. Don’t believe me. That’s cool. I don’t want you to. I’m a science-based person. I don’t want you to believe anything I say. Go and read it. Check it out for yourself, and then you can read what I have to say with the eye of, “Now I know why you said these things.”

I agree. I don’t take anybody’s word for it. That’s what science is. It’s not taking other people’s word for stuff. That’s what I would encourage anyone to do. Read the book. Read the studies. They’re all linked right there. You can read them all online. A lot of them are surprisingly, for science-based stuff, easy to read, the extracts at least. They’re very straightforward. The evidence is there. In the long run, I’m not a doctor. I don’t think a doctor would’ve written this book because a doctor would’ve concentrated on the medical side of it. I’m concentrating on how you do this every day with a minimal amount of effort that will keep it going for years on end. That’s what I’m concentrating on.

I’ll strengthen your point. There have been some very good books and good information disseminated by people who are investigative journalists, people who went deep into the rabbit hole and studied. You’re right. We already know that having an MD in front of your name is not a guarantee that you know this or that. It all depends on you as a person. You can say, “I’m not an MD. Refute me. Prove me wrong. Show me how stupid I am. Please show me.”

There are some studies. One of the things I do that’s implicit, and we didn’t cover it, but it’s there, is that I treat a gram of sugar or dietary sugar, meaning white starch, rice, potatoes, or something, as a buffer for that would be a gram of soluble fiber. That’s how I do that math. I’m practical. I got to live this way, so I do 1:1. That’s probably not the right number. I don’t know if it’s half a gram to a gram. I don’t know that.

I would welcome a study on it. It would make me so happy for them to be like, “Chris, you don’t know what you’re talking about. One in three-quarters of a gram of soluble fiber is enough to offset a gram of sugar.” I’m down with that. That doesn’t refute the point you made, which proves me wrong. That’s great. If you do, you’re only going to prove what’s helping people out. I’m down with that completely.

We talked about cakes and ice cream before. What do you think of wine and alcohol in general?

Alcohol is an interesting case. The biggest myth in Type 2 Diabetes is that alcohol metabolizes to sugar. It does not. It is, in fact, the opposite that makes alcohol dangerous, which is that alcohol takes up your liver’s time in processing it. As a result, your body doesn’t produce as much byproduct sugar. What happens when you drink, especially if you do heavy drinking, is that you will lower your blood sugar. This is why, for Type 1 Diabetics, drinking is super dangerous. It’s not because it raises their blood sugar, but because it drops it like a stone.

Red wine, if anything, is going to do a little bit to lower your blood sugar. I would probably argue that a lot of red wine, like a lot of bourbon or a lot of anything, is probably not good for you, no matter what. I love bourbon, so I’m not being Mr. Teetotaler here. A little red wine is not going to hurt anybody. A lot of red wine and a lot of bourbon is probably a bad idea.

What about white wine?

There’s an interesting question in science on this. There was all that resveratrol stuff that was studied in ‘04, ‘05, and ‘06 when people were talking about why the French don’t have all these other diseases. I would also point out that the French also make lots of whole foods in their cuisine and do lots of after-dinner walking and all of that kind of stuff. Maybe that has something to do with it. To be old Ben Franklin talking about Americans on it, moderation in everything except moderation. With white wines, I don’t know the science on it, but I would imagine it’s no worse than red wine. If anything, it’s alcohol, so it’s going to lower your blood sugar a little bit, at least in the short-term.

How To Find Chris Reade’s Book And Resources

What’s the name of your book?

Beating Diabetes. @BeatingDiabetesUS is also the Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn handle.

To disseminate what you have learned, do you use those channels that you mentioned in the book, or do you do anything more? Do you work with people? What do you do?

I don’t work with people, but there’s the book. There are podcasts like this. On my Instagram, I do a weekly segment where I go to different restaurants. I’m starting to do this in the food store as well. As you said, to dare to go to the middle of the food store, beard the dragon in its den, and read the labels. It’s very instructive. There are some good things that can be found in the middle of the food store. You just have to know what you’re looking for. That’s what I used on those other social channels. It’s to help folks pick this information up and use it for themselves.

If people want to find you, BeatingDiabetes.us will be a good hand.

BeatingDiabetes.us is the website. You can get to all of the other stuff from there.

I want to thank you very much for taking the time. It was a lot of fun. I hope to see you at some point.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on. This was a good conversation.

Important Links

• Chris Reade
• @BeatingDiabetesUS on Instagram
• Beating Diabetes on LinkedIn
• Beating Diabetes
• Sugar Blues

About Chris Reade

Chris Reade is an entrepreneur, technologist, and author dedicated to innovation and empowering others through transformative ideas. As the founder of LookFar, he has supported nearly 200 startups, providing software development, strategic guidance, and community leadership through initiatives like the Ada Lovelace Awards, which celebrate women in technology. Chris also founded Carrollton Enterprise Services, specializing in disaster recovery and corporate innovation.

His new book, Beating Diabetes: How A Botched Insurance Renewal Saved My Life, chronicles his personal journey of reversing type 2 diabetes through science-backed, practical strategies. Combining his entrepreneurial expertise with a passion for health advocacy.

Chris offers a unique perspective on taking control of life’s challenges. Recognized with honors like the Entrepreneur of the Year for Louisiana in 2023, he continues to shape technology, entrepreneurship, and wellness conversations in Louisiana and beyond.