Injected insulin was first used to treat diabetes in 1922, but ancient Egyptian doctors wrote the first recognizable documentation of the disease in approximately 3,500 BC. Doctors in ancient India also recorded diabetic symptoms and dietary treatments. In the many intervening years, diabetes had to be managed with diet alone. These methods had varying (but almost always minimal) degrees of success.
Ancient History
The ancients attempted to cure diabetes using herbs and minerals, but the life-prolonging benefits of these attempts were negligible.
The Early 1900's
In 1796, a Scottish doctor named John Rollo used urine testing to develop a low-carb diet meant to reduce the amount of sugar in his patients' urine. In the early 1900's, Dr. Frederick Madison Allen further developed those theories to prescribe a near-carb-free 'starvation diet'. Though this method reduced his patients' glycosuria, the disease remained a death sentence.
Recent History
At around the same time as Dr. Allen was working on the problem, Dr. Elliott Proctor Joslin (founder of the still-innovating Joslin Diabetes Center) was enrolling diabetics in a live-in program to better study the effects of calorie restriction on their symptoms. The results pointed beyond carbohydrate restriction and reliance on animal proteins to control the disease, indicating that lowering the overall calorie consumption of the patient and emphasizing fresh vegetable foods was a more reliable method of control.
Considerations
The diet that physicians most often recommend to support clinical diabetes control is high-fiber, low-fat, and low in simple carbohydrates.
Warning
Diagnosed diabetics should never attempt to control their disease through diet alone without a doctor's input.
Fun Fact
Ancient doctors determined whether their patients had diabetes or not by tasting their urine. If it had a noticeably sweet taste, the patient was deemed diabetic. Diagnosticians went on to use this eyebrow-raising method of monitoring diabetic blood sugar until the 20th century.
Tags: diet alone