Metformin for Prediabetes—Drug Marketing Run Amok!

In this recent study from an American Medical Association journal, “Metformin Prescription for Insured Adults With Prediabetes” The message is clear, doctors should use the drug metformin more aggressively in individuals who have prediabetes. Over one-third of adult Americans has high blood sugar—higher than normal, but not yet type 2 diabetes—and they should all be on this drug. Here’s the backward economy of pharmaceutical medicine, where suppliers create and define demand.

If you had gestational diabetes (high blood sugar during pregnancy) or have abdominal weight gain with high sugars or high triglycerides, beware—your medical provider is being told to prescribe metformin more liberally. And not to reverse the condition, but to delay the inevitable march to type 2 diabetes. Exercise works better than metformin, research proves this point, but most doctors probably don’t live up to their fitness needs, so why are they our guide to choose between exercise and metformin. And it is a choice—I wrote a piece last year about how metformin interferes with your ability to exercise and prevents you from living the benefits from your fitness routine. So while this drug might postpone type 2 diabetes onset for a few, it interferes with the ability to cure and prevent type 2.

I cringe when I see drug study headlines use the term “prevention” when the data merely display postponement. My message to those with abdominal weight gain or gestational diabetes or any other expression of prediabetes: find the unique steps that work for you to cure, resolve and reverse the process that leads to illness. Health, prevention of disease and vitality are within your grasp, not with another off-label drug but through the wildly effective low-fat, high-carb diet that matches your current expression of insulin resistance. [See Step Three of The Blood Code]