Carey Reams 1978 interview with ACRES USA on Hypoglycemia

ACRES USA: How widespread is hypoglycemia?

DR. REAMS: At least 20 million hypoglycemics is the estimate of Dr. Carlton Fredericks, president of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine. The problem is that the symptoms are almost identical with those of many varieties of mild, or even serious mental disturbances. Most doctors improperly diagnose hypoglycemia as a psychiatric disorder, a neurosis or worse. So they reach for a bottle of sedatives. Those few doctors who do suspect hypoglycemia use the glucose tolerance test. Unfortunately, this test is deeply flawed and cannot be relied upon.

ACRES USA: What is hypoglycemia?

DR. REAMS: Hypoglycemia is a particularly nasty disease in its effects on the sufferer. The dominant characteristics include tiredness and lack of energy, unusual nervousness and irritability, dizziness, and often the most excruciating headaches. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you have hypoglycemia, it’s almost impossible to perform well either on your job or in your marriage. On the one hand, you don’t have enough energy to do an adequate job or to cope with the strains of normal life. On the other hand, your nervousness and irritability makes you unpleasant to be with.  I’ve treated many hypoglycemics, even young men and women in their 20s, who were unable to hold down a job because of their disease. I’m convinced that hypoglycemia is one of the leading causes of divorce. If the disease makes you difficult to work with, it must make you almost impossible to live with.

ACRES USA: What are the other symptoms of hypoglycemia?

DR. REAMS: Well, insomnia is one. That of course adds to the victim’s lack of energy and nervousness. The inability to tolerate even mildly loud noises is another. If someone you know reacts particularly negatively—maybe starting to cry—to a dog’s barking or bottle dropping into a garbage can, that person may well suffer from hypoglycemia.  Hypoglycemics are also highly prone to allergies. Asthma attacks, too, can be precipitated by low blood sugar. One of the more exotic symptoms of low blood sugar is heart palpitations. You can feel your heart skip a beat and slow down. It feels as if your heart is trying to stop, Although these palpitations aren’t quite as intense as real angina pains, they’re understandably frightening, particularly since the hypoglycemia has made the person quite nervous to begin with. Dizziness and light-headedness are other symptoms of hypoglycemia: These can be particularly dangerous if you drive your car a lot. In a few cases, the dizziness is so extreme the person blacks out. Hypoglycemia frequently goes undiagnosed. The symptoms are all commonplace, like fatigue or headaches, so that most people don’t even know something is the matter with them. If they do go to a doctor, in many cases they won’t get relief beyond an aspirin because the doctors simply aren’t trained to spot it.

ACRES USA: What causes low blood sugar?

DR. REAMS: The true cause of hypoglycemia is a liver malfunction. In hypoglycemia, the liver malfunction affects you in several ways. To begin with, the liver is supposed to stabilize your blood sugar in several different ways: by storing sugar when there’s too much and releasing it when more is needed; by maintaining the right chemical balance for insulin—which is essential for proper maintenance of blood sugar levels; and by regulating the production of insulin by the pancreas. In hypoglycemia, the liver fails to properly convert excess sugar into reserve sugar, called glycogen. Because of this the liver doesn’t have enough reserve sugar to release when it’s needed. Moreover, the liver frequently allows the chemical balance of the blood to become too alkaline. This sharply increases the potency of the body’s insulin, which in turn then drives blood sugar levels down abnormally low. In other cases, the liver allows the blood to become too acidic. This decreases insulin’s potency, allowing the blood sugar to go too high. If you were healthy, your body would adjust the blood sugar back to normal. But when you’re hypoglycemic, your body overreacts and forces the blood sugar below normal. So in either case, an improper chemical balance in the blood-caused by a malfunctioning liver allows blood sugar levels to go below normal. In addition, when the liver malfunctions it fails to detoxify and remove various waste products from the body. These build up in the blood and also interfere with insulin’s ability to control blood sugar levels. Finally, when the liver malfunctions it allows the pancreas to produce too much insulin—which causes low blood sugar. This is the main reason for hypoglycemia.

ACRES USA: Why does hypoglycemia cause so many problems?

DR. REAMS: The liver malfunction causes low blood sugar. When your blood sugar is too low, your brain becomes starved for energy. This is because the brain burns only sugar, unlike other parts of the body which can burn either fats or sugars for energy. Natural consequences of a lack of fuel in the brain include the migraine headaches, dizziness, and the symptoms of mild mental disturbance. When the liver isn’t working properly, nutrients are not absorbed. So the patient is undernourished and it’s not surprising that he or she feels tired all the time. Likewise, when the .liver doesn’t work properly, it fails to produce enough hydrochloric acid for proper protein digestion. Urea, a waste product, builds up. This causes tension and insomnia. In turn, this leads to more fatigue, more headaches and more irritability—a vicious cycle. Finally, when the liver is weak, the body becomes hypersensitive to certain starches because it can’t metabolize them properly. It’s not necessarily all starches that cause problems, just some of them. Depending on the patient, it could be wheat, oats, potatoes or something else. Whatever the food, when the hypersensitive patient eats it, it breaks down too quickly into sugar. The blood sugar level, first soars too high, then plummets too low. This leads, as I pointed out earlier, to still more headaches and fatigue.

ACRES USA: What are the main reasons for this liver malfunction?

DR. REAMS: You could be deficient in chlorophyll, oxygen, or calcium—three nutritional elements essen­tial for the liver. When, for instance, the liver lacks calcium, it can’t produce enough hydrochloric acid to digest food properly. Another reason for a sluggish liver is that the person may be eating large amounts of certain foods which put stress on the liver. I’m referring to foods such as nuts & nut butters, meat, whole milk, and cheese. These foods require lots of hydrochloric acid for their digestion. The liver, which must produce the acid, wears down trying to meet the demand. Finally, the liver may malfunction because a person fails to drink enough pure water to keep the liver cleansed of wastes.

ACRES USA: Why is the glucose tolerance test not a reliable means of detecting low blood sugar?

DR. REAMS: First, the test itself is six hours long and is stressful. The stress and the patient’s natural nervousness about the test’s results can and often do affect blood sugar levels. Second, a person may not be sensitive to the glucose solution used in the test, but may be sensitive to other carbohydrates. In this case, the test will simply fail to detect the hypoglycemia. Third, the test only measures the levels of glucose in the blood. However, there are many other kinds of sugars besides glucose. If you don’t measure the total amounts of all kinds of sugars in the blood, you get an inaccurate reading. Fourth, the blood sugar can fluctuate so rapidly that even a series of readings won’t give you reliable data. Fifth, the patient’s blood sugar level may be normal most of the day, except for certain brief periods when it plunges too low. In such cases; the test will probably indicate a normal blood sugar—and miss the problem. Between these five factors, you can see that the glucose tolerance test will often give hypoglycemic readings when there are none; and vice versa, will often give “all okay” readings when hypoglycemia is actually present.

ACRES USA: Then how do you detect hypoglycemia?

DR. REAMS: We use the urine test. It measures the average blood sugar level by measuring urinary sugar levels. The sugar levels in the urine are relatively stable, so the urine test is superior to the glucose tolerance test in this respect. The urine test is non-stressful to the patient, so stress is eliminated as a factor. And the urine test measures all sugars, not just glucose. [Supplemental note: this test employs an ordinary brix refractometer.   According to the RBTI, a urine brix reading of 1.5 is perfect when all other equation numbers are perfect.]

ACRES USA: Can hypoglycemia be cured?

DR. REAMS: The program we recommend cures hypoglycemia in most cases. The secret is to correct the problem—liver malfunction—rather than to treat the symptom—low blood sugar. To correct the liver malfunction, we use the lemon water fast. The lemon water fast produces a rapid improvement in liver function. It also rejuvenates and detoxifies the body. As the body is detoxified and rebuilt, many hypoglycemics experience a “healing crisis” similar to what drug addicts go through in “withdrawal.” Nausea, vomiting and blackouts often occur. Vomiting is just one of the means by which the body rids itself of the poisons accumulated over the years. The blackouts occur, paradoxically, because the body is getting well so rapidly. What happens is that the liver begins to produce many previously lacking enzymes which are needed by the pancreas. When the pancreas suddenly receives this wealth of enzymes, it overreacts and for a short time produces too much insulin. This drives the blood sugar down too low and can cause a blackout. It’s unfortunate, but it is part of the natural healing process. Because the lemon water fast is so powerful, I want to warn all that no person should undertake this fast unless he or she first takes the urine test. Only then can one tell whether it is safe for them to do it without supervision.

ACRES USA: What happens after the fast is completed?

DR. REAMS: Each person is different. However, the general guidelines we follow include a fairly low-fat, low protein diet high in natural carbohydrates. The diet includes grains, vegetables and fruits. Clean meats are allowed several times a week according to the kind of job the person holds. People in physically demanding occupations may require more meat than others. The diet is generous in what it allows. However, we do restrict certain foods to try to eliminate those carbohydrates to which the patient is hypersensitive. We usually remove the Irish white potato from the diet since many, many patients are hypersensitive to it. Another natural organic food which, seems to be harmful to many hypoglycemics is—surprisingly—honey. So often we eliminate honey from the diet, too. Many people who have no problem with one kind of starchy food cannot tolerate similar though somewhat different foods. For example, many people do just fine, with sweet potatoes but are hypersensitive to white potatoes. Others can tolerate maple syrup, yet are hypersensitive to honey. An integral part of the daily diet is fresh raw green salads. This is to supply chlorophyll which the liver needs to produce enzymes. Vegetables rich in chlorophyll include such things as lettuce, escarole, endive, romaine, comfrey, spinach, celery tops, onion tops, green beans and so forth. Chlorophyll in the form of “green drinks” is also important. Take the same type vegetables you used in your salad and juice them with a vegetable juicer or a blender.

ACRES USA: What else do you do to help the hypoglycemics?

DR. REAMS: One of the most important is the distilled water cleansing program. Although most people don’t realize it, they have a lot of sugar—including white sugar; sugar from honey; and sugar from fruit—packed into their muscles and fatty tissues. It’s packed in there because their sugar metabolism wasn’t functioning properly. Their body neither burned those sugars for energy nor excreted them. Until these stored sugars are flushed out of the system, the body may release them into the blood at any time, disrupting the blood sugar level. The distilled water cleansing program is designed to rid the body of these sugars—thus clearing the way for a stable blood sugar level. Next, we recommend that the patients take Min-Col, which is one of the finest mineral supplements available. You can never be sure that the vegetables and meats you eat contain essential minerals. Therefore, we suggest Min-Col capsules, which contain minerals in the same form as in fruits and vegetables. Then we tell patients to eat their fruits and starchy foods before two in the afternoon. Your body needs energy earlier in the day, not towards evening and bedtime. If starchy foods and fruits are eaten after 2 pm, the energy that’s released is not completely used, and the sugar builds up in the bloodstream. Finally, we insist that everyone get plenty of fresh air and do deep breathing exercises daily. This is to assure that your body gets plenty of oxygen.

“The high protein diet only provides temporary relief, but is not a cure.”

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: What do you think of the popular high-protein diet?

REAMS: I know some people feel better on the high protein diet. However, the high protein diet only provides temporary relief but is not a cure.

The short-term relief occurs because the diet eliminates many carbohydrates to which the patient was hypersensitive. However, by itself, the high protein diet does nothing to correct the malfunctioning of the liver and pancreas.

Moreover, over the long-term, the diet can actually worsen the problem. This is because large quantities of hydrochloric acid are needed to digest all the protein. The liver begins to wear down trying to meet the demand. As we’ve seen, it is this liver malfunction that originally causes hypoglycemia.

Finally, on the high protein diet, urea builds up due to poor protein digestion. This leads, as we saw last time, to explosive tension and heart attacks. Ironically, some hypoglycemic die from heart attacks brought on by the high protein diet, the commonly accepted cure.

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: How well does your program work, Dr. Reams?

REAMS: So far I have worked with several thousand patients and the great majority of them are now totally free of hypoglycemia.

Many of them see improvement only several days after starting the program. The first sign of health generally appears when the tongue once again assumes a healthy pink color. After that, the pale, worn-out look disappears and the color returns to the face. Wrinkles seem to vanish, almost as if the patients had a face lift.

Within a few weeks, the patients are amazed at how well they feel. The fatigue, tension and irritability are gone. Their zest for life comes back. The patients become easy to get along with and a joy to be around. With their newfound energy, they go back to the jobs and do, as a rule, far better than ever before.

One patient said, “It feels as if I were just born again.” Another recent one thanked me and said simply, “What blessed relief.” I have received hundreds of other notes and comments like these.

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: One last question, before we go on to diabetes. How permanent is this improvement? I mean, once the patients leave you, does the improvement stick?

REAMS: Generally yes. Once the hypoglycemics are well, the improvements are permanent, provided they stick to the program. Once the liver and pancreas are functioning properly, the patients can go from meal to meal – five hours apart – without a single snack. They can eat a wide variety of foods – including many carbohydrates – without fear of low blood sugar. Incidentally, the craving for sweets disappears for good. How long does this improvement last? Some of my patients who were treated ten years ago still keep in touch regularly. They’re doing fine.

“{Diabetes} often leads to blindness, loss of limbs and even to fatal heart disease.”

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: Turning now to the opposite condition, high blood sugar or diabetes, what are the symptoms?

REAMS: Many of the symptoms are similar to those of hypoglycemia. The victims are tired and lack energy. They’re unusually nervous and, like the hypoglycemic, quite unstable. Diabetics suffer from headaches, dizziness and lightheadedness. Like hypoglycemic, diabetics have notoriously “sweet tooths.”

However, diabetes is far more severe than hypoglycemia.

It often leads to blindness, loss of limbs and even to fatal heart disease. As you mentioned earlier, diabetes is the third worst killer in America, claiming over 300,000 lives a year.

Eye problems begin with blurred vision and pressure behind the eyes. Frequently, the eyeballs become dilated. If the condition is not corrected, all vision can be lost permanently. Indeed, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in adults.

One little diabetic boy, just 14 months old, was well along the way to losing his vision. His eyes were puffy and swollen and looked as if they were going to pop out of his head. If his condition had not been corrected, this child would have been blind by the time he was ten.

Loss of limbs can and does result from seemingly minor skin rashes, cuts or sores. As the diabetes worsens, these take longer and longer to heal – sometimes months for a minor nick or scratch. Eventually, they don’t heal at all. Instead, gangrene sets in and amputation is the only way to save the person’s life.

Sexual problems are another unfortunate result of diabetes. Several studies show that 25% to 50% of male diabetics are impotent – percentages which are far higher than among healthy males.

Female diabetics fare even worse. Their genitals become itchy and infected with fungi. Quite often, they complain about foul smelling discharges from their urogenital tract.

Circulation problems are frequent among diabetics. As you’d expect, poor circulation leads to heart problems. Indeed, it’s well-established that diabetics are quite prone to heart attacks.

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: And don’t most diabetics have excessive thirst?

REAMS: Oh, yes, thank you. Diabetics often drink enormous quantities of liquids. As a result, they must urinate frequently. Certainly not serious, but quite an inconvenience on the job, while traveling, or when you are trying to sleep.

[ACRES OR HEALTHVIEW]: How does diabetes cause so many problems?

REAMS: It’s much the same mechanism as hypoglycemia – liver malfunction. The liver fails to stabilize blood sugar; fails to maintain the proper pH of the blood; and fails to process and absorb nutrients properly.

In diabetes, the liver frequently allows the blood to become too acidic. This reduces the potency of the body’s insulin. The consequence is that, overall, there is too much sugar in the blood.

[BEGIN JESSE PART OF INTERVIEW HERE]

However, the blood sugar level may fluctuate widely, plummeting down for short periods of time to abnormally low levels and then coming back up again. This occurs because the liver and pancreas are weak, and as a result, they continually overreact – first to high blood sugar levels and then to low blood sugar levels. These extreme blood sugar fluctuations disrupt the brain’s activity. It loses its ability to regulate the use of salts and sugars.

As a result, mineral salts accumulate in the blood vessels. This causes hardening of the arteries.  Simultaneously, various sugars accumulate in the tissues. This causes excessive thirst. It’s just your body’s natural cleansing mechanism telling you to flush out these excessive sugars.

ACRES: And why do cuts fail to heal? [This question & answer not in Dr. Jesse’s transcript]

REAMS: Liver malfunction prevents the proper absorption and use of vitamin A, which leads to a vitamin A deficiency. As you probably know, vitamin A is essential for proper healing. The lack of it is a major cause of the frequent rashes diabetics suffer and the reason why their cuts and sores fail to heal.  The lack of vitamin A is also the primary reason for the vision problems diabetics suffer. It is well known that vitamin A is essential for your eyes.

The reason why diabetes causes the sexual problems I described earlier isn’t completely known. However, there is research indicating that the diabetic’s liver malfunction causes a hormonal imbalance which could cause the problem.

ACRES: If both diabetics and hypoglycemics suffer from a liver malfunction, then what is the difference between the two diseases? [This question & answer not in Dr. Jesse’s transcript]

REAMS: Actually, hypoglycemia – low blood sugar – is just the forerunner of diabetes. If hypoglycemia goes undetected and untreated, it frequently degenerates into fully developed diabetes,

In diabetes, the liver malfunction is more severe than in hypoglycemia. Because of this severe liver malfunction, diabetics suffer from both high and low blood sugar, since their blood sugar may fluctuate widely up and down. For example, we had one diabetic patient whose blood sugar level fluctuated between 300 and 50 in just a few hours.  Diabetes, therefore, is characterized not only by the finding of high blood sugar, but also by the severity and frequency of blood sugar fluctuations.

There is one other factor that makes diabetes so much more severe than hypoglycemia. Ironically, it’s the treatment recommended by the medical orthodoxy – injected insulin.

Insulin can cause tremendous damage, In fact, its continual use may bring about an early death.

ACRES: Would you please explain why you say something like that? [This question & answer not in Dr. Jesse’s transcript]

REAMS: Yes, there are many reasons why insulin is so dangerous.

The insulin the doctors give doesn’t act the same as the insulin naturally produced by your own pancreas.  This induced insulin forms a crystalline salt which oxidizes and hardens the walls of the blood vessels. The result is hardening of the arteries.

One of our neighbors had a twelve year old girl who had been on insulin since she was two years old. The insulin had created severe hardening of the arteries in her brain. A blood vessel burst in her brain, causing cerebral hemorrhage which killed her.

Whenever young children receive insulin injections over a period of years, great damage is done. Insulin should never be used on children except as a last resort.  Diabetic children respond to diet. I’ve helped thousands and not a single one required insulin.

Another problem is that the doctor’s insulin usage never perfectly matches the requirements of the patient. Some days you consume more starches and sweets than other days. Some days, you over-exercise and consume more energy than at other times. It’s almost impossible to measure the insulin dosage to keep up with the body’s precise needs.

So, often the diabetic’s insulin dosage will be too high. As a consequence, the patient’s blood sugar level is forced down too low – with all the problems that that creates. And particularly, when the insulin dosage is too low, another set of problems is created.

Still another problem is that the system slowly releases insulin into the muscle tissues. When the body turns the insulin loose, you get insulin shock as the blood sugar is driven too low.

Finally, in many cases, the body tissues become saturated with insulin. In these cases, the body can’t effectively use any more injected insulin. When a patient reaches this point, it’s possible for the muscle tissues to release a fatal dose of insulin into the bloodstream.

Before any patient takes insulin, he or she should be aware of all the problems it causes. The dangers of injected insulin shows the fallacy of trying to control blood sugar by external means – instead of helping the body to regulate it naturally. We find that improving the body chemistry almost always brings results.

ACRES: So, what do you do to help the diabetics? [This question & answer not in Dr. Jesse’s transcript]

REAMS: Since diabetes – like hypoglycemia – is caused by a liver malfunction – we use the same basic program to handle it.  We use the lemon water fast to improve the liver function; we use the distilled water cleansing program to flush toxins from the tissues.

From a 1977 Reams Lecture: You can write volumes and volumes about a malfunctioning pancreas but it is always due to a mineral deficiency.

Low or High blood sugar is not caused by what you eat. It is a malfunction of the pancreas which is a malfunction of the liver.  All malfunction of the liver is a mineral deficiency.

Then we use the same dietary program to correct deficiencies in minerals and chlorophyll and to rebuild the patient’s body. As with hypoglycemia, we insist on fresh air and exercise.

However, one difference between the care of hypoglycemics and diabetics is that diabetics have to reduce and eventually eliminate their own insulin dosage. This is something we cannot and will not do for any patient. However, patients do not find this a hard task. Once their liver function improves, their insulin requirements drop sharply, often in a matter of days.

For example there was one 40 year old diabetic man who had been on 120 units of insulin per day. By the fourth day, he was down to 30 units of insulin. By the sixth day, he felt a surge of energy which he had not felt in years. By the tenth day, he was off insulin completely, and returned home. He remains on the diet and has been checking with us regularly.  So far, he has been off insulin for over two years.

There was the diabetic man who was 100 pounds over-weight, and who couldn’t walk a hundred feet without having to sit down and rest. He had been on insulin for 20 years, 120 units a day. We gave him a diet and he regulated his insulin shots himself.

Several months later, his excess weight was gone and he was walking several miles a day. He felt 20 years younger and was just ecstatic about being off insulin. So far, this man has been off insulin for almost a year. It he continues on the program, he’ll never have to go back on insulin.

We also cared for a 32 year old diabetic mother; the wife of a doctor and herself a registered nurse. Her blood sugar was out of control in spite of the fact that she took insulin. Indeed, whenever she took insulin, it would drive her blood sugar down so fast and so low that she began to shake. She had lost so much weight that she was a pitiful sight to look at.

Today she is back at home and has been off insulin for more than three months. Although I still don’t consider her completely well, I think she has made enormous progress. She now looks simply marvelous and bubbles with enthusiasm.

Finally, I recall the little 3 year old boy – a full fledged diabetic who was brought here by his mother. He sat around all day and never felt like playing. In five days his blood sugar was down to normal, and three days later he was ready to go home.

So you see, our program has worked for thousands of diabetics, as well as hypoglycemics. This is because we correct the main cause of blood sugar problems – liver malfunction.

ChooseLife Notes : Bold sections added by ChooseLife.

In Choose Life Or Death, Carey Reams describes his recommendation for the Pancreas to function and meet it’s daily requirements of insulin production, this was 3oz of green juice. This would have been many years ago, plus Reams was a world class agronomist, this leads me to presume that nowadays it may require a multiple of this value, 6oz’s or more. Reams would have been feeding patients high brix green smoothies, having tested the quality of many fruits and vegetables nowadays here in the UK, it may take an even higher amount.

Carey Reams lost a large portion of his Pancreas due to shrapnel during service in WWII, he lived some 40+ years (to 82) with around 50% functioning Pancreas.

Calcium – Chlorophyll – Oxygen