Dr Rob Szabo joins me on today's episode joins me to discuss a huge and growing problem in our society - diabetes. Rob's practice is called The Low Carb Clinic where he works with a team of practitioners utilising nutritional and environmental medicine to help patients manage their health and improve their outcomes. Rob also has a passion for regenerative agriculture and shares his own personal and professional story.

Selected Links from the Episode

Dr Rob Szabo website - The Low Carb Clinic

CSA: Community Supported Agriculture website

Unstress episode with Cliff Harvey on carbohydrate appropriate diets

Unstress episode with Dr Peter Brukner on healthy fats

Unstress episode with Prof. Thomas Seyfried on cancer as a metabolic disease

Download the PDF transcription

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Hello and welcome to Unstress. I'm Doctor Ron Ehrlich. Now today's episode is an interesting one on so many levels. Doctor training, public health messages, industry influence, chronic disease management versus addressing the cause, what a novel idea.

Look we've all visited doctors and we've had various points in our lives and sometimes it's for an acute problem. You might have a respiratory infection, some injury or perhaps you're in for a regular check-up. You might get some blood tests, the results come back, your doctor gives you some advice, may even give you some medication. Now that advice comes from years of studying at medical school and then if you can picture me now, using quotation marks as I say this, "staying up to date with the latest," and again in quotation marks, "evidence-based medicine." Evidence-based medicine is the gold standard in health care, and of course, all of this is supported by professional organizations, one of which I'll get to in a moment.

Now as many of you may know, diabetes is a huge and growing problem in our society. Now I'm going to reference here the Diabetes Australia website, the National Diabetes Services Scheme, surely you couldn't get more evidence-based and up to date than that, okay. So, that was rhetorical by the way.

So what is type one diabetes? It's an autoimmune condition. The body attacking itself. The pancreas stops making insulin. Now that's in 15% of cases, that's what diabetes is, type one. Much more common is type two diabetes. The pancreas does make insulin but it's not produced in sufficient quantities that your body needs, and it doesn't work effectively. So it's a combination of genetics and environmental factors, used to be called late-onset diabetes but it's affecting people younger and younger. And this is still from the website, managing type two diabetes. I wanted to share this with you because it's very relevant to our conversation today and I again quote Diabetes Australia here. Type two diabetes can often initially be managed with healthy eating and regular physical activity, however, over time most people with type two diabetes will also need tablets and many will also need insulin. It's important to note that this is just the natural progression of the disease. I'm still quoting. And taking tablets or insulin as soon as they are required can result in fewer complications in the long term, to help you manage diabetes, your diabetes, and again this is that National Diabetes Services Scheme from Diabetes Australia, here are your meal suggestions. Regular and spread evenly throughout the day, lower in fat, particularly saturated fat, and most importantly should be based on high fibre carbohydrate foods such as wholegrain bread, cereals, beans, lentils, vegetables and fruits.

Well, my guest today is Melbourne medical practitioner, Doctor Rob Szabo, and this is not a spoiler, but he runs the practice in Melbourne, his practice is called The Low Carb Clinic. I had the pleasure of meeting Rob when he was speaking at the Annual Conference of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, the acronym is ACNEM,