This Rotten Food Reverses Type 2 Diabetes Damage

By now, it should no longer take us by surprise when the most extraordinary rotten foods are found to have beneficial health effects.

After all, penicillin, some immunosuppressants, and some statins can be made from scraping mold off food (if you can catch enough of it anyway).

According to a new study, there is another rotten food type that can reverse and prevent the cardiovascular damage caused by type 2 diabetes.

Many people remember little of their high school chemistry classes, but the one memory that inevitably sticks is the experiment with hydrogen sulfide. This is the gas that is produced when eggs rot, when plants rot in swamps and sewers, and when our intestinal bacteria encounter sulfur-containing foods. It is the gas that makes rotten eggs and flatulence smell like they do.

Unpleasant as this sounds, many tissues in your body produce this gas from enzymes to dilate blood vessels and regulate insulin production.

In 2010, scientists published a study in the journal Diabetologia that compared the levels of hydrogen sulfide in the blood of lean men, overweight men with metabolic syndrome, and men with full-blown type 2 diabetes.

Their study demonstrated that men with diabetes had levels four times lower than healthy men do, and that those with the metabolic syndrome had levels twice as low as their healthy counterparts have.

They also found that the men with the lowest levels had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high insulin resistance, and damage to blood vessels.

In other words, the more hydrogen sulfide, the better.

Many of the researchers who participated in the 2010 study have now published a new one proving hydrogen sulfide can prevent the damage type 2 diabetes does to blood vessels and can reverse the damage that has already occurred. The study was published in the journal Pharmacological Research.

Diabetes is harmful and potentially deadly, decisively because of its effects on your heart and circulatory system. High blood sugar causes the parts of cells responsible for respiration and energy production to leak into your bloodstream. These cell structures then produce toxic oxygen metabolites that circulate through your body. This then damages your blood vessels in a process called oxidation.

Once your blood vessels are damaged, your blood pressure and blood lipids rise, and the chance the blood flow to certain organs can be interrupted increases.

In the latest study, scientists isolated the cells that appear in the blood vessels of mice and applied two hydrogen sulfide-containing drugs straight to them. The leaking immediately stopped, and the previous damage to the cells reversed.

Does this mean you should “mature” some eggs in your kitchen cupboard for a few months and substitute eggnog for your fruit smoothies?

Thank heavens not.

First, while the hydrogen sulfide might be healthy, other byproducts of the rotting process almost certainly are not.

Second, in large amounts, it is erosive and poisonous and can also explode in your kitchen. There are patches in the Dead Sea and off the Namibian coast where the oxygen-poor water and rich plant life have created hydrogen sulfide-rich zones that kill all fish that enter these areas.

Unfortunately, this is another one of those cases where we have to wait and see whether scientists can devise a natural diabetes treatment that contains hydrogen sulfide.

In the meantime, here is the 3-step strategy thousands of readers have used to completely reverse their type 2 diabetes, without rotten eggs…