An Apple a Day keeps Diabetes Away?

Pune’s 86-year-old D P Parkhe has published an e-book advocating eating apples to keep diabetes at bay.

In 1997, D P Parkhe’s blood sugar count was 355 when he was 72 years’ old. He used to pop four sugar-control pills each day and was also hospitalised in the ICU. “I was given up for dead,” he says. But once home, he started doing his own research on diabetes and how the effect our food has on it. He designed his own sugar wheels in diagrammatic form by taking half-hourly blood and urine sugar count, collating this data with his food intake and exercise. It was a long-drawn experiment wherein he tried out various diet patterns that included a variety of fruits. The result was that he stumbled upon the fact that it was the apple that helped reduce his blood sugar from 180 to 120 mg/dl.

He now focused his mind and effort entirely on the qualities of the apple, coupling this with walking and regular input of Vitamin B Complex. “I observed that an apple leads to reduction in sugar that may be because of an improvement in impaired metabolism or the biocide action by Malic Acid, Citric Acid etc. taking part in Kreb’s cycle of controlling sugar,” he says. The Krebs cycle can also be called the Citric Acid Cycle (CAC) or the Tricarboxylic Acid (TCA) Cycle. This cycle takes place in the mitochondrial matrix and is the primary step of aerobic processing within a cell. The process oxidises glucose derivatives, fatty acids and amino acids to carbon dioxide (CO2) through a series of enzyme-controlled steps.