Diabetes is Optional: Hintonia: The Natural Way to Control Type 2 Diabetes

What if there was a simple natural remedy for Type 2 diabetes, with no side effects?  Wouldn’t that be wonderful? It’s not a fantasy. The herb Hintonia latiflora is study-proven to help control and even reverses Type 2 diabetes. Read more from my friend, Jacob Teitelbaum, M.D., author of my most recently published book.

The herbal answer to Type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome and more

You can stop diabetes without medications.

Let me repeat that: You can stop diabetes without medications.

High blood sugar, Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome are not inevitable. A diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes is not a life sentence.

Whatever the dire statistics may tell you (and your doctor), you can stabilize, reverse, and normalize your blood sugar levels with the lifestyle changes we talked about in Chapter 4. With the help of an amazing herbal extract!

Clinical research has now confirmed what the indigenous people of Mexico have known for centuries: Hintonia latiflora is effective for, and often reverses mild to moderate Type 2 diabetes!

Found in marketplaces in Mexico and Central America, this miracle botanical is an extract of the bark of a shrubby tree that grows in the Sonoran Desert. Its medicinal power comes from the extreme climate changes the tree experiences in its desert home.  

The desert’s scorching heat and torrential rainfalls stress the Hintonia latiflora tree and provide the keys to a powerful defense mechanism inherent in the plant and an essential part of its medicinal value. The natural environmental stresses to the tree enhance its ability to survive and thrive in such a harsh environment and are key to hintonia’s traditional use to treat Type 2 diabetes and gastrointestinal problems.

But hintonia is much more than a folk remedy. It’s been studied in detail for its ability to reverse high blood sugars for over 60 years. It has only recently become available to the North American public in a product called Sucontral-D™.

The earliest work showed that hintonia extract is often as effective in lowering blood sugar as insulin and even more effective in some cases. But hintonia results in “side benefits” instead of side effects. That early research was done even before the days of oral diabetes medications.

Since then, there have been over a dozen studies showing how powerfully effective hintonia is!

Today’s widespread availability of oral diabetes medications has decreased the number of adult diabetics taking long-term insulin. However, as we learned in Chapter 5, those diabetes medications carry serious side effects with them. Furthermore, why would you want your condition to deteriorate, requiring progressively more potent medications with increasingly serious side effects? It sounds like it is definitely time for a better solution. The good news? Hintonia to the rescue!

Plants and plant extracts are composed of complex molecules, usually with a variety of nutrients that are dependent on one another to act synergistically or to enhance each other.

Hintonia is no exception.

How Does Hintonia Work?

First, it is a rich source of flavonoids, nutritional compounds found in colorful fruits and vegetables. Extensive research shows that flavonoids reduce insulin resistance and inflammation.

Flavonoids are great, but if all flavonoids prevented diabetes, you could eat a bunch of grapes or tomatoes or drink a lot of red wine and that would do the trick. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Hintonia stands alone in the gift of blood sugar control.

But more about that later in this chapter. Let’s start by looking at the research on hintonia and how it helps reverse diabetes.

Solid research shows that not only can hintonia help control blood sugar and overcome insulin resistance, reducing your need for pharmaceuticals, it can also enhance the effectiveness of diabetes medications if your doctor and you decide that you need them.

In fact, in a study published in the German journal Naturheilpraxis mit Naturalmedizin (Naturopathic Practice with Natural Medicine) the dry concentrated bark extract of Hintonia latiflora—combined with additional nutrients— significantly lowered HgBA1C values (average levels of blood sugar), fasting glucose levels (blood sugar before a meal) and postprandial (after eating) blood sugar levels.

Fasting and after meal blood glucose numbers, along with A1C levels, are important because they show how much sugar circulates through your system and how your body deals with it after meals. What the research showed was amazing! Fasting and post-meal blood sugars improved by an impressive 23% and 24% respectively with hintonia. And glycosylated hemoglobin decreased by a remarkable average of 0.8 points! (about 11%). This means many people went from being diabetic to no longer being diabetic.

Impressively, by the end of the study 39% of those using anti-diabetes drugs could reduce their medication levels. Some were able to stop their medication entirely.

But there is more good news. Hintonia not only lowers blood sugar and often reversed diabetes. It also eliminates many of the symptoms of diabetes.

One study factored in a mix of major diabetic symptoms. The scores improved an impressive 73%, from an average 4.8 points to 1.3 points at the end of the study. This is a massive change that can dramatically increase your quality of life, and well-being.

Participants also saw improvements in blood pressure, lipids, and liver values.

Other valuable studies of hintonia show that compounds from its leaves may help stop gastrointestinal damage and gastric ulcers. Considering the gastrointestinal discomfort caused by some drugs used for Type 2 diabetes, this is yet another reason to consider adding Hintonia latiflora to a diabetes-fighting regimen.

Stop the Blood Sugar Roller Coaster

People with diabetes struggle with blood sugars that spike and plummet during the day and night. As this occurs, your energy, pain and mental clarity may find themselves on a roller coaster as well.

One of hintonia’s greatest benefits is that it helps keep those sugars steady throughout the day and night, making life easier and contributing to long-term better glucose control.

Mexican researchers were finally able to isolate the unique way that it works: The plant is an inhibitor of alpha-glucosidase, an enzyme that releases sugar from foods, particularly carbohydrates. We all know that carbohydrates, especially simple carbs like sugar and foods made with white flour, are the bugaboo of people with Type 2 diabetes, so this news alone is a huge boon for people with the disease.

Coutareagenin, a polyphenol nutrient found in the bark extracts unique to hintonia, appears to be responsible for many of its other blood-sugar controlling benefits. For this reason, please seek out a hintonia supplement standardized to contain at least 20 mg two to three times a day of coutareagenin polyphenols.

The president of the International Diabetes Foundation was the lead author on another study that strongly recommended the use of this unique herb in treating and preventing Type 2 diabetes. Not only because of improved blood sugar control, but also because of its effectiveness in lowering cholesterol and other elements of metabolic syndrome that can lead to Type 2 diabetes.

Finally, in yet another clinical study, adult participants with Type 2 diabetes were provided with an extract of Hintonia latiflora combined with trace nutrients (vitamins B1, B6, B12, folic acid, chromium, zinc, and vitamins C and E) for six months. These ingredients also help protect against oxidative damage to blood vessels, stop nerve damage and keep metabolism functioning the way that it should. But it is the hintonia that is the heavy hitter.

Where Does Hintonia Come From?

The hintonia bark is grown and harvested in the upper zones (highlands) and part of the Petén (jungle area) in Guatemala. The plant can be found as well in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries in Central America. There are even scientific reports in Spanish on this special herb written in the 1950s.

Hintonia is grown and harvested wild and also in specific fields where a technique called vegetative reproduction is used. Once one plant is harvested, parts of its root are taken and planted somewhere else, resulting in a new bush with exactly the same properties and content of polyphenols.

To protect the tree, however, only the upper layers of bark are peeled away, with the bark layers below remaining. This way they ensure that the hintonia bush stays alive and healthy, and the bark, the lifeline where the nutrients, water, etc. are transported between the roots and crown of the bush, continues to be intact. This very careful and labor-intensive way of harvesting is essential to protect these precious bushes, and prevents overharvesting.

I highly recommend adding Sucontral-D™, a clinically studied Hintonia latiflora product, to your daily regimen. It is the only such supplement on the US market and is combined with B-vitamins, folic acid, chromium, zinc and vitamins C and E.