If you’re taking diabetes meds, there’s an urgent new warning out there that you just have to see.

Public Citizen is urging the FDA to ban the drug Victoza because of links to thyroid cancer, pancreatitis, and severe allergic reactions.

In addition, Public Citizen says patients who take this injectable med have quadruple the risk of acute pancreatitis of those who take other diabetes meds. The group estimates that up to 2,000 patients have gotten the condition from the drug since it was approved in 2010.

Naturally, the company that makes the drug insists that it’s safe. What else would they say? I’ve haven’t seen a drug maker yet respond to a safety warning with an apology.

But the drug’s own label tells me this stuff is bad news. It says right on it that it has caused thyroid cancer in lab animals — and while it also says it’s unclear whether that risk extends to humans, that’s clear enough for me.

If you’re a patient taking this med — and with $1 billion in sales last year, I know plenty of patients are — talk to your doctor about your other options.

Of course, most doctors will just shift you from one bad med to another. And if you have diabetes, odds are you’re taking several bad meds at the same time.

That’s why I recommend that diabetics work with a holistic doctor instead — because in many cases, holistic doctors can help their patients find the natural alternatives that can reduce their meds.

Considering the risks of these meds, fewer is better. But there’s something even better than fewer — and that’s none at all.

You’ve heard that you can’t cure diabetes, but you heard wrong. By committing to healthy lifestyle changes, you can reach the point where you’ll no longer need meds or even insulin.

I know you can, because I’ve seen it happen in my own clinic time and again.

You don’t need to be in alternative medicine to know that statin drugs are a bad idea.

These days, even the doctors who once gave them out to nearly everyone are waking up to the fact that cholesterol drugs do plenty of harm and very little good.

And now, “mainstream” doctors are turning to what was once dismissed as “alternative” medicine to bring cholesterol levels down — including the simple lifestyle changes that I’ve been advocating from the beginning.

It’s not exactly a radical idea, but I’m glad to see the rest of the country catching on — and some are even bragging about their results in places such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One recent series of editorials there was a debate between two competing mainstream teams trying to treat a hypothetical 55-year-old patient with high cholesterol levels who was otherwise healthy.

A decade ago, I’m sure they all would have said “statins.”

Today, a set of doctors who said they’d use that approach were practically booed right out of the journal — with one team of doctors correctly pointing out that they’d have to treat 100 patients like that hypothetical man for five years to prevent even a single heart attack.

And if that’s all that happened — a heart attack was prevented — maybe it would be worthwhile.

But, as Dr. Rita Redberg and Dr. William Katz of the University of San Francisco, California wrote in the journal, at least one of those 100 patients will end up with diabetes because of those meds and a whopping 20 percent will experience the notorious statin side effects (and other studies like the Jupiter trial have shown risk closer to 25 percent).

Those include serious and debilitating muscle pain, fatigue, memory problems, cataracts, and even sexual dysfunction.

Now, I don’t know if this means these mainstream docs have gone alternative or if I’m suddenly mainstream. To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me — all that matters is that patients are finally getting the common-sense approach to cholesterol control they should have been given all along.

Better late than never.

For the most advanced cardiovascular testing contact the Stengler Center for Integrative Medicine at 760-274-2377.

Despite what you’ve heard, type-2 diabetes doesn’t have to be a lifelong sentence.

You don’t have to live with the disease or even “manage” it. It can be cured — and I mean really, truly cured: No more drugs, and no more insulin.

But there’s one supposed cure that I definitely don’t recommend, and that’s the dangerous stomach-shrinking surgeries making headlines lately.

Sure, those procedures can take the weight off fast. And in two new studies, the results were so good that surgery is now being touted as a cure for the disease.

In one, gastric bypass surgery brought blood-sugar levels down to normal in nearly half the diabetics who had it. In the other, 95 percent of diabetics who had biliopancreatic diversion surgery were in remission within a year, along with 75 percent of those who got the Roux-en-Y procedure.

Some patients in both studies were able to stop meds before they even left the hospital — and when you consider that diabetes drugs include some of the worst of the worst (Avandia, anyone?), I’m all for that.

But a dangerous surgery isn’t what I’d call the best alternative to drugs. Sure, it might lead to quick results — but this is one case where you don’t want to take any short cuts.

That’s because bariatric procedures don’t cure the biggest diabetes risk factor of all, and that’s the poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle that caused the disease in the first place.

Just look at singer Carnie Wilson. She’s not a diabetic — not as far as I know, anyway — but she recently made headlines for having a second Lap-Band surgery after the weight she lost from her first one came back.

“I reverted back to old habits (like) mindless eating,” she recently confessed in an interview. As a result, she went from 150 pounds after her last surgery… to 236 pounds before her second procedure.

Her story isn’t as unusual as it might sound. In fact, it’s all too common — and that’s why surgery is a lousy choice, since studies show a significant number of people who get these surgeries relapse.

Besides, you’ve got other options here.

I know you do, because I’ve helped cure diabetic patients myself. I say “helped” because this is one case where a doctor can only do so much. The rest is up to you, and I won’t lie: It takes hard work, dedication and discipline.

But once you’ve done it, there’s simply no going back to “mindless eating” or any of your other old bad habits — and certainly no going back to a life of diabetes.

Gentlemen, there’s one more reason for you to lose weight whether you have diabetes or not. Keep reading for more.

Any time I use the words “soda” and “study” in the same sentence, it’s never good news for soda. I can’t recall a single study that shows soda benefits anything other than the bank accounts of the people who sell it.

And the latest research is no exception.

A new look at data on 42,883 men between the ages of 40 and 75 finds that those who drank the most sugary drinks had a 20 percent higher risk of a heart attack during the 22-year study — a link that held even after adjusting for risk factors such as smoking, activity levels and a family history of heart problems.

What’s more, the researchers found that for each serving of a sugary drink you down in a day — like one 12-ounce cola — your risk of cardiovascular disease is boosted by 19 percent.

In addition, the men who drank the most sugary drinks also had lower levels of HDL cholesterol — that’s the good stuff — and higher levels of deadly triglycerides.

Think that’s bad? Hold on — because the study in Circulation gets even worse: Men who drank the most soda had the highest levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP. That’s an inflammation marker that can mean anything from heart disease to cancer to an autoimmune disorder.

But none of this should be surprising, since all of these problems have been linked to sugar before — and drinks are one of the biggest sources of sugar in the modern diet.

A single can of soda, for example, has roughly 40 grams of the sweet stuff. That’s like going to Starbucks and ordering a “tall” (or what the rest of us call a “small”) 12-ounce coffee… and putting 10 sugars into it.

It’s an insane amount of sugar.

For some incredible visuals on just how much of it is in each can, bottle, and Big Gulp, check out the images on the “Sugar Stacks” website.

All that sweet stuff is bound to play havoc with your body. Along with all the risks I mentioned earlier, even a moderate soda habit can cause your blood sugar levels to spike — eventually leading to metabolic syndrome and even diabetes.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ll be any safer switching to diet either. Other studies have found that diet soda drinkers actually gain weight — and at least one study linked diet soft drinks to an increased heart risk of its own, along with an increased risk of stroke.

I’m not done with soda yet — keep reading for more.