Well, we are each free to use words however we choose. But that is not how the medical profession defines the word “cure”. “Cured” means the condition is gone. Gone for good, gone forever. If you have pneumonia and a course of penicillin gets rid of it, you are cured. You can walk away and never think about it again.
Now, it is indisputable that some people are able to adopt diet and lifestyle changes that keep the condition perfectly under control. If they could then return to their previous habits without the symptoms reappearing, then that would be a true cure. I have yet to see any credible documentation of anyone who’s done that. Absent that, we are talking about great control, but not a cure.
Thank you for bringing this documentary to my attention. I was in the habit for several months to fast for one 24-hour period each week. After viewing this video, I intend to return to some regular fasting. I think it’s good for my T1D. I’ve heard over many years from many different sources about the good effects of fasting on longevity. My biggest diabetic complication fear is cardio vascular disease and stroke. It’s in my family genetic makeup. Diabetes exacerbates that risk. I don’t see any downside to fasting.
I still don’t like the use of the terms cure or reverse with diabetes unless the person can eat any way they like without adherence to a mitigating eating protocol and still be gluco-normal.
But diabetes type 2 is not totally like that. It is connected to how much excess fat you have, compared to what your body is able to cope with, before it starts developing diabetes. Say lets take a man at age 23 188cm and 140 kg. He has type-2 diabetes. Lets says his genetic limit for developing diabetes is 90 kg, if he goes 90 kg ,he develops diabetes. He goes down to 72kgs and is able to stay there, but fluctuates 2 kgs up and down at that weight. At this weight he eats what he wants, but is careful about maintaining it around this range. Most likely he will never get diabetes type 2 again, if he stays there. And I know several people like this. So it is possible. So being a diabetic sets limits, but it is possible!
But there is a great deal of evidence now that T2 develops and then the weight gain happens not the other way around. And I would never use either the word “cure” or “reversal” about T2. Only good control. I am very much with @David_dns on that one.
And I long ago stopped trusting anything out of the ADA. If I had followed any of their advise longer than the 6 months I gave it, I would never have gotten control. Nine years in, I am still controlling with a low carb/exercise approach, but I don’t expect that to last for ever…
30% of those diagnosed with type 2 diabetes have a normal bmi. But a normal bmi is quite a wide range, from 18.5 to 24.9
According to my height 188cm, from going to the lower end of bmi to the higher, my weight could be everything from 65 kg to 88 kg, this is a 23 kg range, and still be considered a normal bmi. And this figure also says nothing about my bodycomposition, I could very well have a bmi of 20, but a bodyfat of 25% which would classify my as an obese person in terms of bodyfat.
look at this picture. These are two famous professors in diabetes research, they measured bmi and bodyfat in lots of people in both India and England,and compared the results, they also tested themselves. by coinsidence they both had a bmi of 22.3, but the one to the left has a bodyfat of 9% the one to the right 21% ! Same bmi,nearly double the difference in bodyfat!
16% of women have a normal or underweight bmi, but bodyfat of over 35%, counting them as being obese.
6% of men had the same figure but their limit for obesity in terms of bodyfat is 25%.
3% of women had bodyfat of under 35%, but overweight bmi, and the same figures for men where 12% again with the limit at 25%.
Also look at this history.
This man had a Bmi of 21 at a height of 5 feet 7 inches(170 cm) , when he got diagnosed with diabetes type 2. He when went on the newcastle diet, and and reached a weight of 56 kg, giving him a bmi of 19.4. He then got sugars like a non-diabetic, and he does not eat a lowcarb diet, but a rather silly one, he belives saturated fats are bad for instance. But again, weight is the important thing, but far more imporant is where the fat is stored and lost.
Also Type-2 store fat in abnormals places like the liver,pancreas, and as visceral fat, which is tge cause type 2, people which not do not get diabetes, however large their bmi, do not store fat this places.
Roy Taylor did a brilliant study that showed this.
Individuals listed for gastric bypass surgery who had T2DM or normal glucose tolerance (NGT) matched for age, weight, and sex were studied before and 8 weeks after surgery
Weight loss after surgery was similar (NGT: 12.8 ± 0.8% and T2DM: 13.6 ± 0.7%) as was the change in fat mass (56.7 ± 3.3 to 45.4 ± 2.3 vs. 56.6 ± 2.4 to 43.0 ± 2.4 kg). Pancreatic triacylglycerol did not change in NGT (5.1 ± 0.2 to 5.5 ± 0.4%) but decreased in the group with T2DM (6.6 ± 0.5 to 5.4 ± 0.4%; P = 0.007). First-phase insulin response to a stepped intravenous glucose infusion did not change in NGT (0.24 [0.13–0.46] to 0.23 [0.19–0.37] nmol ⋅ min−1 ⋅ m−2) but normalized in T2DM (0.08 [−0.01 to –0.10] to 0.22 [0.07–0.30]) nmol ⋅ min−1 ⋅ m−2 at week 8 (P = 0.005). No differential effect of incretin secretion was observed after gastric bypass, with more rapid glucose absorption bringing about equivalently enhanced glucagon-like peptide 1 secretion in the two groups.
CONCLUSIONS The fall in intrapancreatic triacylglycerol in T2DM, which occurs during weight loss, is associated with the condition itself rather than decreased total body
In short, type diabetics lost fat from the liver, nondiabetics did not despite the fact that both the control and diabetic group lost the same amount of weight!
So yeah, diabetes and prediabetes can be reversed as long as you loose enough fat, and the fat needed to be removed is highly variable largely dependent on genetics. You could of course be a LADY or Mody, and I feel for you, those groups are really let down by the medical community, but a standard type-2 would reverse his condition like the thin man described in the daily mail article.
My skepticism is higher in any argument using a source such as the British tabloid, the Daily Mail.Wikipedia has this to say about medical stories covered by the Daily Mail:
The paper has been criticised by doctors and scientists for its sensationalist reporting on medical subjects.[14]
I regularly read The Guardian, another UK newspaper, and an excellent source of news. My sense of the Daily Mail is that it is similar to America’s National Enquirer, a good source of celebrity gossip and tawdry scandals. It’s not a news source I would depend on when seeking quality information about things medical. We’re all aware of such rags that specialize in gaudy headlines written in “end of the world” font sizes.
@David_dns and @Terry4…We have a long family history of picking up tabloids at the grocery store for bedridden ill family members—from the flu to major surgery—because one’s attention span is so short…headlines like alligator baby born to human mom or some such…Also People Magazine and the occasional comic book! I missed the moon invasion issue, my friend. I guess I wasn’t sick at the time…Hehe…Blessings all…
PS–I think we need to pull up that TED talk for this thread. Dr Attila or something like that-Either of you remember? It’s floating around TuD somewhere. Now there’s a reliable source!
oh you beat me to it, honestly I think I’ve listened to this one a dozen times, and it gets to me every single time. I know we’ve tried to get him here for a talk, he’s in great demand. We did have his partner (their company http://nusi.org/)
The story is featured in the Guardian as well, he is a journalist so he is a person of some qualifications. Also, this not some kiss and tell story, but a testament to how he cured his own diabetes.Here is his twitter: https://twitter.com/ricdoughty His fasting in 2013 was 5.1 as you can read from a tweet then.
By Michael Mosley. It has a foreword written by professor Roy Taylor, the man behind the amazing Newcastle diet, so he is not only in the dailymail but also several other places.
And I did not just post a dailymail link, but other sources as well,
It did not just publish from a tabloid, the story is also published in the guardian in 2013, the daily mail piece from 2016, which shows he is still cured from his diabetes.
I also posted some sources about how bmi and bodyfat is not necessarily the same, and that two people with the same bmi, may have a twofold difference in bodyfat.
So I do not agree that a diabetic is always a diabetic, yes you will have to watch your weight as a diabetic, but if one gets ones bodyfat down to a sufficient level, you could still eat anything you want, and not develop the sympthoms of diabetes, provided that you stayed within your bodyweight range that do not push you over to the diabetic state.
Fasting Blood Sugar Progress Chart mmol/L-mg/dl (800 kcal diet)
Day 1: 10.5 / 190
Day 2: 9.8 /175
Day 3: 8.3 /148
Day 4: 6.7 / 123
Day 5: 6.4 / 112
Day 6: 5.7 / 103
Day 7: 5.0 / 90
Day 8: 5.6 / 100
Day 9: 4.8 / 87
Day 10: 4.5 / 81
Day 11: 4.6 / 83
Day 12: 5.1 / 92
Day 13: 6.0 /105 (Removed daily Januvia medication due to side effects)
Day 14: 4.1 / 74
Day 15: 4.7 / 84
Day 16: 4.1 / 76
Day 17: 4.6 / 83
Day 18: 4.7 / 84
Day 19: 4.8 / 87
Day 20: 4.4 / 80
Day 21: 4.6 / 83
Day 22: 4.9 / 89
Day 23: 4.4 / 79
Day 24: 4.3 / 78
Day 25: 4.3 / 77
Weightloss is about 15 pounds from day 1.
Those numbers are quite amazing in my opinion and clearly shows that if one can reverse diabetes, you surley must be able to remove pre-diabetes.
I agree regarding bmi being a very poor measure of whether someone is “overweight” or not. People with a normal bmi can be significantly overweight depending on their body composition. Conversely, people who have a lot of muscle mass can have an elevated bmi while having very little body fat. It is very easy for a 200 lb 6 ft tall man with minimal muscle mass to point to the bmi chart and prove he is not overweight. Nature and physiology though are telling us otherwise, and I hope sooner or later we will all start listening. It is a problem of our entire society, not just of the individuals with diabetes.
A single example is interesting, but that’s all it is. I could cite several examples of people gaining weight, never having changed their LCHF /exercise regimen and still maintained an A1c in the normal range…It is so much more complex than weight gain or loss. And BMI is not the be all and end all in these circumstances–or any other, for that matter…I would guess this person’s so called reversal is temporary—so good for them…
