Diabetes Can Be Reversed

Type 2 Diabetes has been regarded by the medical establishment as irreversible. Once you had it, it inevitably went only one way - downhill. Treatment focuses on minimizing the damage and slowing the decline, yet diabetics suffer from a wide range of serious conditions including high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke and heart attack, blindness, neuropathy, ketoacidosis, digestive disorders and fatigue. And if that were not enough, about 60% of all foot and leg amputations are caused by diabetes.

The current thinking is that there is nothing you can do other than try to manage the symptoms and minimize the inevitable damage. But that may all be about to change thanks to a clinical trial underway in the UK called the Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT) that released its initial results in March of 2019.

The trial assigned 272 people in the UK to receive either the standard treatment (the control group) or a closely supervised, very low calorie diet (the intervention group). For those in the intervention group, all diabetes medication was halted on day one of the trial. After one year, 46% of those in the intervention group were completely free of diabetes and off all their medications. At the 2 year point in the trial, 36% of those in the intervention group remained diabetes free. And the control group? After 2 years, 3% were diabetes free and off their medication. Regardless of which group they were in, 64% of those who lost 22 pounds or more were diabetes free after 2 years.

So the approach did not work for 100% of the people or 100% of the time. But nearly half of those assigned to the intervention group were diabetes free and medication free after 2 years.

This is not an approach for the faint of heart, and it absolutely, positively should not be attempted unless under close medical supervision. The intervention group was on a diet that provided only 850 calories a day from vegetables, salads and a specially formulated nutritional shake. They remained on this diet for 12 - 20 weeks. After the initial restrictions, they slowly added foods back into their diet over the next 4 - 8 weeks. After that, they had regular meetings with a nurse clinician and dietician to help them maintain their lower weight. Anyone who gained 10 or more pounds was immediately restarted on the initial calorie restricted diet.

Clearly this was no fun. But if you were one of those who walked away free of diabetes and all its many health dangers, perhaps worth the cost.

In the United States, the number of people with Type 2 diabetes has tripled between 1990 and 2010. In 2015 there were 30.3 million Type 2 diabetics, about 10% of the population. Another 84 million (nearly 1 in 3 of us) have pre-diabetes, many of them undiagnosed and unaware.

The takeaway from this is embarrassingly simple. "The incidence of diabetes increases if a population is overfed," says Roy Taylor, one of the researchers involved in the DiRECT study. "If a population is short of food, diabetes disappears."

We eat to much of the wrong things and we exercise too little. And it can kill us. Now, at least, it looks like we can step back from the brink. IF we are willing to give up the garbage we bring home from the grocery store, the 3,000 calorie meals we eat in restaurants and some of our couch time.

For more details on the DiRECT trial go to ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal/#publicinformation .