Reversing Type II Diabetes

[Berzerker]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-11-reveals-calorie-diet-reverse-diabetes.html

In a new study, a Yale-led research team uncovers how a very low calorie diet can rapidly reverse type 2 diabetes in animal models. If confirmed in people, the insight provides potential new drug targets for treating this common chronic disease, said the researchers.

One in three Americans will develop type 2 diabetes by 2050, according to recent projections by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Reports indicate that the disease goes into remission in many patients who undergo bariatric weight-loss surgery, which significantly restricts caloric intake prior to clinically significant weight loss.

While they're looking at the potential for drugs to help, I dont see why there's a need - its about the calories. Do you have diabetes? Wanna get off the drugs before Invokana leads to amputated limbs? Eat healthy and eat less... Seems you might be able to reverse your condition... and quickly.

I'm suspecting so many of our diseases are related to the over consumption of food. But not just calories, the kind of calories. There are many foods that contain ample calories but are still good and essential - like those found in the Mediterranean Diet, nuts, olive oil, etc.

Its the processed junk thats killing us... For example, in Asia rice is a staple. But the 'elite' preferred white rice as opposed to the less processed brown rice and they paid the price with more diseases while the peasantry was actually better off. Course even brown rice can be bad for you since it more readily absorbs toxins from the soil. We actually need arsenic but too much is harmful and it accumulates in rice, albeit there are ways to reduce arsenic levels in rice.

There's also a theory about the benefits of fasting, a practice found in the Bible and various cultures around the world. "Starving" yourself mimics features crucial to our evolution, feast or famine... We do both and have done so for God only knows how many millions of years. Maybe even the first life had to develop the ability to go without food for lengthy periods.

edit: I have chronic acid reflux, got it by eating big meals and lying down before bed time. So I've restricted my intake, gave up the sugar (except for fruit) and I've lost about 30 lbs and it didn't take long at all. Maybe a couple months... And now I've been out of the habit long enough I have to make sure I eat enough.

I dont eat breakfast or lunch, I wait until afternoon and have an apple and maybe a banana a bit later (need more of them, they're good for reflux). I have one main meal and try to eat it earlier in the night and then a snack closer to bed time. Its my new better habit and its how the pounds are dropping off with ease.

I cant believe I spent several decades abusing my body with food... My diet was terrible, fat, grease, red meat, etc. Now I rarely eat a steak (switched to chicken and turkey) and when I do the portions are half what I'd consume normally.

 

[Narz]

I thought it's already common knowledge you can reverse type ii diabetes with diet.

 

[Narz]

There's also a theory about the benefits of fasting, a practice found in the Bible and various cultures around the world. "Starving" yourself mimics features crucial to our evolution, feast or famine... We do both and have done so for God only knows how many millions of years. Maybe even the first life had to develop the ability to go without food for lengthy periods.

Intermittent fasting is a big new discovery, some might call it a fad but it's unlikely to go away since it's backed by science, at least so far.

(God she's hot!)

I cant believe I spent several decades abusing my body with food... My diet was terrible, fat, grease, red meat, etc. Now I rarely eat a steak (switched to chicken and turkey) and when I do the portions are half what I'd consume normally.

How'd you make the change?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Intermittent fasting is a big new discovery, some might call it a fad but it's unlikely to go away since it's backed by science, at least so far.

I went on the bandwagon in March and it really works for me. Not only does it reduce fat and improve muscle growth, you also sleep much better.
Unfortunately I can't really stick to the 8-hour window with my current work hours, but 10 or even 12 also helps.

 

[Berzerker]

How'd you make the change?

Just a conscious effort to tell myself "NO" while looking at rib eye steaks at the store. I had to change, I've spent the last couple years getting rid of or reducing bad habits and I still have trouble, I want to commit to the Mediterranean diet but I still eat more chocolate ice cream and red meat than I 'need".
I also didn't like the proton pump inhibitors (eg Nexium and Prilosec) docs recommend for reflux problems so I've been seeking 'natural' remedies. Cutting way down on dairy was/is probably the toughest change, I love milk! I quit pot a 2-3 weeks ago and thats helping too (the smoke relaxes the muscle keeping acid from entering the esophagus), gave up alcohol 2-3 years ago because beer was causing me nerve damage.

Its really a battle, I cant believe it only took about 3 months of eating large meals before bed time to cause this problem and it'll take years to recover, if thats even possible. Chronic inflammation is a major cause of cancer and its precursor Barrett's Syndrome. I've been considering surgery, they can tighten the esophagul sphincter, but I'd rather not go under the knife if lifestyle changes can solve my problem.

 

[Hrothbern]

Intermittent fasting is AFAIK some decades ago first studied.

Two info's on it.
1.
It looks like that our metabolism is able to a kind of soft "hibernation", especially around some switches in your mitochondria. During this "hibernation" if food is not extremely bad, we slow down ageing processes in our body.
The evolutionary considerations here put forward is that it pays off for our species to recognise prolonged periods of famine, in order to reduce fertility, until our metabolism gets again rich food, that triggers fertility and libido, enhancing the pay back for the huge investment that a embryo and a baby need. Having a baby during a bad period is a waste evolutionary seen.
2.
Diabetes 2 is all about insuline and blood sugar spikes, about how your body metabolism switchboard is tuned to store bloodsugar into fat or more glycogene, and most importantly, what kind of fuel is predominantly used, fat or glucose.

In a perfect world,
you keep your blood sugar spikes low (many ways to do that)
you enhance the ability of your cells to store more blood sugar and fetch it faster from your blood (insuline metabolism)
you process bloodsugar faster into fat
your main fuel you body uses and expect is fat.
To consider also is that before the agricultural revolution, carbonhydrates, easily converted into fast blood sugar, were A. a smaller part of our food intake. B. were mixed with huge amount of fibres C. were eaten in smaller portions.
Hereby noted that many fibres are also converted to fat in your digestive tract.

The nice thing about fasting/litlle food carbonhydrates, is that your metabolism resets to a fat fuel metabolism settings. From there you can move on in several choices.
The risk of it, is always that you go also short on essential and semi essential micronutrients. You better compensate for that.

About that increasing of your general inflammation level.
Lesser known is that the kind of whole proteins like milk or meat, recommended for children and mussle building are not, ARE NOT, the kind of proteins you need to get maintain max health at older age.
The milk, meat, egg proteins are for max fertility, growth. The body metabolism triggers especially on methionine.
If you eat animals top to toe, so not only the musle, but also all the collagen, you are better off. To consider is that collagen: skin to the outside, but also the skin of you organs, your bones, is very healthy and inflammatory reducing. That is also the reason why broils are so good for sick people.

 

[Berzerker]

The evolutionary considerations here put forward is that it pays off for our species to recognise prolonged periods of famine, in order to reduce fertility, until our metabolism gets again rich food, that triggers fertility and libido, enhancing the pay back for the huge investment that a embryo and a baby need. Having a baby during a bad period is a waste evolutionary seen.

Excellent point, I've heard women who are into fitness and body building reduce their body fat levels so much they dont even have periods much less pregnancies

 

[Ryika]

So many scientific theories for what basically boils down to "If you keep yourself from eating for most of the day, you lose weight."

 

[Hrothbern]

So many scientific theories for what basically boils down to "If you keep yourself from eating for most of the day, you lose weight."

Well... this post is about Diabetes 2... a nasty disease.... and for sure somebody having lots of overweight from too much eating, is likely to get Diabetes 2 at a much younger age.
But
Slender people, or muscular no-fat people can get easily get Diabetes 2 when they eat wrong... the only thing you need to do for it is having a lot of bloodsugar spikes and decrease the strenght of your metabolism to be on fat burning... NOT the too much fat of your body in order to lose weight, but the daily fat you eat, which is BTW much too low in the average western diet.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Excellent point, I've heard women who are into fitness and body building reduce their body fat levels so much they dont even have periods much less pregnancies

Yes, that is correct. What many people do not know is that the reverse is true aswell, actually almost all morbidly obese women stop getting their period, many of them are physically unable to have children.

So many scientific theories for what basically boils down to "If you keep yourself from eating for most of the day, you lose weight."

You can eat a single meal per day and still get fat. Ask me how I did it (don't).

 

[Ryika]

You can eat a single meal per day and still get fat. Ask me how I did it (don't).

Oh, you certainly can, and you can also get, or stay, fat if you only eat in a window of 8 hours a day.

For most people who are overweight and don't manage to lose weight, it likely comes in part from passive eating though, and for that just reducing the hours in which you're "allowed to eat" is perfect. I know, because I did it years ago (although admittedly I'm not the perfect example as I didn't have that much to get rid of to begin with). Only gets you so far if in those other 8 hours you eat the worst things imaginable of course, but it's a way of reducing intake (you'll likely "overeat" in those 8 hours, but not make up for what you'd have eaten over the rest of the day) if passive eating is part of the reason you're getting fat, and actually rather easy to do once you've overcome the first few weeks.

Actual 2-days-a-week fasting is probably a whole different beast though..

 

[Berzerker]

Yes, that is correct. What many people do not know is that the reverse is true aswell, actually almost all morbidly obese women stop getting their period, many of them are physically unable to have children.

I didn't know that... Seems a bit strange, evolutionarily speaking I can see why famine would reduce fertility, but how much of our existence saw morbidly obese critters? Well, live and learn...

Oh, you certainly can, and you can also get, or stay, fat if you only eat in a window of 8 hours a day.

For most people who are overweight and don't manage to lose weight, it likely comes in part from passive eating though, and for that just reducing the hours in which you're "allowed to eat" is perfect. I know, because I did it years ago (although admittedly I'm not the perfect example as I didn't have that much to get rid of to begin with). Only gets you so far if in those other 8 hours you eat the worst things imaginable of course, but it's a way of reducing intake (you'll likely "overeat" in those 8 hours, but not make up for what you'd have eaten over the rest of the day) if passive eating is part of the reason you're getting fat, and actually rather easy to do once you've overcome the first few weeks.

Thats basically what I've been doing, I use to eat from about noon well into the night (I'm a night owl as evidenced by my posting history), maybe 14-18 hours. Now I wait longer into the day before starting and only an apple or banana and I shut it off earlier, so I'm down to a 8-12 hour window with a smaller caloric intake of course.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

Type II Diabetes can be reversed without fasting by following a super low glycemic load diet. That means you can eat as much fat, protein, fiber, and resistant starch as you want (though you should eat enough calories to maintain a healthy weight, not going overboard with steak to the point of obesity). That means you can eat enough to avoid hunger while fixing your diabetes by cutting out sugar and refined carbs.

 

[Hrothbern]

Type II Diabetes can be reversed without fasting by following a super low glycemic load diet. That means you can eat as much fat, protein, fiber, and resistant starch as you want (though you should eat enough calories to maintain a healthy weight, not going overboard with steak to the point of obesity). That means you can eat enough to avoid starvation while fixing your diabetes by cutting out sugar and refined carbs.

Which is pretty close to our diet we had for many hundreds of thousands of years

EDIT
To be clear. That probable evolutionary diet was NOT the kind of Paleo diet that gets so much attention, containing lots of meat and raw.
Our digestive system is not that of a rabbit or a Gorilla (with his enormous belly)... we moved on from that by cooking tubers to better digestable.

 

[Azem.Ocram]

I forgot to mention that intermittent fasting has other benefits. I read in Scientific American that it slows aging. I also read that 20% of calorie intake from protein is the minimum for health and that 30% to 40% is better. A different study showed that a 30% protein, 60% fat, 10% carb diet with the same calorie intake and exercise leads to weightloss over the same calorie intake and exercise regime (in voluntary captivity) with 60% carbs.

 

[Hrothbern]

Perhaps also interesting here to add is brown fat.
above discussion is avoiding blood sugar spikes, avoiding triggering full fertile mode of your mitochondria (whereby noted that some micronutrient help like reservatrol, but the main trigger is litlle of the amino acid Methionine, whih can be achieved brute force with low protein, and more moderate with less egg yolk, meat, milk)... and the most important one: get your metabolisn in fat fuel mode, optimised for burning fat (and eat fat indeed)

The special benefit of brown fat is that it is fat tissue that has a lot of bloodvessels including the very fine blood vessels. Quite in contrary to normal white fat, that is difficult to asccess by your body metabolism.
Brown fat amount increases in your body if you learn you body to burn it while (lightly) shivering from cold. Burning that fat is the natural way our body has for such situations. There are people that increased brown fat with training in icewater, and can keep out for extreme periods where we are dead in minutes (like with the Titanic).
Babies have a lot of brown fat, and we in our warm comfort cocon, with heated houses do not. It is also important and a hub for our lymphatic system (which has no heart as pump, and can only flow in our body if our muscles contract regularely. This all works together and proper use leads to better optimalisation of your fat burning capacity.

just sitting, swallowing carb, a warm house... we were not made for that

 

[Berzerker]

I forgot to mention that intermittent fasting has other benefits. I read in Scientific American that it slows aging. I also read that 20% of calorie intake from protein is the minimum for health and that 30% to 40% is better. A different study showed that a 30% protein, 60% fat, 10% carb diet with the same calorie intake and exercise leads to weightloss over the same calorie intake and exercise regime (in voluntary captivity) with 60% carbs.

I just did a bit of reading on vegetable protein, green peas! Kinda hard to pack in the protein on a veggie diet, amazing how much is in chicken

 

[civvver]

Diet's an issue for sure but I think a bigger problem is sedentary lifestyle. People just don't move much anymore, and why would you? There's so much entertainment everywhere that all involves not moving. Most jobs now are desk jobs. Transportation is automatic not manual, and it has to be since many people live further from work now.

Carbs are so hard to give up, not just cus they are tasty and our bodies are conditioned to crave them, but cus they are dirt cheap. I can make a pbj for like 25 cents.

So with fasting, the whole breakfast is the most important part of the day thing is a myth? Does it not kick off your metabolism?

What do you have against PPIs just wondering? I get really bad acid reflux but it's limited to just a few foods. PPIs work fine for me.

My biggest triggers by far are coffee and wine (red way worse than white) so I just don't drink those anymore. Beer and liquor I can handle in moderation of frequency. What I mean is I can drink a half dozen drinks in one sitting and be fine, but if I have 1-2 daily for like a week I get reflux. So I try to only drink socially at parties and stuff and not just a beer to relax at home. It's weird but it like builds up in my system or something. Big meals do eventually get me but it has to be like a lot of eating at night for a while, usually only an issue around the holidays when you're going to a lot of dinners. And I can't eat fast food daily, but I already gave that up for cost reasons a long time ago. I pack my lunches now.

 

[Berzerker]

true...sit around all day and your body has more trouble detoxifying (I think). The body has a series of 'pumps' to push everything around but they require movement to work properly. Some people can get deep vein thrombosis or blood clots on long flights and its recommended people get up and move around to reduce the effect. Even if you cant get up and move, just flexing muscles isometrically at least forces blood to flow more. I'm fairly active since I play lots of golf but on my days off I dont do much at all.

 

[civvver]

On a side note the guidelines for high blood pressure in the us just changed. 120/80, which was often cited as an ideal measurement, is now crap apparently and considered elevated. Hypertension now starts at 130/80.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...idelines-mean-yours-might-be-too-high-n820456

I'm not sure if having high blood pressure increases your risk of diabetes or vice versa, but they both increase your risks of the same bad things like stroke and heart disease.

They are saying these new guidelines are to encourage people to seek treatment, whether it's changing lifestyle or medications. Apparently they will begin putting people on blood pressure meds at lower levels now. Conspiracy theorist in me kind of thinks maybe this is a ploy by drug companies to sell more drugs.


Also I didn't share my personal anecdote but my father in law is 60, was massively overweight probably around 330 but with a height of 6'4". Just a really big guy, fairly active, goes hunting a lot, walks a lot etc so in pretty good shape just heavy. He would eat out all the time and drink a lot of beer and eat a ton of sugar. He used to go sit on the couch after dinners and feed my girls cookies, eating 3-4 himself every night.

Last winter he was feeling really thirsty for a few days and just not right and went to the dr and his blood sugar was like off the charts high, I want to say in the 500s. Quite frankly they were shocked he hadn't already had a stroke or something. He gave up drinking on the spot and carbs entirely for about 3 months. He mostly just ate steak, pork chops, chicken, eggs, lunch meat and vegetables. He never "dieted" or watched his calories, just threw out carbs. His sugar dropped dramatically in just a couple months so he began eating some carbs like a couple pieces of toast with peanut butter at breakfast and maybe a hamburger on a bun at dinner. Other days he might sneak one cookie. But still he mostly just eats meat, eggs, nuts and vegetables.

Now his sugar is super low, like 80s all the time, he's lost 80 pounds in a year and docs say he doesn't really have diabetes anymore. He's still keeping the same habits though so I'm not sure if he's considered cured or not or if it would return if he started drinking again.

It kind of sucks we can't all just eat platefuls of pasta and fries washed down with beer but such is life I guess. It's mostly just willpower for many people.