While losing weight helps in curing type 2 diabetes

A British clinical trial suggests that patients suffering from type 2 diabetes for less than 6 years stop their treatment for diabetes and hypertension, in parallel with a strict diet for several months, with close support.

A radical diet and two years of support can help you avoid type 2 diabetes. Sometimes even after 5 years. Geraldine Zamansky, journalist for Health Magazine on France 5, today discusses the challenge of this strict diet to help patients change their eating habits and lose weight.

franceinfo: Did the participants in this study actually develop diabetes and no longer have it?

Geraldine Zamansky: Totally. To enter this clinical trial established in the United Kingdom, you had to suffer from obesity and have been diabetic for less than 6 years. After one year, about half of the 149 volunteers who followed the prescribed strict diet were free of their diabetes, and after 5 years, 13% remained so.

This means that blood sugar control works again without medication. how ? I said drastic: they just changed the food for 3 months, then 3 months of food recovery, with all the support, to maintain their initial weight loss, continued for another year and a half. ie often 15 kg.

But is the new medical consensus changing to advise against cruelty-free diets?

Please note, this is not about losing a few pounds for the beach. This is a therapeutic program to prevent diabetes, a serious disease associated with dangerous excess weight. Moreover, this protocol was based on the effects of bariatric surgery that reduces stomach size, and therefore, food intake.

People who have undergone surgery have recovered from diabetes. Professor Mike Lynn, who coordinated this study from the Faculty of Medicine in Glasgow, Scotland, explained to me that his diet, in turn, without a scalpel, removes the root of the problem: excess fat in the pancreas and liver. This allowed the volunteers to safely stop taking their diabetes pills.

That’s impressive, but after 5 years, have the volunteers repeatedly resumed their treatment?

Yes, more than 8 out of 10 have relapsed in some way. But the longer they stayed in remission without diabetes, the less complications they suffered. For example, we are talking here about vision risks or amputation risks. This is crucial for Professor Lin, who can no longer help reduce the risks associated with the disease. So he shares with his team a more accessible version of his diet, this time on porridge, in good Scottish fashion. Should not be done without medical supervision. And above all, they continue to seek what will be the best long-term support to achieve true healing.

A study published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology

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