[HN Gopher] Intermittent fasting may negate need for diabetes dr...
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       Intermittent fasting may negate need for diabetes drugs, small
       study suggests
        
       Author : supermatou
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2022-12-14 21:22 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.upi.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.upi.com)
        
       | hwayne wrote:
       | I was skeptical and did some further reading, but it seems like
       | there's other papers showing that diabetes is reversible with
       | weightloss. In particular:
       | 
       | - This 2006 paper found that bariatric surgery can reverse
       | diabetes: [2006]
       | 
       | - This paper reversed diabetes in people purely through calorie
       | restriction: [2011]
       | 
       | - This survey article [2020] finds that about half (!) of
       | diabetics who lose 15 kg totally reverse type 2, and no longer
       | need any medication. It also proposes mechanisms for why this
       | works.
       | 
       | I'm not a doctor or a medical researcher and don't have the skill
       | to read these studies carefully. But it seems that it's generally
       | known now that diabetes is reversible with dieting? Of note the
       | 2020 article is a little stricter than TFA: it says that the
       | HbA_1c threshold has to below 6.5% even after _six_ months of no
       | medication, while TFA defines it as _three_ months. Given that
       | the  "only 2.8% of control group individuals achieved remission",
       | it's possible that intermittent fasting only helped vis-a-vis
       | weight loss, and as long as you lose enough weight you can
       | potentially reverse diabetes.
       | 
       | It'd be nice if TFA was on sci-hub.
       | 
       | [2006]
       | https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/55/7/2025/1419...
       | 
       | [2011] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21656330/
       | 
       | [2020] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1449
        
       | Johnny555 wrote:
       | That's a pretty long fasting interval:
       | 
       |  _" is a new proposed dietary approach based on [intermittent
       | fasting] involving five fasting days followed by 10 days of
       | reintroducing everyday food items."_
       | 
       | And when they say "everyday food items" they apparently mean a
       | special diet:
       | 
       |  _The diet contains daily foods such as wheat, barley, rice, rye
       | and oat, "and features reduced glycemic loads, calories, and
       | carbohydrates, as well as increased unsaturated fatty acids," the
       | scientists said._
       | 
       | It doesn't appear that they tested a group that had the special
       | diet but without the intermittent fasting.
        
         | irremediable wrote:
         | 5 fasting days doesn't mean 5 days of total fasting.
        
       | diabeetusman wrote:
       | I'm not seeing the reasoning behind intermittent fasting in
       | particular as opposed to losing weight in general. Couldn't the
       | title just have equivalently been "losing weight may negate need
       | for [type 2] diabetes drugs"?
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-14 23:02 UTC)