Planned fasting may help reverse Type 2 diabetes

◗ All three men were able to stop injecting themselves with insulin within a month of starting their fasting schedule

Toronto, Oct. 10: Planned intermittent fasting may help to reverse Type 2 diabetes, according to doctors who were able to cut out the need for insulin treatment for three patients in their care.

Lifestyle changes are key to managing type 2 diabetes, but patients themselves cannot always control blood glucose levels.

According to doctors from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine and Scarborough Hospital in Canada, three men, aged between 40 and 67, planned intermittent fasting to see if it might ease their symptoms.

“The use of a therapeutic fasting regimen for treatment of type 2 diabetes is virtually unheard of,” doctors wrote in the journal BMJ Case Reports.

“This present case series showed that 24hour fasting regimens can significantly reverse or eliminate the need for diabetic medication,” they wrote.

The patients were taking various drugs to control their disease as well as daily units of insulin. In addition to type 2 diabetes, they all had high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Two of the men fasted on alternate days for a full 24 hours, while the third fasted for three days.

On fast days they were allowed to drink very low calorie drinks, such as tea/ coffee, water or broth, and to eat one very low calorie meal in the evening.

All three men were able to stop injecting themselves with insulin within a month of starting their fasting schedule. In one case this took only five days. Two of the men were able to stop taking all their other diabetic drugs, while the third discontinued three out of the four drugs.