EAT TO BEAT DIABETES
A mouth-watering series that could transform your health
IF YOU are struggling with excess weight or type 2 diabetes, this low-carb plan — part of the Mail’s Good Health for Life series — should put you back in control of your health. Here, Dr David Unwin — the NHS GP behind the plan — explains how it works, while chef and food writer Katie Caldesi reveals some exclusive low-carb recipes.
The word ‘diet’ makes us think of denial — and hunger. But as those who switch to low-carb discover, this is far from their experience. On Saturday, I told the story of my patient, Roy Almond, who ‘reversed’ his type 2 diabetes — or, more accurately, put it into drug-free remission (meaning he no longer needed medication) — just four months after he’d gone low-carb.
Roy, who’s 74, and his wife Pat were delighted, particularly as he’s also lost 3st. And Roy’s blood pressure readings are now better than they’ve been for years, despite coming off his blood pressure medication.
And he’s done it without going hungry — or wanting sugar. he used to have a sweet tooth, but says he’s ‘amazed’ by how little he’s hankered after cakes or biscuits.
‘The strange thing is I just don’t crave food like I used to; I’m not so hungry any more,’ he says.
how is that possible? Going low-carb boils down to giving up table sugar completely, as you might expect. But also cutting back on starchy carbs, such as cornflakes, muesli, bread, spaghetti and crackers, because the body breaks all these down into sugar.
The starchy carbs you cut out are replaced with green vegetables, fish, meat, as well as eggs, nuts, full-fat dairy such as cream, cheese and yoghurt, and healthy fats such as olive oil, coconut oil or even butter. And these are very filling!
Roy is now my 66th patient who’s achieved type 2 diabetes remission using the low-carb approach.
I first told Mail readers about the incredible results that can be achieved this way earlier this year. Since then, I’ve shown that type 2 diabetes low-carb colleagues In August, is can not and help the two I with. only published eminent condition a study of in environmental the International Research Journal and Public health that found significant numbers of my patients have not only reversed their type 2 diabetes, but they were able to come off their blood pressure medication, too.
And the message about lowcarb is spreading. A set of tables I produced showing the surprising degree to which starchy carbs, such as bread, can affect blood sugar levels has been officially
endorsed by the National Institute for health and Care excellence (NICe), the healthcare watchdog, as a useful resource for people with type 2 diabetes. (A version of this is printed on the last page of this pullout.) Low- carb is something of a grass roots revolution, spread via social media thanks to those with type 2 diabetes. And in many cases, doctors are learning about the low- carb diet from their patients. In fact, that is exactly how I first came across the approach back in 2012.
A patient amazed me by coming into the practice having lost stones in weight.
When we did her blood tests, to my astonishment they showed she’d put her type 2 diabetes into remission.
I was fascinated to learn she was part of an online community, the low- carb forum on
diabetes. co. uk. There were 40,000 people helping each other with their condition, quite outside of the NhS (there are now 308,000 in the forum).
To understand how shocked I was by this, in the previous 26 years as a GP I hadn’t come across a single case of type 2 diabetes remission. I had no idea it was even possible.
My experience was that for most people, this was a chronic, deteriorating condition and often, over time, the only answer was to add more drugs. But my patient and the low-carb forum set me thinking.
The truth was, although I advised my patients with type 2 diabetes to avoid table sugar, biscuits and sweets, I had completely forgotten that starchy carbs such as rice, potatoes, bread and breakfast cereals are all digested down into lots of sugar. Indeed, the starch molecule is actually made up of glucose, the very sugar
that people with type 2 diabetes struggle to deal with. Someone recently described this to me as ‘starch is lots of molecules of glucose holding hands’.
Before long, I had 18 patients switching to a low-carb diet — and to learn more, I went low-carb with them.
It was amazingly straightforward. As an example, instead of a curry with rice, I’d put the meat and sauce on green veg.
Still feeling guilty about never having previously mentioned it, I explored how I could explain the ‘sugariness’ of starchy foods to my patients — which is how my tables now used by NICE, came about.
They are based on the glycaemic index, which many of you will know compares the ‘sugariness’ of different foods with pure glucose.
A more sophisticated measure is the glycaemic load of the food, which looks at the ‘sugariness’ of a portion of that food and how it affects blood sugar compared with pure sugar. For example, a banana will affect your blood sugar to the same extent as consuming 16g of pure glucose.
The problem was my patients had no idea what 16g of glucose looked like.
So I came up with a new idea, and with the help of someone who really understood dietary carbohydrates and particularly sugars — Dr Geoffrey Livesey, fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine — we devised a way of showing patients, in a simple visual way, how foods affected blood sugar levels
In the case of the banana, the 16g of glucose are equivalent to 5.7 tsp of sugar. So eating a banana (or nearly 6 tsp of table sugar) is much the same in terms of what happens to your blood sugar levels.
I remember our first calculation that revealed eating a medium- sized baked potato would affect your blood sugar to the same extent as 9 tsp of actual sugar. Even I was astonished!
We produced seven tables of foods and their effect on blood sugar levels, from fruits to cereals. Our work was published in The Journal of Insulin Resistance in 2016.
The low-carb approach is not just about weight loss and type 2 diabetes. After starting with the first 18 patients in 2013, we found unexpected improvements in liver function, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. Significant numbers of my patients were able to come off their blood pressure medication.
I, too, benefited. Thanks to my low-carb diet, my previously high blood pressure of 160/90 went down to normal, 130/80. Read tomorrow’s pullout to find out more about this effect.
NOTE: If you are taking medication or are worried about your health, consult your GP before embarking on a change in diet.