How cutting carbs could help your sleep troubles, too!
When I started offering the low-carb diet to my patients, it was specifically to tackle type 2 diabetes. But I found it improved other conditions, too.
Last Saturday in the Mail, one of my patients, Marcia Mawdsley, who’d had type 2 for 23 years, revealed how after going low-carb she had lost more than 3 st and had been able to come off insulin and blood pressure medication, too.
Meanwhile, Anna eastwood, who told her story last Tuesday, reversed her fatty liver disease after shedding almost 9 st on a low-carb diet. Other patients have also seen their cholesterol levels improve, so they no longer need to take statins. And some report finally sleeping better.
But what links these conditions to type 2 diabetes — and giving up sugar and starchy carbs?
Firstly, a word about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that’s now reached epidemic proportions — as many as one in three people is estimated to have early signs of it, according to the nhS.
Often it shows up on ultrasound scans of the liver that show it to be enlarged and full of fat.
These conditions — type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, central obesity (carrying excess weight around the abdomen), fatty liver disease, as well as raised blood fats levels such as triglyceride are often found together and make up something we call the metabolic syndrome, which is itself linked to heart disease and some cancers.
What connects all these conditions is our old friend, insulin.
The hormone insulin is produced by your pancreas to get your blood sugar down. It does this by pushing glucose out of the bloodstream and into cells.
Firstly, it pushes glucose into the muscle cells for energy, but if you eat more sugar than your muscles need then the excess is pushed into your belly fat and liver in a form of fat called triglyceride. This may give rise to central obesity and fatty liver.
In its turn, fatty liver causes your cells to become more resistant to insulin, so it doesn’t work as well — we call this insulin resistance and it is part of how we develop type 2 diabetes. This helps explain why all these conditions are found together.
But what about high blood pressure? This was the subject of a paper I published last year with Professor Adrian Brady, a cardiologist from the University of Glasgow — we found that people with type 2 diabetes choosing a low-carb diet achieved significant improvements in blood pressure.
It seems that for people with type 2, insulin causes them to hoard salt, which raises blood pressure.
Finally, with the sleeping problems, it’s the losing weight that probably plays a role in the improvements my patients report.
Perhaps some of you saw the recent news story about ‘fatty tongues’ being the main driver of sleep apnoea?
This condition, often associated with heavy snoring, causes people to stop breathing for a while and is associated with daytime sleepiness and high blood pressure, which affect quality of life.
The ‘fatty tongue’ bit made me start asking my low-carb patients if any of them had noticed any improvement in this, as one might expect weight loss to help.
One man (or rather, his wife) noticed a significant improvement in just three weeks. Our weight loss star Anna eastwood was on the waiting list for a sleep clinic appointment she now no longer needs!