EAT TO BEAT diabetes

Millions of us have lifestyle-induced diabetes – and millions more are on the brink. Now, in a groundbreaking series, the creator of the 5:2 diet shows how YOU can prevent or even reverse this potentially deadly condition . . . in just eight weeks!

THIS is a wake-up call. A warning. And it’s addressed not only to those already suffering lifestyle-induced diabetes, but to the millions of people in this country who have dangerously high blood sugar levels and don’t yet know it.

We in Britain today are facing a health epidemic, the true horrifying scale of which is only just becoming apparent.

Figures published earlier this month reveal that for the first time ever more than four million Britons have diabetes.

Rates have more than doubled in the past 20 years, and if current trends continue experts predict more than five million will have the illness by 2025. It is the fastest growing health threat of our times.

The reason? Our sedentary lifestyle and the food we eat is not only making us fatter, but is leading to raised blood sugar levels.

This is bad for our bodies and puts us at risk of Type 2 diabetes, leading to a lifetime on medication and a whole host of associated health complications.

If you think this doesn’t affect you, consider this statistic. According to the British Medical Journal, an alarming one in three adults in Britain have pre-diabetes (blood sugar levels that are abnormally high, but not yet in the diabetic range). I’ll repeat that, shall I? One in three. Even if your own blood sugars are normal, this epidemic will almost certainly be affecting someone you love or care about.

And here are some more scary facts about this toxic time bomb:

IT IS a largely silent epidemic. If you have raised blood sugars you may feel unusually tired, thirsty or hungry, find it hard to get a good night’s sleep or have a general mental ‘fuzziness’. But it’s more likely that you’ll have no symptoms at all, at least to begin with.

IF YOU do have pre-diabetes (and unless you’ve been tested you won’t know), there’s a 30 per cent chance that within five years you will develop Type 2 diabetes — the kind linked to unhealthy diet and lifestyle. It used to affect mainly those over 40, but doctors are seeing it in ever younger patients.

APART from leading to diabetes, raised blood sugar speeds up the ageing process and significantly increases your risk of heart disease, stroke and cognitive impairment (when you have problems remembering things or making decisions).

BLOOD sugar problems are not restricted to those who are overweight. In fact, a third of all Type 2 diabetics have a healthy Body Mass Index or BMI (the commonly used measure of weight relative to height). As we’ll see, it’s not so much a question of how much fat you are carrying as where it’s deposited.

Once you tip from pre-diabetes into diabetes, you will be slapped on medication faster than you can say: ‘Coca-Cola.’

But pills don’t treat the underlying disease and rarely stop it progressing.

Anyway, I’m convinced that there are lots of people who, given the opportunity, would rather get healthy through lifestyle changes than resort to a lifetime on drugs.

AND here there is some good news. There is a simple way not only to halt the progress of prediabetes but, remarkable as it sounds, achieve what until now has been regarded as impossible: actually reversing Type 2 diabetes and returning your blood sugar levels to normal — all in JUST EIGHT WEEKS.

During the course of this series, I’ll be introducing you to a novel, 800 calories-a-day diet.

It’s much easier to stick to than you might imagine, and you’ll be eating tasty wholesome food that will leave you feeling properly full in a way that lasts.

You will not only lose your belly fat fast, but see your blood sugar levels tumble even faster.

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? But the approach is based, among others, on rigorous scientific trials done at the University of Newcastle, investigating, in detail, the mechanisms underlying what goes wrong with blood sugar control.

Over the next few days you’ll meet some of the men and women who have used it to eat their way back to health. They are not exceptional. Despite being told by their doctors that ‘it won’t work and you’ll never stick to it’, many others have done the same.

But surely, I hear you say, this is crash-dieting and crash-dieting always fails? You end up putting back on all the weight you lost, and more.

Well, no. Like anything, it depends on how it is done. Over this series, I will take you through the science and demolish many common myths about dieting.

But first, a bit of background. Though I qualified as a doctor, I have spent nearly 30 years making science and health-related television documentaries, covering many of the big medical issues of the day and interviewing hundreds of experts on a huge range of topics. This has given me a unique perspective and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the recent rise in diabesity (diabetes plus obesity) is truly frightening.

It has not crept up on us gradually. People became a bit heavier in the post-war years, but in the Fifties the average waist size for women was still only 26in (34in for men) and Marilyn Monroe, who had a 22in waist, was certainly not exceptional for her time.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the Eighties that obesity took off in a spectacular fashion; in a single generation it swept the globe. Today, the average waist size for British women is 34in, and for men it’s 37in. We typically underestimate our waist size by two inches, because we rely on trouser size rather than measuring around the belly button.

Among the rich, developed countries, we lead the pack along with the Americans and Australians. Today, roughly two-thirds of our population is overweight and men and women have put on an average of 18lb (the equivalent of a large, heavy suitcase) in the past three decades.

Why do I care about all this? Because my own story reflects how the epidemic of diabesity came about and offers a solution as to what we can do about it.

I started studying medicine in 1980, when everyone was obsessed with the amount of saturated fat in our food.

Huge numbers of people switched from eating animal fats, such as butter and milk, to margarine, low-

fat products and vegetable oils. I was no different. I gave up butter, cream and eggs. I rarely ate red meat and switched to skimmed milk and low-fat yoghurt — neither of which I enjoyed, but both of which I was sure were good for me.

Despite all this self-denial, I put on nearly 30lb over the next few decades. Then, three years ago, my doctor told me that my blood sugar levels were within the diabetic range. Only just, but nonetheless diabetic. Time to go on the tablets.

I was shocked and wondered what to do. Even then, I knew that this is not a trivial disease, but rather than start on a lifetime of medication I decided to make a documentary for the BBC in which I would seek out alternative ways to improve my health.

While making Eat, Fast, Live Longer, I came across years of animal research and numerous human trials demonstrating the multiple benefits of ‘intermittent fasting’. This involves periodically reducing your calorie intake to bring about not only weight loss, but improvements in mood and memory.

So I went on what I called the 5:2 diet (eat normally five days a week, then cut calories to around 600 on the other two days), and found it surprisingly manageable. I lost 20lb in 12 weeks and my blood sugar and cholesterol levels returned to normal.

After making the documentary, I co-authored a best-selling book called The Fast Diet, which included not only the science behind intermittent fasting, but also a practical guide on how to do it.

Our book was not, however, aimed at diabetics, and I wondered at the time if what had happened to me was unusual.

So, I decided that I would look more closely into the science linking calories, carbohydrates, obesity and diabetes.

WHY LOW FAT HAS MADE US FATTER!

MY QUEST left me in no doubt that the dietary disaster we face today is an unintended consequence of that age-old campaign against saturated fats.

It successfully persuaded us to eat more fat-free and fat-reduced diet products. But we didn’t get slimmer — we became fatter.

One problem is that when people cut out fat, they get hungry, so they switch to cheap and sugary carbs, as I know from my experience.

Another is that when manufacturers took out fat from food they put in sugar to make it more palatable.

The low-fat Starbucks muffin, for instance (now discontinued or at least I can no longer find it on its website), used to contain 430 calories and the equivalent of 13 tsp of sugar.

The thing about carbs — particularly easily digestible ones such as sugar, but also breakfast cereals, pasta, bread and potatoes — is that they are quickly broken down in the gut to release sugar.

Your pancreas responds by producing insulin, the hormone whose job is to bring high blood sugar levels back down.

It does this by helping energy-hungry cells, such as those in your muscles, take up the sugar.

unfortunately, an unhealthy diet and a low-activity lifestyle can, over many years, lead to what’s called ‘insulin resistance’. Just as your children stop listening if you keep shouting at them, your body becomes less and less sensitive to insulin.

With the insulin’s ability to divert the surplus calories into muscle cells thus hampered, it forces them instead into your fat cells.

Deprived of fuel, your muscle cells tell your brain to eat more. So you do. But because your high insulin levels are still encouraging fat storage, you just get fatter while staying hungry.

That is not to say that being obese inevitably leads to Type 2 diabetes. You can be overweight without being diabetic, and diabetic without being overweight.

And the real problem seems to be not how much fat you carry, but where it gets deposited.

THIN ON THE OUTSIDE, FAT ON THE INSIDE

WHILE the subcutaneous fat that gathers on your bottom, thighs and arms is relatively harmless (and may even be protective), a far greater danger lies in the hidden fat that wraps itself around your heart, liver and gut.

Because this ‘visceral’ fat lies inside the body, rather than on the surface where you can see it, you can appear to be relatively slim. People like that are known as TOFIs — Thin On The Outside, Fat Inside. I used to be one of them.

Visceral fat is particularly dangerous because it invades organs, such as your liver and pancreas. It’s the build-up of the fat in these two organs that then causes lots of problems with our insulin and blood sugar levels according to the man on whose ground-breaking research my Blood Sugar Diet is based.

Roy Taylor, professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle university, is one of Europe’s most respected diabetes researchers and also runs the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre. his team have developed novel ways of measuring levels of fat in the liver and pancreas.

They’ve shown that once these rise above a critical point, the two organs stop communicating with each other. Eventually, your body can’t produce enough insulin or simply stops responding to it. You become a Type 2 diabetic.

Professor Taylor also argues that we each have our own ‘personal fat threshold’ (PFT), a tipping point that is partly down to genetics and ethnic origin. This decides how much fat you can accumulate before it starts to overflow into your liver and pancreas, leading to Type 2 diabetes.

In some people the PFT seems to be set high; in others it’s surprisingly low. Take actor Tom hanks, who experienced persistently high blood sugar levels from the age of 36. In 2013, by which time he was 57, he announced he had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

he’s not someone you’d think of as particularly overweight. But he was probably carrying too much for his particular genetic make-up and

eventually reached his PFT. The good news is that whatever your PFT, if you drain the fat out of your liver and pancreas then your blood sugars will begin to fall back towards normal, and the odds are that you will reverse your diabetes.

A DRAMATIC DIETARY DISCOVERY

In 2011, Professor Taylor began a trial that involved asking 11 recently diagnosed diabetics to go on a very low-calorie diet.

In the first week they lost an average of 3.9kg (8lb) and most reported finding the diet surprisingly easy, their hunger disappearing within 48 hours.

In just eight weeks — a remarkably short time — they lost an average of 15kg (33lb), as well as nearly 5in round the waist. What’s more, by the end, their blood sugar levels were all back in the non-diabetic range.

‘It was electrifying,’ says Professor Taylor, ‘amazingly more effective than I thought it would ever be.’

His follow-up studies have shown, not surprisingly, that the less time you have been a Type 2 diabetic, then the greater the chance of success.

In a recent study, published four months ago, he showed the diet could get blood sugar levels back to normal (without medication) in 87 per cent of people who had been diabetic for less than four years and in around half of those who had been diabetic for more than eight years.

One of Professor Taylor’s high-profile critics recently approached him after a lecture. ‘I was wrong,’ he told him. ‘You were right.’

Further vindication came when the charity Diabetes UK announced it has given the largest research grant in its 80-year history to a largescale trial he is conducting alongside colleagues from Glasgow University. Running for five years, it will involve patients from more than 30 doctors’ practices from all over the UK.

In the meantime, many individuals have been taking matters into their own hands — and you can do, too.

In Monday’s Mail, I’ll explain more about how you can lose weight, improve your health and get your blood sugar under control. And all this while eating tasty and wholesome food that will keep you feeling fuller for longer. I will also explain the sort of tests and precautions you should take before starting.

AdApted from the eight-Week Blood Sugar diet: Lose Weight Fast And Reprogramme Your Body by Michael Mosley (Short Books, £8.99). © Michael Mosley 2016. to order a copy at the special price of £7.19 (offer valid until January 23, 2016), please call 0808 272 0808 or visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk. p&p free on orders over £12.