Prof Roy Taylor on Type 2 reversal

[zoombapup]

Hey guys.

Not sure what the policy is with posting links etc. But I was doing a bit of reading on the Newcastle University pages for the diet etc and came across this video, it only had 60 views!! I mean something as profound as this and only 60 people had seen it?

Only 3 subscribers too, considering that fluff like the Keto diet have millions of subs and views, this is pretty shocking.

Anyway, here's a pretty positive message from Prof Taylor that I thought was interesting.

 

[grovesy]

I know I would not be able to do it.
I also have reservations as they dont seem to know why it works for some ans not others, there has been no long term results yet, and that it may be rolled out as the golden bullet but without the support that was given to the trail participants.

 

[zoombapup]

According to the website: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal/#scientificinformation

It appears that part of it is personal metabolic differences, which I guess is what plays out on these forums a fair bit. So any study is going to show averages and not personalized results, plus, to be honest the scientific ethics panels would have a fit if you were going to try and make it personal anyway.

Why do you say you wouldn't be able to do it? I mean the mechanism (eating less) is pretty basic. I guess it depends on your definition of long term, but 2 years is probably about as good as it gets right now and they show positive results for a relatively high proportion of subjects, certainly enough to get my interest as a scientist myself it does make me wonder about the protocols for really long term studies.

Got Prof Taylors book on the way tomorrow, so I'll probably read that during my next medical appointment wait (it usually takes hours to be seen).

 

[grovesy]

I know I find restrictive diets difficult to adhere to!
I personally find a way of eatingI can maintain most of the time. I also have found that foods I could tolerate have changed over the years.

 

[DebbieC]

Hi all I found this very positive although I agree T2 can be complicated and maybe linked to other causes, but my son lost 4st in 3 and a bit months and his diabetes in remission...he has struggled with weight for years since early 20s and no diet seemed to work for long.. he then went back to eating pretty rubbish diet and then got T2 in September.... I am really hoping that if he can now keep his weight down the diabetes will stay away for as long as possible.. his GP knows of this research and said she has another patient who lost similar amount and her diabetes gone too.. seems small number imo but one can only hope. More importantly it seems cutting back drastically on carbs and only having very few new potato or low carb bread a few times a week has enabled drastic weight loss without any hunger or binge eating which seems to have been key in this diet actually working ( that and me being the menu planner and chef ) anyway I agree that weight loss has really helped my son and it was easily achieved which to me is quite miraculous

 

[grovesy]

The Newcastle Diet is not low carb it is ultra low calorie diet for a limited period of time. In the trail they used diet shakes.

 

[ianf0ster]

There is a simple reason why the Prof Taylor videos about the DIRECT study and the Newcastle diet get less views than those of Dr David Unwin (who's research work Prof Taylor has assisted with). It is that Low Carb is easier and more easily sustained for the majority of Type 2 diabetics.

I suggest you watch this video from the Public Health Collaboration (in the UK).

This was recorded in 2017, his recent figures show between 40% and 50% remission at the 2yr mark for his patients and even greater savings on Diabetes drugs at his surgery.

 

[Eddy Edson]

easier and more easily sustained

Taylor's stuff: short term intensive calorie reduction for a few weeks; afterwards just whatever calorie level to maintain weight-loss.

LCHF: Restrict carbs forever.

Taylor's stuff is great, and if it works for you and you can maintain weight loss. The obvious problem is the maintenance part. The primary end-point for the DiRECT trial was 15kg weight loss. A high proportion of participants achieved this at 12 months, but at 24 months it had fallen to just 11%. That doesn't seem radically better than weight loss programs in general (certainly low-carb strategies don't do any better in general).

The depressing point is that maintaining weight loss is just really hard - the effort required to maintain can be about the same as the effort required to lose, and you have to do it forever.

 

[zoombapup]

The depressing point is that maintaining weight loss is just really hard - the effort required to maintain can be about the same as the effort required to lose, and you have to do it forever.

Way to end on a positive note there Eddy 😛 but of course you're right. Which I guess is why a lifestyle change is more important in the long run.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Way to end on a positive note there Eddy 😛 but of course you're right. Which I guess is why a lifestyle change is more important in the long run.

Or pharma needs to come up with a really good appetite suppressant pill!

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Or pharma needs to come up with a really good appetite suppressant pill!

I saw an article last year that suggested 40-70% of your propensity to gain weight was genetically derived, including your level of appetite (and which things you desire most), how quickly you feel full, and then, of course, what your body actually does with the various nutrients.

I think this is why people constantly looking for ‘the’ way are going to struggle, because different things work for different people, and it seems that some people are just hard-wired to find this really really tough

But it does clarify that the stigma around weight really needs to end. This isn’t weakness or lack of willpower - it’s just a very uneven playing field. And if you don’t struggle with weight, just be very VERY thankful!

 

[Ralph-YK]

Not watched the videos yet.

and you have to do it forever.

This is the problem with diets, they are short term.

Which I guess is why a lifestyle change is more important in the long run.

 

[DaveB]

The problem with Prof Taylor's ND Low-Calorie work is that it based less on good science than Dr Unwin's Low-carb. Calories are not a food group and if you keep their level down, say to 800cals/day, you may end-up reducing fats rather than carbs as fats have twice the calories than carbs. This is not what you want in the long-term as carbs are the main cause of obesity and not fats. I think some of the ND works leans more towards the view that 'fat makes you fat' and hence needs reducing which has been the prevailing view and doesn't appear to be true compared with the role of carbs in the diet. In my view calories are best ignored.

 

[Ralph-YK]

The problem with Prof Taylor's ND Low-Calorie work is that it based less on good science than Dr Unwin's Low-carb. Calories are not a food group and if you keep their level down, say to 800cals/day, you may end-up reducing fats rather than carbs as fats have twice the calories than carbs. This is not what you want in the long-term as carbs are the main cause of obesity and not fats. I think some of the ND works leans more towards the view that 'fat makes you fat' and hence needs reducing which has been the prevailing view and doesn't appear to be true compared with the role of carbs in the diet. In my view calories are best ignored.

Do you have a reference for it being down to carbs.
For diabetics it is carbs we have to manage (or reduce). Some people are stuck on calories (which don't affect BG) and from there fats. The diabetic dietician I saw failed to help me manage my diabetes. Cause she was all bothered about me having bacon (just the once), cause fats, cause calories.

 

[Pandora71]

Just 'chipping' in. There seem to be 4 proven ways to reverse diabetes and I think only 2 of them are sustainable:
1) post bariatric surgery obese patients lose diabetes before they lose weight because the liver and pancreas is quickly stripped of its fat and the patient becomes less insulin resistant.
2) The non surgical versions of this is intermittent fasting in all its forms (see Jason Fung on You Tube).
3) Newcastle Diet also works by stripping liver fat away and 800 kcals assuming you are not just eating 3 Mars bars a day is low carb as well as low cal.
4) Low Carb - the spectrum from keto to 120g. per day See various trials but Virta Health has shown results across 2 years.
https://phcuk.org/rcts/ This is the link comparing diets not specifically for type 2 but the theory is that type 2 is a driver of weight gain and other health issues in a larger proportion of the population.

All these work by reducing spikes in insulin that cause fat to be stored and not used up from the body stores. Everyone has a Personal Fat Threshold (Prof Taylor's term). Some people cannot store much fat in their fat cells and easily become diabetic e.g. South East Aisans who often aren't fat but do get diabetic easily versus some very fat people who easily store fat and don't become diabetic.
The implication of 3) is that by drastically cutting calories the body adjusts down its' metabolism and that is why being on a diet makes you feel hungry, cold and tired and you eventually give up. I think it is a tough diet to follow if you have a family or social life. People do lose weight but often find it very easy to regain the weight they lost and more (pus their diabetes).
Fasting and low carb have been found to be more sustainable than the standard diabetes low fat, high carb diet (see link above). Crucially fasting does NOT crash the metabolism (presumably because in our past we did naturally have periods where there was no food unless we caught it and yet we still had to function efficiently). The problem today is that we live in a very carb loaded food culture and it is really hard for people to imagine not eating bread, pasta and rice.
There is also a problem with a phobia around dietary fat based on the failed hypothesis that fat causes heart disease and the fact that is calorie dense but not fattening.
I;ve done it to make my type 1 easier to manage (lazy person who doesn't want to have to count carbs and guestimate my bolus dose).
Sorry for this long post but I think Prof Taylor 's work is proof that Diabetes can be reversed and since then sites like Diet Doctor are making the science and practice of low carb/keto much easier. Unfortunately the low fat/high carb doesn't seem to work for a lot of diabetics but everyone should try their own experiment.

 

[zoombapup]

Just 'chipping' in.

And a very good chip it was. I agree completely with what you said (from what I've read so far anyway). I think long term the low carb diet is definitely the one that would be easiest to maintain. But the question about the ND is more about short term vs long term weight loss. Essentially they're saying that it doesn't matter if its fast or slow loss as long as a certain percentage of loss happens, so why not do it quickly and then shift to a more maintainable low carb mode after that. As Prof Taylor puts it, you need to be eating 2/3rd of what you were before, which makes sense for some cases (especially mine as my portion control is terrible it seems).

I just got Prof Taylors book, so will have a read next time I've got a few spare hours, but i think the message is at least positive if you can maintain weight loss below some threshold value that is personal and to do with Liver and Pancreas fat.

Man, it all sounds complicated, but fundamentally it's just counting numbers of numbers of specific elements in food. Only takes simple arithmetic.

 

[DaveB]

I will chip back in. Although the ND 800 calories diet does reduce body fat and can reverse diabetes, have any comparative tests been done to check the effect of restricting carbs to a certain amount? It could have the same effect or work even faster? There may be metabolic reasons why it wouldn't be as good in the short term but I've never seen the two approaches directly compared.

 

[zoombapup]

I will chip back in. Although the ND 800 calories diet does reduce body fat and can reverse diabetes, have any comparative tests been done to check the effect of restricting carbs to a certain amount? It could have the same effect or work even faster? There may be metabolic reasons why it wouldn't be as good in the short term but I've never seen the two approaches directly compared.

I'm sure I came across a paper during one of the youtube conference videos I was watching that did this. I can't recall the citation though so not much use I'm afraid. I think maybe some of it was coming from Duke University? They had a clinic that switched to a low carb diet as a treatment if I remember rightly. Worked surprisingly well and they've been trying to get it more widely adopted.

The point is to basically get rid of the fats in the liver and pancreas however you can I suppose. I mean Prof Taylors work isn't suggesting a particular diet is the one true diet etc. It's just saying "cut the weight, get the fat our of the liver and pancreas and see positive effects". How people do that is likely to be individually biased depending on what foods they eat and their willingness to undergo the misery of 800 calories a day etc. Some people do keto, some do mediterranean, some do OMAD (one meal a day), apparently they can all work. What makes things worse IMHO is that all of these things tend to come with people trying to sell something, books, supplements, other products. I'm definitely not a big fan of that aspect of "health".

 

[Ralph-YK]

All these work by reducing spikes in insulin that cause fat to be stored and not used up from the body stores.

I think the insulin level isn't the actual issue here. It's the (high) blood glucose level. The higher BG, the more glucose there is to be laid down as fat.

 

[zoombapup]

I think the insulin level isn't the actual issue here. It's the (high) blood glucose level. The higher BG, the more glucose there is to be laid down as fat.

Not sure its quite that simple though is it? I mean if you have higher levels of insulin, you end up becoming resistant, which means that you need higher BG levels to achieve the energy and it goes in a downward spiral, leading to inflamed cells and I presume many of the complications. At least that's my understanding. Still got to read a few books on the subject before I'm really clear what's going on.