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The big fat debate over whether keto-style diets are right for reversing diabetes

If a low carbohydrate diet could reverse diabetes, you would think experts would be rushing to recommend it. So why the caution? JOHN McCRONE reports.

Something is going on. Lined up in the cabinet at a Taupō cafe are a bunch of keto options.

Keto "fat bomb" cream slice. Keto bacon and egg sandwich. Special of the day, vegan keto stuffed tomatoes and pumpkin – just 1.5 grams of carbs.

Mention a ketogenic diet – or even its milder cousin, the low-carbohydrate/high-fat (LCHF) diet – and the medical establishment frowns. They felt they had got past this kind of faddish nonsense with the Atkins diet back in the 2000s.

But Taupō has a switched-on local doctor and now a switched-on community. Dr Glen Davies at the Taupō Medical Centre has been pushing a low-carb approach to repairing diabetes and other chronic metabolic diseases for a couple of years now.

And he says it has become a self-help thing. A citizen movement.

Taupō's "Reverse Type 2 Diabetes" Facebook page has 1200 members, he says. A weekly support meeting can draw over 100 people. He doesn't even have to explain how low-carb works any more.

"Taupō as a community has just adopted LCHF. Everyone's talking about it. Whenever I eavesdrop on a conversation in a cafe, it's all people discussing their macros."

For years Davies says he did the usual wrong things as a doctor when patients came in obese, pre-diabetic, and then eventually diabetic.

Tell them to try to lose weight by eating less, rather than questioning their macronutrient balance. Then watch as the diabetes drugs didn't do much but suppress the symptoms, while the inevitable deterioration of type 2 diabetes mellitus continued.

But in 2017, a few things happened. Davies says that was the year of the great sugar tax debate – the call to push back on unhealthy soft drinks and other processed foods.

As it happens, that went nowhere. But at the same time, keto diets were becoming the trendy thing. And as a doctor, he was seeing the results.

"I had some patients telling me they had lost a phenomenal amount of weight. I mean like 40kg."

Finally he had one guy – a retired software company owner – who had managed to reverse his diabetes after a bit of research.

"He came in, plonked a whole lot of books on my desk, and told me to read them."

So from 2017, LCHF eating principles became part of his surgery conversation. And the proof has been in the pudding. Or at least the pudding his patients aren't eating any more.

Davies says he is now up to 41 cases of diabetes and pre-diabetes put into remission using a low-carb diet. You can imagine what that is like after years of thinking diabetes was a progressive one-way disease.

"Geez, the reward of seeing people turn their lives around is why we go into medicine. Now we've actually got this powerful tool that works, hopefully we're going to see a whole lot of invigorated and excited GPs doing what I'm doing," Davies enthuses.

Click here to read the rest of the article:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/he...ersing-diabetes