Inside Dr Michael Mosley’s personal mission to help Australians beat type 2 diabetes – The Guardian

Is Australia as healthy as we think? Dr Michael Mosley’s new documentary asks us to reimagine our management of type 2 diabetes.
In 2012, Dr Michael Mosley sought a diagnosis from his GP for what he believed to be skin cancer. Fortunately, the skin cancer test returned a negative result, but it did expose another, arguably more sinister illness: he had type 2 diabetes.
“I thought I was in good shape,” Mosley says. “In fact, I wasn’t. If you looked at photographs of me then, I was pretty rotund, but I was in complete denial.”
Despite his disbelief, Mosley was well acquainted with the dangers of the disease: his father had succumbed to its complications “quite early”, at age 74, so his motivations to improve his own health were high.
“I was fortunate that I was able to, if you like, reverse my [type 2] diabetes by losing a significant amount of weight – I lost about nine or 10 kilos – and keep it off,” he says.
It was this near miss, combined with the fact that rates of type 2 diabetes are quietly skyrocketing in our country, that inspired Mosley’s new documentary, Australia’s Health Revolution, which airs on SBS on Wednesday 13 October. In this three-part series Mosley works alongside exercise physiologist Ray Kelly to prove heavy medication regimens aren’t the only – or the best – means of managing type 2 diabetes.
Dr Michael Mosley and exercise physiologist Ray Kelly both believe type 2 diabetes is reversible.
Mosley and Kelly recruited eight Australians with type 2 diabetes, and, working in conjunction with participants’ allied health practitioners, got them to participate in an eight-week program inspired by Mosley’s own success.
They were placed on a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet that pushed their bodies into ketosis – a metabolic state in which the body burns fat for energy instead of sugar. Depending on their level of mobility, participants were also prescribed exercise regimens in which they committed to everything from simple tasks such as walking to the front door to one-on-one boxing lessons.
“Professor Roy Taylor up in Newcastle [in the UK] … explained to me exactly why I’d managed to [reverse the condition],” Mosley says. “Since then, his research has really exploded. And the idea that you can put your [type 2] diabetes into remission – reverse it, whatever you like to call it – has gone from sort of fringe to mainstream.”
Even though he’s already come out the other side of type 2 diabetes once, Mosley wasn’t prepared to watch from the sidelines. Instead, for several weeks at the start of the experiment, he put his own body on the line in the name of science, subjecting it to a typical Australian diet of ultra-processed foods and little physical activity.
Predictably, his blood sugar levels soared to pre-diabetic levels in a matter of weeks.
“I was pretty sure that if I put the weight back on and I went on an unhealthy diet, my blood sugars would go back [up], but I was sort of interested in a slightly academic way to test that,” he says. It was also a “dramatic gesture” of solidarity with the program’s participants, who had committed to undoing the havoc wrought on their bodies after living this type of lifestyle for years.
It was a process that wasn’t easy for Kelly to watch, but it was nothing he hadn’t seen before. Kelly – a Kamilaroi man from Wallabadah in northern New South Wales – has 30 years’ experience in helping Australians living in rural and regional areas prevent, manage, and reverse type 2 diabetes.
“I’ve been pushing this for a long time,” Kelly says. His frustration at the rate of change in the detection and management of type 2 diabetes has motivated him to pursue a PhD in the field. “This is my life’s work. This is my passion. [That’s why we’re] going to communities like Bourke or Warren or Walgett, Coonamble, Dubbo, Quirindi, Tamworth – everywhere – and showing … what can be done.”
Australia has surprisingly high rates of obesity.
In spite of their vastly different backgrounds and life experiences – a contrast that Mosley jokes would make the basis of a great buddy comedy – Mosley and Kelly are united in the belief that type 2 diabetes is reversible. They also felt strongly that the documentary should feature participants from all walks of Australian life.
Mosley says: “Australia has surprisingly high rates of obesity. You’re also big consumers of ultra-processed food … There are plenty of super healthy people [in Australia], but there are also plenty of super unhealthy people.” And potentially 500,000 cases of type 2 diabetes are undiagnosed.
Kelly says he wanted to demonstrate how widespread the problem is by casting participants from Indigenous, immigrant, and varied geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. “I said [to the production team]: ‘Don’t give me low-hanging fruit. I really want challenges because I want to show what we can do.’ It’d be a wasted opportunity if we took the easy options.”
They even committed to testing federal MPs from across the nation on the lawns of Parliament House to drive the message home among a group they believe has been slow to act on Australia’s type 2 diabetes epidemic.
But beyond their shared frustrations, both Mosley and Kelly believe what we do next is the “easy part”. Why? Because research showing type 2 diabetes can be reversed is becoming impossible to ignore.
“We know it works,” Kelly says. “The research is all there.” The rest is up to us.
Australia’s Health Revolution With Dr Michael Mosley premieres on Wednesday 13 October at 7.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand.

source