Let’s say our paths cross three days from now, and you tell me you didn’t read today’s article.
It’s because you recently took a fasting blood sugar test, and the doctor found your number to be optimal. Nowhere near the range that indicates you’re among the one in three Americans who are prediabetic, let alone one of the more than 35 million who, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate, have Type 2 diabetes.
Would such a confession suggest to me you misread the article’s title? Possibly – and also that you’re unfamiliar Stoic philosophy.
Stoics believe what the Greek emperor Marcus Aurelius came to write sometime during 170 and 180 while engaged in a series of wars: “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy.”
I believe that to be true, and why, even if you’re highly unlikely to ever develop Type 2 diabetes, you can still learn important stuff from the said and the unsaid in both aforementioned studies.
The first, which appears in the January issue of BMJ: Nutrition, Prevention & Health, is driven by what its author Dr. David Unwin of Norwood Surgery, a primary care clinic in the United Kingdom, calls “real-world data.” Over an eight-year period, the clinic treated 473 overweight or obese type 2 diabetics, offering them a few forms of treatment.
One was to follow a low-carb diet with the goal of reaching a body weight and blood sugar level where prescription drugs were no longer needed to negate their affliction. In total, 183 patients opted for that.
For five of them, the diet did not help matters. For 37, it did – just not enough.
For the remaining 141, though, one year of receiving low-carb diet advice and adhering to the diet produced bloodwork that showed they had reached remission. When Medical News Today asked Unwin about that, he called the 77% success rate incredible.
And it certainly is. Back when the disease was still known as Type 2 diabetes remission without the use of drugs was considered to be impossible.
So why did I first mention the 42 type 2 diabetics who met with what over-the-top euphemists call incomplete success? It relates to the imagined introduction where you skip reading this article because you fail to see how it applies to you.
Those incomplete successes show how it does.
We both know it’s far easier to pop pills than alter eating habits. And that’s what 290 of the 473 type 2 diabetics who came to Norwood Surgery during the study chose to do.
Since they were offered an easier alternative and rejected it, we can only assume all the patients who opted to follow the low-carb diet gave an honest effort, including the 42 who didn’t achieve remission. Now I’m not a doctor, just an observer, and the obvious one to be made here is that following a low-carb diet won’t always lead to weight loss – even if you’re a type 2 diabetic who’s either overweight or obese.
Which is just more grist for the mill where I grind out article after article reminding you the most important thing to do if you want to maintain a high level or improve a lesser level of overall health.
Experiment, experiment, experiment.
Because what works for someone else in a laboratory or real-world setting may not work for you. The second of today’s featured studies suggests that, too.
It reveals another potential way to reach remission if you have Type 2 diabetes: Improve the brain’s insulin sensitivity.
In the study performed at the German Center for Diabetes Research, Tübingen University Hospital, and Helmholtz Munich in Munich, Germany, and published in the September 2022 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, 14 obese men and 7 obese women did just that by exercising for one hour three times per week for eight weeks.
The combination program of walking and cycling worked so well that it “resulted in enhanced brain insulin action to the level of a person of healthy weight.” Additionally, the subjects reported less hunger and lost visceral fat, the type linked to an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
What detracts from these results, however, is the manner of the exercise. Each session was not only always supervised but also led to all 21 exercising for part of the hour at 80% of VO2 maximum.
Reaching that point is tough – especially for someone not in good shape, let alone obese – and maintaining such intensity tougher.
The National Council of Strength & Fitness correlates 80% of VO2 max to a score of 17 on the 0-to-20 Borg Scale RPE (rate of perceived exertion). So imagine each of your thrice weekly one-hour walks or rides getting progressively harder until it reaches a level just a bit less than “extremely hard” and then maintaining that level.
If you know you can’t or don’t want to follow such a workout, that’s not good or bad. It just proves my point.
That you need experimentation instead of a machete to hack your way through today’s dense jungle of health information.
