When losing weight helps cure type 2 diabetes

A British clinical trial suggested that patients suffering from type 2 diabetes for less than 6 years stop their treatment for diabetes and hypertension, in parallel with a very strict diet for several months, with close support. .

A radical diet followed by two years of support allows you to escape type 2 diabetes. Sometimes even 5 years later. Géraldine Zamansky, journalist for the health magazine on France 5, today discusses the challenge of this drastic diet, to help patients change eating habits and lose weight.

franceinfo: The participants in this study had really become diabetic and are no longer so?

Geraldine Zamansky: Quite. To enter this clinical trial, set up in the United Kingdom, you had to suffer from obesity and have been diabetic for less than 6 years. After a year, almost half of the 149 volunteers, who had followed the proposed drastic diet, were free of their diabetes, and 5 years later, 13% remained so.

That is to say, the control of the amount of sugar in the blood works again without medication. How ? I said drastic: they only ate meal replacements for 3 months, then 3 months of reintroduction of foods, all with support, continued for another year and a half, to maintain their initial weight loss. That is to say often 15 kilos.

But the new medical consensus is rather to advise against brutal diets?

Please note, this is not about losing a few pounds for the beach. This is a therapeutic program to stop a serious illness, diabetes, associated with dangerous excess weight. Moreover, this protocol was based on the effects of obesity surgery which reduces the size of the stomach, and therefore, food intake drastically.

People who have had surgery have come out of diabetes. Professor Mike Lean, who coordinated this study from the Faculty of Medicine in Glasgow in Scotland, explained to me that their diet, in turn, removes, without a scalpel, the origin of the problem: excess fat in the pancreas and liver. The volunteers were therefore able to safely stop taking their diabetes tablets.

It’s impressive, but 5 years later, the volunteers have often resumed their treatment?

Yes, more than 8 in 10 have relapsed in some way. But the longer they remained in remission, without diabetes, the fewer complications they suffered. We are talking here about threats to vision, or the risk of amputation, for example. This is crucial for Professor Lean, who can no longer support minimizing the dangers linked to this disease. He therefore shares with his team a more accessible version of his diet based this time, in good Scottish fashion, on porridge. Not to be done without medical supervision. And above all, they continue to seek what would be the best long-term support to achieve true healing.

The study published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology

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