Experts Weigh In On Ketogenic Diet For Diabetes Type 2

Experts Weigh In On Ketogenic Diet for Diabetes Type 2

Ketogenic diet has taken us by the wind in the recent years. There are numerous resources available online for people who are considering going on one.
A ketogenic diet, in very simple terms, is a very low-carb diet. It has been claimed that going on a ketogenic diet is beneficial for people seeking to lose weight and to improve their health. This probably sounds very charming to a person with diabetes who is looking to lose excess weight and to improve their overall general health to avoid or prevent any diabetes related complications.
But, is it really worth all the hype it has generated?
For someone who has diabetes, a healthy and nutritional lifestyle is extremely important. Though lowering the consumption of carbs from your diet can aid you, is it actually recommended to restrict yourself to a very low carb diet if you have diabetes?
We can’t claim to know but we reached out to respected experts who have shared their thoughts on the diet and whether they recommend it to their patients.
Read on to find out whether or not you could benefit from going on a Ketogenic diet.
1. Gina Keatley, CDN
I would not recommend the ketogenic diet to any patients other than those suffering with epilepsy. The proper ratio of fat to protein to carbohydrate calories (80-15-5) is extremely difficult to maintain over any period of time. In many research studies over half of the participants drop out of studies before they have completed due to this difficulty and in other studies the researchers do not get institutional approval for such a strict limit of carbohydrates and use one with far Continue reading

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Metformin: Can a Diabetes Drug Help Prevent Cancer?

In 1957, the first results from a clinical trial of the diabetes drug metformin in patients were published. Yet, it would take nearly 40 years for the drug to be approved in the United States as a treatment for type 2 diabetes.
Now researchers want to know whether this decades-old drug may have additional uses in another disease—cancer. Based on findings from a number of large epidemiologic studies and extensive laboratory research, metformin is being tested in clinical trials not only as a treatment for cancer, but as a way to prevent it in people at increased risk, including cancer survivors who have a higher risk of a second primary cancer.
Numerous early-stage clinical trials are currently under way to investigate metformin’s potential to prevent an array of cancers, including colorectal, prostate, endometrial, and breast cancer. Several of these trials are being funded by NCI’s Consortia for Early Phase Prevention Trials. And NCI is collaborating with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to study participants from the landmark clinical trial, the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), to investigate metformin’s impact on cancer incidence.
Some of the early-phase prevention trials of metformin are enrolling participants who are at increased risk for cancer and who are obese, have elevated glucose or insulin levels, or have other conditions that put them at risk for diabetes.
“With the obesity epidemic, these studies are applicable to a substantial portion of the U.S. population and, increasingly, of the world population,” Continue reading

Diabetes Drug That Also Treats Obesity Could Make Billions

Being fat sucks. I’m not judging; I’ve been overweight all my life. Obesity puts you at risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even some cancers.
Then of course there’s Type 2 diabetes. The mother of all obesity-related complications keeps your body from regulating the sugar it needs as fuel, and can lead to all kinds of health issues, like kidney damage, heart disease, and even limb amputation.
That could change, if pharmaceutical companies can convince doctors that a new-ish class of drugs can attack Type II diabetes and the fatness that begets it—without killing patients. Earlier this month, at the Endocrine Society’s annual conference in Boston, Danish pharma Novo Nordisk presented three years of data showing that their diabetes drug liraglutide helped obese and prediabetic patients lose weight without undue risk. Which is big, for a drug that’s been flagged for causing cancer.
In rats, that is. Liraglutide—or Saxenda, as it’s known commercially for weight-loss—carries a black box warning from the FDA for giving thyroid tumors to rodents. However, the specific tumor-causing cell biology is different enough in rats that many endocrinologists don’t consider it a significant risk to human patients.
Many, but not all. Weight loss drugs are historically pretty risky. Remember Fen-Phen? It was great at helping people get skinny—as long as those people were OK with developing chronic heart problems. Fen-Phen was pulled from the market in 1997, and its maker had to pay billions of dollars in legal fees.
Liraglutide, in Saxenda form, might Continue reading

Price controls on diabetes drugs, licenses for sales reps key features of pharmaceutical bill

Price controls on diabetes medication. Requiring pharmaceutical sales representatives to be licensed and annually report to the state on their activities. Mandating disclosure of any pharmaceutical-related contributions by nonprofits working in the health care sector.
These are just some of the changes proposed by Democratic Sen. Yvanna Cancela in an omnibus pharmaceutical bill introduced on Tuesday — changes she says are necessary in order to ensure patients have access to life-saving drugs and to bolster health care industry transparency. But pharmaceutical company lobbyists are already digging in their heels and saying it will reduce patients’ access to life-saving medicine and ignores the importance of private market competition.
A substantial portion of the bill, SB265, seeks to improve access to medically necessary diabetes drugs by implementing price controls, which pharmaceutical companies have long resisted. The legislation, which eight of Cancela’s Democratic colleagues have signed onto, would require the state Department of Health and Human Services to compile a list of “essential” drugs that treat diabetes, such as insulin and biguanides, and require drug manufacturers to reimburse purchasers — either the patient or the insurance company — when the manufacturer’s list price of the drug exceeds the highest price paid for the drug in certain countries or if it exceeds annual changes in the Consumer Price Index.
The goal, in Cancela’s view, is essentially to stabilize the cost of a drugs such as insulin that have existed for 95 years and yet have Continue reading

FDA approves Novo Nordisk diabetes drug Ozempic

(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved Novo Nordisk A/S’s diabetes drug Ozempic, setting the stage for a heated battle with Eli Lilly & Co’s Trulicity.
Ozempic, known generically as semaglutide, will compete with others in a class known as glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analogs, which imitate an intestinal hormone that stimulates the production of insulin.
Ozempic is a once-weekly injection that Novo Nordisk hopes will take market share from Trulicity, which has been cutting into sales of Novo Nordisk’s once-daily Victoza. Novo Nordisk is also developing an oral form of semaglutide.
The company said it plans to price the drug at $676 per prescription, which it described as “at parity” to current market-leading drugs in the same class.
The approval comes as Novo Nordisk faces pricing competition to its existing diabetes products. The company is banking on Ozempic to help drive the overall growth of the GLP-1 market, which includes Trulicity and AstraZeneca Plc’s once-weekly Bydureon.
Novo Nordisk is betting that Ozempic’s proven heart benefit and weight-loss advantage over rival products will increase its attractiveness both to physicians and insurers.
Analysts on average expect annual sales of Ozempic to reach $3.17 billion by 2023, with sales of Trulicity, which was approved in the United States in late 2014, reaching $3.71 billion over the same period, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that by 2022 Novo Nordisk will have captured roughly 60 percent of the GLP-1 market compared with an expect Continue reading