
Is “Keto” the Key to Reversing Diabetes?
SEATTLE -- A wave of recent studies show that in many cases, type 2 diabetes is partly or wholly reversible with high fat, very low carb ketogenic diets.
Speakers at the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute 5th annual Thought Leaders Consortium urged the clinical community to radically re-think the received wisdom about this common disorder, and start applying diet and lifestyle programs that actually address the root causes of the condition.
Fresh data from an ongoing study of 232 overweight or obese women and men with type 2 diabetes (average age 54 years, average BMI of 41), provide evidence that after 10 weeks on a carefully-formulated low-carb ketogenic diet, 36% were able to stop insulin therapy completely, while an additional 51% were able to significantly lower their doses.
Mean hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) measures dropped from 7.5% to 6.5%, with 56% of the participants reaching A1c levels below the diagnostic threshold for diabetes. This was accompanied by clinically significant weight loss in 71% of cases (McKenzie A, et al. JMIR Diabetes. 2017 2 (1): e5).
Though many clinicians and researchers have long predicted the possibility, this is the first large-scale study to show that major biomarkers of type 2 diabetes can be consistently shifted in the right direction via dietary interventions.
“We are very pleased with what we are seeing,” said Stephen Phinney, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Virta Health, a San Francisco based clinic specializing in lifestyle-based treatment of diabetes and related metabolic diseases. “And all of this is based
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