A new study showed that type 2 diabetes is not necessarily a lifelong disease. Some of those affected were able to reverse their disease within 12 weeks through intermittent fasting.
A diagnosis of type 2 diabetes does not necessarily mean that you will be dependent on medication for the rest of your life blood glucose measurements to have to carry out. An experiment with 36 sufferers showed that following doing intermittent fasting for three months, half of the people had their diabetes gone and it hadn’t come back following a year. The symptoms of the others improved so drastically that they were hardly dependent on medication.
The benefits of intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting has become increasingly popular in recent years. Not only for weight loss, but also to increase well-being or as a “cell rejuvenation cure”. The concept: You only eat in a very specific time window of the day or on specific days of the week. The body has to fall back on its reserves and during the fasting episodes it has – to put it simply – time to concentrate on burning fat instead of being busy with digestive processes. Followers also see intermittent fasting as a healing method for various diseases, including autoimmune diseases, allergies or even cancer. Researchers at the Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha, China therefore wanted to find out how intermittent fasting affects people with type 2 diabetes.
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Does intermittent fasting reverse diabetes?
The researchers prescribed 36 people with the disease a strict fasting program for three months: It included five days of eating only regarding 840 calories per day at certain times, followed by 10 days of a normal, balanced diet. The results were clear. Every second person experienced diabetes remission. This means that the subjects were no longer dependent on diabetes medication for at least a year and no longer showed any symptoms. For the other participants, the cost of medication fell by up to 77 percent. So everyone experienced some form of dramatic relief, according to the study, published in the journal “Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism” has been published.1
Diabetics who have been ill for years also benefit
The study also challenges the prevailing view that diabetes remission can only be achieved in patients with a shorter duration of diabetes (0-6 years). Sixty-five percent of study participants who recovered had a history of 6 to 11 years of illness. “Type 2 diabetes is not necessarily a lifelong disease. Diabetes remission is possible when patients lose weight through changes in their diet and exercise habits,” study leader Prof. Dongbo Liu said in a statement from the Endocrine Society.2 “I am confident that our findings will have a major impact on the more than 537 million adults worldwide who suffer from this disease.”
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Weight Loss or Intermittent Fasting – What’s the Real Reason?
During the fasting period, the participants lost an average of 6 kilograms. Since the study with 36 subjects eats quite small, it is difficult to judge whether the weight loss and healthier diet caused the diabetes remission, or just the intermittent fasting itself. However, one thing is certain: The interval fast is a suitable and safe diet method for diabetics, from which they can only benefit.
