You can bid farewell to Type II Diabetes: Study

New Delhi: Type II Diabetes can be brought under control through intermittent fasting said a recent study.

The researchers from Canada successfully got three long-term diabetics off insulin in a period of one year by putting them on therapeutic fasting.

However, doctors have warned patients from trying this independently since the results were only from a trial and would need a deep research of the same.

So what exactly is therapeutic fasting? Simply put, therapeutic fasting means following a controlled and voluntary diet which includes avoiding all calorie-containing food and drinks for a specified period of time, that is consuming low carb diet, TOI reports.

That is these patients placed under trial, consumed dinner on fasting days, whereas on non-fasting days, they had both lunch and dinner along with unlimited amounts of low-calorie fluid intake such as water, coffee and tea.

The patients were given a general multivitamin supplement on fasting days.

The Canadian research team chose three long-term diabetic patients who were on regular insulin injections.

Patient 1 was a 40-year-old man was suffering from diabetes for 20 years, and patient 2, a 52-year-old man had diabetes since the 25 years, both were put on therapeutic fasting thrice a week for 24 hours for seven and 11 months, respectively.

The third Patient was a 67-year-old man diagnosed with diabetes for 10 years, fasted for 24 hours on alternate days.

After the successful trial, all the three patients were able to discontinue their regular insulin, while patients 2 and 3 discontinued all medications entirely.

Patient 1 had discontinued three out of four medications after he underwent the trial.

When their weight loss was checked, Patient 1 had a 12% weight loss and 13% weight circumference reduction while Patient 2 and patient 3 lost 18% and 10% weight, respectively.

“Medically supervised, therapeutic fasting regimens can help reverse type-II diabetes and minimise the use of pharmacological and, possibly, surgical intervention in diabetics,” the researchers concluded in the study which was recently published in British Medical Journal.

Here in India, some diabetologists are working on the reversal of diabetes with diet restriction but they believe can be done on obese or overweight patients.

“It shouldn’t be tried at home just because three people have gained from such trial,” said Dr Sujeet Jha, Head of Endocrinology division at Max Saket.

Dr Anoop Misra, chairman of Fortis C-DOC Centre of Excellence for Diabetes, Metabolic Diseases and Endocrinology, says this diet restriction regimen becomes difficult to follow in the long term.