New research supports low carb approach

This post originally appeared on Defeat Diabetes, Australia's leading program to send pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes into remission, and is republished with their permission.

A systematic review published in 2021 in the prestigious BMJ (British Medical Journal) supports the use of a low carb eating approach in the management of type 2 diabetes.

A systematic review is the highest form of scientific evidence and looks at all the randomised control trials (where subjects are assigned to one of two groups: the experimental group who receive the treatment that is being tested, and the other comparison group who receive an alternative treatment).

This review of 23 published trials from around the world involving over a thousand participants, showed that diets low in carbohydrate (less than 26% of daily calories) achieved greater rates of type 2 diabetes remission than those who followed other diets traditionally recommended for managing the disease.

Compared with (mostly low fat) control diets at six months, low carb diets showed a 32% increase in remission of diabetes, when coupled with the participants' medication to lower their blood glucose. Large and clinically important improvements in weight loss, triglycerides, and insulin resistance were also seen.

One of the study authors, CSIRO scientist and Defeat Diabetes medical advisory panel member Professor Grant Brinkworth, said “These results show low carb diets can be a really effective dietary approach for type 2 diabetes management, however, the challenge is to provide patients with easy-to-use support tools and convenient product solutions to help them adhere to it long-term to gain these greater health improvements.”

The Defeat Diabetes Program is an example of one of those ‘easy-to-use support tools’ which can help patients put their type 2 diabetes into remission.

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