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I was skeptical and did some further reading, but it seems like there's other papers showing that diabetes is reversible with weightloss. In particular:

- This 2006 paper found that bariatric surgery can reverse diabetes: [2006]

- This paper reversed diabetes in people purely through calorie restriction: [2011]

- This survey article [2020] finds that about half (!) of diabetics who lose 15 kg totally reverse type 2, and no longer need any medication. It also proposes mechanisms for why this works.

I'm not a doctor or a medical researcher and don't have the skill to read these studies carefully. But it seems that it's generally known now that diabetes is reversible with dieting? Of note the 2020 article is a little stricter than TFA: it says that the HbA_1c threshold has to below 6.5% even after six months of no medication, while TFA defines it as three months. Given that the "only 2.8% of control group individuals achieved remission", it's possible that intermittent fasting only helped vis-a-vis weight loss, and as long as you lose enough weight you can potentially reverse diabetes.

It'd be nice if TFA was on sci-hub.

[2006] https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/55/7/2025/1419...

[2011] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21656330/

[2020] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1449




Without a doubt weight loss can mitigate the need for drugs, but diet works better in my experience. I eliminated my need for extraneous insulin in less than 4 months just by switching to a keto diet. When I was able to come off the drugs I was still morbidly obese and well over 400lbs. Significant weight loss followed, but the diabetes went into remission well before there was any significant weight loss.


I thought it was widely known that weight loss and carbohydrate/sugar restriction results in drug-free remission. People are addicted to fast sugar and are often eating themselves to death.




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