That's a pretty long fasting interval:<p><i>"is a new proposed dietary approach based on [intermittent fasting] involving five fasting days followed by 10 days of reintroducing everyday food items."</i><p>And when they say "everyday food items" they apparently mean a special diet:<p><i>The diet contains daily foods such as wheat, barley, rice, rye and oat, "and features reduced glycemic loads, calories, and carbohydrates, as well as increased unsaturated fatty acids," the scientists said.</i><p>It doesn't appear that they tested a group that had the special diet but without the intermittent fasting.
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:<p>- This 2006 paper found that bariatric surgery can reverse diabetes: [2006]<p>- This paper reversed diabetes in people purely through calorie restriction: [2011]<p>- 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.<p>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 <i>six</i> months of no medication, while TFA defines it as <i>three</i> 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.<p>It'd be nice if TFA was on sci-hub.<p>[2006] <a href="https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/55/7/2025/14198/Mechanisms-of-Recovery-From-Type-2-Diabetes-After" rel="nofollow">https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/55/7/2025/1419...</a><p>[2011] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21656330/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21656330/</a><p>[2020] <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1449" rel="nofollow">https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1449</a>
I'm not seeing the reasoning behind intermittent fasting in particular as opposed to losing weight in general. Couldn't the title just have equivalently been "losing weight may negate need for [type 2] diabetes drugs"?
There's a big difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes; this study focuses on type 2. It would be better if the HN title and the title on upi.com included "type 2".