As I read it is prescribed for people who are obese and where diet and exercise no longer adequately control glucose levels so for those past that magical point of no return . sounds like from your posts you are not there (I Hope). Also you if you are controlling blood sugar well through diet and exercise, taking Metformin might cause hypoglycemia but I think if you are doing the former you don't need the latter right? For those not there yet, there are lot of studies on how, in addition to healthier eating as we all discussed, resistance exercise and developing muscle (not body builder but normal muscle) helps because muscles can take up glucose easily without the aid of insulin or muscles adapt to become more sensitive ot insulin due to the need to store glucose and therefore will better regulate blood levels. With cancer being discussed as a metabolic disease, anything to keep glucose uptake in check does lower risk factors for cancer.
Everything in your fine posting is accurate except perhaps the part about Metformin causing hypoglycemia. My understanding is that Metformin ( and now Berberine), helps to control "liver dumps" of glucose and it may help insulin sensitivity. I don't think it has the ability to make a person go low ---at least not like insulin. This is why I think it likely that it would be good for everyone to take Metformin.---Someone correct my misunderstanding please---Ishmael.
Uh no....some people wait too long to make an effort to reverse the damage and even after diet and exercise regiment, their blood sugar levels remain elevated. Then you are past the point and really cannot reverse it at all.
Metofrmin does two things: 1) reduce amount of sugar produced by the liver 2) Increases sensitivity of muscles to insulin. When diet and exercise fail to adequately control blood glucose levels, Metformin is prescribed. Sometimes, this medicine is used in conjunction with other anti-diabetic medication. Used in isolation, Metformin will not automatically result in lower blood glucose levels. However, low blood sugar levels can happen when you combine Metformin with diet, exercise and possibly other antidiabetic medication. So I did not mean to imply it causes low blood sugar, I specifically said if you are taking it and controlling your blood sugar already with diet and exercise. There was a suggestion by someone of controlling blood sugar and taking the pill as a precaution. I just mentioned an obvious risk.
I said before it was cured by eliminating internal fat (can be done via low carb dieting or high carb, doesn't matter): http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2017/09/type2diabetesisreversible/
Thank you for the article. Looks good, but before I personally would be in agreement, I would need to see what glucose is 2 to 3 hours after a glucose tolerance test. If that was normal then I would agree that the word "cured" could be used. I didn't see anything in the article or study about that---it just talked about fasting glucose.
This is the typical problem with citing studies. You left out the most important parts of the study: Under close supervision of a medical team, 11 people who had developed diabetes later in life were put on an extreme diet of just 600 calories a day consisting of liquid diet drinks plus 200 calories of non-starchy vegetables. 3 people had recurring diabetes after the 12 week study was done and 1 person could not be restested due to ovarian cancer. So out of a small pool of 11, 7 people were able to reverse their Type 2 after sticking with ith for 8 weeks and then retested again in 12 weeks. there was no further follow up so how do you know it was cured? The diet consisted of a liquid diet formula (46.4% carbohydrate, 32.5% protein and 20.1% fat). This was supplemented with three portions of non-starchy vegetables such that total energy intake was about 600 kcal/day. You took this study to conclude that it can be done by high carb or low carb, it did not matter. However you did what a lot of people do, take a study with an incredible small sample and ignore the test parameters. This was not a diet focused on carb content at all but a near fast at all so your conclusion is not supported by the study you cited. In fact the same could have been achieved with a 2-3 week fast and then you can conclude that you don't even need to eat at all to cure Type 2 . This was also an extreme diet of 600 calories. If you ate 600 calories of fruit daily you will still lose significant weight and could reverse the effects of early onset Type 2 diabetes because your blood sugar woudl not be able to maintain high levels. This study should have also measured body fat and muscle mass changes to show how the body really changed. However, out of these 11, only 7 were able to make any real change.
--By normal, I would think you would need to back under 140 in 2 hrs on a glucose tolerance test---I need to see something from the study showing that.
The problem is the study showed success in 7 people on a severely resricted diet. I would even challenge the findings to conclude that they forced the people into a Ketogenic state which burned off a lot of fat internally due to being in starvation. fasting blood glucose was down significantly in later stages of the study. I think they should have tested blood ketones during the study but they were not thinking of all aspects. They did not do blood glucose the same way you measure because it was in England so different metric measures.