Guardian article on Newcastle diet

Hmm. Sounds a bit like Late onset Type 1 rather than a Type 2 diagnosis for the thin guy. I'd be interested to hear how he's doing in a year's time and whether he has been able to stay with low sugars and be able to eat anything like normal.

As I keep posting on here thin people are just as likely to have visceral fat as overweight people and the Newcastle Study was to study the effects of reducing/removing visceral fat by using a very low calorie diet over a short period.

You cant see visceral fat but it is this fat which causes insulin resistance and if it is reduced then the insulin resistance is reduced which causes high bg levels, again not a cure as if the visceral fat comes back so will the insulin resistance and thus the T2 diabetes. If you are a thin person who has visceral fat you will always be predisposed to it unless you change your diet/lifestyle.

The best thing any T2 diabetic can do to help themselves is lose their visceral fat as the Guardian article testifies. But if it is a particular diet that causes visceral fat in the first place then it is likely to return unless the diet is changed to healthier choices. Maybe its processed foods that cause visceral fat to be laid down, maybe it isnt, maybe its saturated fats and maybe it isnt.

As with all these things more research needs to be done to identify the causes of visceral fat, the only thing we know for sure is it is not good for us.

Sid Bonkers said:

As I keep posting on here thin people are just as likely to have visceral fat as overweight people and the Newcastle Study was to study the effects of reducing/removing visceral fat by using a very low calorie diet over a short period.

You cant see visceral fat but it is this fat which causes insulin resistance ....

Click to expand...

Quite. Michael Mosley is fairly thin but he is worried about diabetes and his scans show that he is right to do so, because he has a lot of visceral fat.

Prof Roy Taylor's work comes out of the Magnetic Resonance Centre, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/facilities/

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/staff/profile/roy.taylor

Some of you may recall the Hairy Dieters in his 'Bod Pod'.

Sid Bonkers said:

Maybe its processed foods that cause visceral fat to be laid down, maybe it isnt, maybe its saturated fats and maybe it isnt.

Click to expand...

Taylor's hypothesis is that it is caused by raised triglyceride levels in the liver and pancreas. As soon as I cut out sugar, my blood trigs dropped from 4.2 to 2.1 so, whether he is right or wrong, I won't be running the risk in future.

phoenix said:

HOWEVER, that's the evidence from post mortems and it's probable that most of these people were ill before they died. I presume (not really sure) that with magnetic imaging Prof. Taylor is able to 'visualise' beta cell mass in living people.

Click to expand...

That's the problem. You can measure the levels of glucose and insulin and you can 'see' the amount of visceral fat but with over 1,000,000 islets, you can't see them or work out which ones are functioning without slicing the patient open. It is an aim though and they have been working on it for some years:

Imaging pancreatic beta-cells in the intact pancreas
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/2 ... 1.full.pdf

It's good news for diabetic rodents.