And that is where lots of people will say that because of the way he has run his experiments (using meal replacements) he is wedded to the low cal paradigm which may work for some but not for all. There are many members of this forum who severely calorie restrict but are no longer losing any weight.
If by changing what you eat and when you eat you can have a similar weight loss then there's no reason why some of it won't be visceral fat (which I think he means rather than specific pancreas fat) as so far as I know there is no guaranteed way to loose that gram off your pancreas.
He does seem to be 100% wedded to calories based on all my reading / viewing. That's a pity. It's pretty astounding that he specialises in diabetes, but I don't recall him ever talking / writing about carbohydrates and insulin in the context of the most sensible diets for diabetic people. It's equally astounding that, while he promotes weight loss by any means, he hasn't addressed the issue of lowering RMR and the difficulties that creates.
If weight loss is the important thing, then it would be nice if it was acknowledged just how poor the statistics for that are, and if sensible ideas were given for how to overcome the odds. The one thing that the DiRECT study does at least acknowledge is that weight maintenance is so hard that patients should be offered regular counselling after weight loss.
But that's a psychological approach, not a biological one. The biological assessment of the best diet for diabetics, how best to lose weight and keep it off seems to be completely absent from Newcastle.
Not only is it absent, but the main approach that most people are likely to take if they read up on the Newcastle studies is possibly going to be one of the worst approaches. It will result in people with T2 eating more carbohydrates than they need, and taking the advice to do no exercise while losing weight, and even be cautious of exercise after losing weight.
My own view, especially after the amazing study that
@Indy51 highlighted recently (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29467800), is that the 'rapid' part of the approach is probably okay, but it's much more sensible to keep carbs as low as possible, and to try to do some resistance exercise if you can.
I find a lot of what Roy Taylor says is overly simplistic, and can actually make the science seem less credible than it actually is.
The various studies however I've got a lot of time for. The correlation of lowered liver fat with increased insulin sensitivity, the correlation of lowered pancreatic fat with restored first-phase insulin response, the observations under the microscope of what happens when you remove fat from a beta cell, and the observation that only in bariatric patients with T2 does pancreatic fat decrease after the operation, is all great scientific insight.