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Newcastle Diet is Low Carb

The precursor work done by Taylor and Lean was done at Glasgow Uni, and was exploring VLC diets and low energy liquid diets on groups of people who were a mixture of T2D and non-diabetic to gauge weight loss efficacy in obese people. Their first diet study was apparently a small-scale 600 cal VLC using just shakes. The first trial at Newcastle was the low-energy Optifast trial. I believe it was the second trial that used the MRI scans of the liver to show the effects of the diet on NAFLD The diabetes results came out of the second trial. There is no evidence I could see that any of his studies used keto level diets,
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/130256/
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I now gather this was meant for me. I have never done any form of calorie controlled diet since I have never been more than 2lbs overweight. I used low carb replacing the carbs with (mainly saturated) fat and extra protein. I lost 30lbs during the initial phase getting my HbA1C down to 45 and then added in a little more fat and protein (deliberately) gaining back 5lbs while my HbA1C continued to drop to 37.
 
lucylocket61 said:
Can I just double check this? 100g of leafy greens is around 30 cals. 200 cals is a huge amount of green veg to eat a day. The diet mentions 250g of non starchy veg, which is around 80 cals max and 8g of carbs. So a total of around 80-85 carbs daily.
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The version I googled said 600calories from meal replacement shake and the an extra 200 calories form low carb veg (which I interpreted as leafy greens - though Cauliflower & Broccoli would also fit ).

But my point is that the ND not only restricts calories, but it restricts carbs and is low carb and lower than 130gms carbs per day generally quoted by the low carb community and much much lower than those studies which attempted to debunk low carb by setting it at around 200gms to 230gms per day.
 
My thoughts too. It would apparently be feasible to eat 800kcal sugar a day, but it is unlikely to result in diabetes remission. So low carb would, in my opinion, provide the means to burn adipose fat but is probably dropping into ketosis as a sneaky byproduct of vlc and fasting.

Fat (lipid) burning occurs when the sugar levels are low and there is no insulin or adrenaline floating around the blood. This triggers the glucagon response that allows fat to be used for energy in the muscles according to Krebs.

A vlc with carbs is likely to raise both the glucose and insulin levels in the blood, cutting off the lipid pathway, Also cutting off gluconeogenesis whereby lipids get converted to glucose for the nerves and brain. So NAFLD will not melt away.
 

In fact I have just seen a tweet about a study which shows that a low calorie diet will only reduce body fat if insulin is low. Otherwise lean mass is consumed. I re-tweeted saying that since insulin is 'the fat storage hormone' it was very predictable finding.
 
Experience of Low Carb diets and diabetes shows that it is gms/day of carbs because of the way it converts to blood glucose, and may or may not trigger the insulin response. Percentage of intake is not so relevant especially since the fat macro is also limited in this diet, It is blood glucose levels that are important to this discussion since these enable or inhibit fat burning.
 
I've never tried it, I grasped onto Taylors declaration that "it was the weight loss, not the method that was important!
 
and???? I am not sure of your point.

I said that a low carb definition is less than 130g a day. I made no mention of calorie intake or the percentage of cals taken up by carbs. To a certain extent, given the aim is to reduce blood sugar levels, the percentage of cals made up by carbs is irrelevant to that goal.
 
I'm not arguing that percentage of Calories from carbohydrates is a better definition than g of carbohydrate - I was just pointing out, in the context of the OP arguing with people on another forum, that there is no universal definition of low carbohydrate diets. The people he is arguing with may be defining low carbohydrate in a different way.
 
So it appears that to achieve a low level of 800 Calories, you get Low-Carb 'for free' along with it. I suspect it's the low-carb aspect that provides the weight loss and not the low-fat aspect as we know that carbs are the main cause of weight gain rather than fats. I just wish people, including experts such as Prof Taylor, would stop talking about Calories which are purely a measure of energy and as the body metabolises the three food groups in a very different way, measuring Calorie input is not a good measure. I was interested in one of the posts saying for the NHS to accept the ND diet, carbs couldn't be mentioned. I can believe that as the NHS bases much of it's dietary thinking on myth and legend.
 
Daibell said:
So it appears that to achieve a low level of 800 Calories, you get Low-Carb 'for free' along with it
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Which neatly explains why in the precursor studies to DiRECT they checked for ketones... can't think why that would have been.....
 
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