I get it. you like the science. me too. but just like MBaker, I also value anecdotes. Personally, I work on the idea of 'reasonable doubt', which for my own purposes is set at '1'. This means that you could show me a billion cases that backed up one position, and all I'd need to see is one example of the opposite being true, for me to no longer be able to claim absolutes.
Here's a pertinent example: Before getting involved in the conversations on these forums, I believed the idea touted among plant-based proponents that a ketogenic diet could only ameliorate the symptoms of diabetes, by virtue of carb avoidance, but that remission could never actually be possible. It only took me seeing your OGTT, showing very good carb tolerance for me to completely reverse my previously-held belief. Puf! Just like that. Now, if i ever encounter a vegan telling me that only a HCLF diet works to put d2 in remission, I'll tell them that is false.
As I've explained elsewhere on the forum, I've been in and around various diet and nutrition forums and communities for about 17-18 years. I've done the low-carb, primal, keto, high-carb, raw-vegan, fruitarian diets. But more than all of that, I've been in countless situations where I've had my long-held and even long-preached beliefs disintegrate in the face of contrary evidence, even if that evidence is anecdotal. That's why I'm only interested in getting to the truth, even if it contradicts what I think/thought.
You, on the other hand, have posted that Barnard chart maybe five or six times. I've even found it in older posts, when I was reading. Even in the face of a growing mass of anecdotal evidence from people vastly improving on their own diabetes numbers and also on the numbers from Barnards' trials, (Not to mention huge amounts of weight-loss within an apparent insulin-heavy paradigm, and improvement of all aspects of their health) and the only thing you can manage to comment is "Forks over knives is hardly a "study" neither are Cyrus and Robbie's stories..". There's seemingly not the slightest curiosity on your part, or question-asking, to explore how all of these people are experiencing such marked health turnarounds, while doing the diametric of everything you hold to be true.
Like I said, unless you can get people into metabolic wards, free-living studies are going to have limits; not least because of errors in reporting, lack of compliance etc. The same issues likely factored into the Virta studies, which I think bottomed out at an HbA1c of 6.2%, at a year, before then setting on a course sharply back upwards. Are the numbers lower than Barnard's trials? Of course. Turns out that when compliance is necessary many people will be able to stick to a diet of meat, eggs and butter with more success than sugarless oatmeal, with berries, and brown-rice with lentils. Either way, i find the Virta results to be wholly unremarkable. But I don't use that as evidence that a high-fat diet is ineffective either by total numbers, nor in the long-term. Why? because I only have to come here and read the hundreds of accounts of people leaving Virta's numbers in the dust.
So, no....it's not that I'm impervious to evidence. I just take my evidence from a source of people who are dedicated to following this specific chosen diet, right here on this forum.
In the coming years, those few pages of current FOK and MD success stories will expand exponentially. i wonder how many cases you'd have to read before finally relinquishing your "from my cold, dead hands" hold on that Barnard study
Here is what a weight loss diet (albeit in this case a very low calorie one which might not be your choice.) can do for your OGT results in time. IE reverse your T2 rather than just manage your blood sugars. Incidentally Bulkbiker lost 8stone albeit gradually and it would be improbable I think if he had not lost all his pancreatic and liver fat and hence reversed his T2 That would account for his good OGT results.
ok