
Drug dramatically reduces diabetes symptoms in mice - asdrty
http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=11134
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robobro
As a type 1, this article disappointed me

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susan_hall
Not eating any food for several days also greatly reduces diabetes symptoms in
mammals. I am not clear why this is not the default treatment. If people have
trouble with will power then they can always check into a clinic that
specializes in fasting. There are thousands of retreats, meditation, and
medical clinics that help facilitate fasting. 20 or 30 days without food will
resolve most symptoms in most humans.

I've read that in the pre industrial era, humans spent about 10% of their
lives facing famine conditions. Our bodies expect a certain amount of
starvation. Millions of years of evolution did not prepare us for a world
where you can walk into a grocery store and for $8 or $9 get a tub of
strawberry ice cream containing as many calories as 2 foxes or a baby antelope
(any of which would have taken some work to acquire).

I realize that companies can not get a patent on fasting, so perhaps there is
less money in it, but it is still a good option and should be considered for
anyone whose other medical conditions do not preclude it.

~~~
jimrandomh
> 20 or 30 days without food will resolve most symptoms in most humans.

Your advice is much more lethal than you think. You should not pretend to know
things about medicine when you don't.

~~~
susan_hall
Do you realize that there have been hundreds of studies suggesting that
fasting has health benefits? There are too many listed on Google for me to
link to them all but here is a random sample of a few.

Start with this one, which was on Hacker News for awhile:

Total Starvation – 382 days without Food

[http://cristivlad.com/total-starvation-382-days-without-
food...](http://cristivlad.com/total-starvation-382-days-without-food-study/)

"I recently came across this study from 1973 in which a 27 years old male has
fasted for 382 days under the supervision of researchers from a Scotland
University. This is the longest fast ever been recorded.

This patient weighted in 456 pounds (~207 kg) and weighted out 180 pounds (~82
kg). So, he lost 276 pounds (~125kg) during his fast. Five years after the
fast ended, the patient’s weight has been constantly around the values of 196
pounds. A.B. had no ill symptoms during and after the fast."

Medically supervised water-only fasting in the treatment of hypertension

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11416824](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11416824)

Intermittent fasting: a dietary intervention for prevention of diabetes and
cardiovascular disease?

[http://dvd.sagepub.com/content/13/2/68.long](http://dvd.sagepub.com/content/13/2/68.long)

Wikipedia lists all the fasts undertaken by Ghandi, his longest being 21 days:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fasts_undertaken_by_Mah...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fasts_undertaken_by_Mahatma_Gandhi)

There are all the Christian sites that promote fasting so you can be more like
Jesus:

[https://danielfast.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/christian-
fastin...](https://danielfast.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/christian-fasting/)

There's endless other religious sites I could link to. In India the yogis are
known for very long fasts.

You should try to educate yourself on this subject. There is an abundance of
information that is only a Google search away.

~~~
jimrandomh
First of all, intermittent fasting is different from calorie restriction is
different from prolonged fasting. Prolonged fasting is much more dangerous
than the other two.

And second, what applies to healthy people, metabolically speaking, usually
does not apply to people with diabetes. I did a Pubmed search before I posted
my comment, and wasn't able to find a single example of prolonged fasting
having even been tried in T2DM patients.

As someone with T1DM (the kind caused by autoimmunity, not the kind caused by
obesity), my expectation is that a T2DM who tried this in an ICU would
probably experience hypoglycemia and abort, while someone who tried it outside
an ICU would probably die.

