Comment by throwaway12245 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway12245 | Hacker News Reader

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To anyone facing diabetes type II, consider non pharmaceutical approaches: diet and exercise.

1) Diet: Low carbohydrate diets are one technique: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9437985/

"In this randomized, crossover intervention trial among adults with prediabetes or T2DM, the 12-week percentage change in HbA1c, the primary study outcome, improved significantly for participants on both diets"

2) Exercise: High intensity training and strength training improve blood measurements. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30270019/

"From a practical clinical perspective, the performance of [strength training] + [high intensity interval training] may be advised for additional benefits regarding insulin dosage reduction."

In short, cut out the bread, deserts, pizza , lift some weights and do some sprints. Keep doing it.

Pubmed is great resource. Search for terms like "clinical trial" "diabetes", "HIIT", "mediterranean diet", VFKD. [edit: I do want to emphasize the term "clinical trail". Diet and nutrition research has a lot of other types of research. Often the quality suffers. Clinical trials, and hopefully other clinical trials that verify earlier findings, are the best.]

Getting on top of the situation early will save you a lot of grief ( and doctor's visits and paying for drugs).

Low carb diets seem to be a key component of curbing metabolic syndrome, but it’s really never as simple as “diet and exercise…keep doing it”. For some bodies, the amount of diet and exercise needed to avoid metabolic diseases is so high that it impedes quality of life.

> it’s really never as simple as “diet and exercise…keep doing it”

I disagree with "never". I think most people can use diet and exercise to avoid and even reverse type 2 diabetes. An unpopular opinion hereabouts, but likely true.

The exercise part is possible in theory, but in practise not many people have lives in which they can do 4000 kcal of exercise daily, six days a week. 4000 kcal takes a long time. I have heard of a guy who became a security guard and walked around a town for 10 hours each night. Exercise took him from "severely obese" to just above "normal" BMI over the course of 18 months or so.

The diet part is also possible in theory, but many people's family and social environments practically require them to eat muffins, cakes, sweet desserts, and other micronutrient-poor dishes. Refusal to take part gets them ostracized.

>social environments practically require them to eat muffins, cakes, sweet desserts

Most people will let you slide on gorging if you simply say "Doctor's orders". HIIT means sprinting hard 3 times twice a week. Just about anybody can do it.

Yeah, but it doesn't burn enough calories. Even accounting for the increase in basal metabolic rate.

Check out the clinical trials.

I have. It works for some people, but there are scores of situations where it isn’t enough.

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