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We have nearly 2 million Australians with type 2 diabetes. We have another 2 million with pre-diabetes who'll probably go on to develop diabetes unless they change. It's actually the biggest health issue in this country in the western world and the treatment has alwaysbeen drugs and even bariatric surgery at times.
What we've discovered over the last decade or so is that diet can actually reverse, put type 2 diabetes into remission.
Twelve years ago I was living in Liverpool working for the football club there and if you'd asked me then, you know, was I healthy I'd have said, yeah, sure, you know, I'm okay. The reality was I wasn't quite a healthy as I thought I was. So I was metabolically quite unwell and in retrospect I was pre-diabetic and I have no doubt that if I'd kept going the way I was, I'd have followed my father's footsteps and developed type 2 diabetes. Aound that time I started to hear about suggestions that maybe we weren't eating the right things, that it wasn't fat that was a problem, it might have been sugar and carbohydrates that were the problem. So I decided I would just try 3 months of removing all the sugar and starches and carbohydrates from my diet.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, at the end of 3 months I'd lost 13kg in 13 weeks without ever reducing what I ate. I was never hungry and then when I did my bloods all my metabolic issues had resolved. My fatty liver that I had for 10 years, gone. Triglycerides normal, insulin normal, everything back to normal. It made me realise, you know, that we've basically been giving people the wrong dietary advice and that there was a there was hope for people with type 2 diabetes because at the moment they're not given much hope. So I started to write about it, talk about it. I started a charity called SugarByHalf with the aim of reducing the amount of added sugar by half. So the average Australian has about 18 teaspoons of added sugar a day and the World Health Organization recommends no more than six. So we thought, well, let's have a target: sugar by half. My covid project was to set up a program called Defeat Diabetes that gave people the tools they needed to reverse their diabetes, so lots of video lectures, articles, meal plans and we've now had over 12,000 people go through the Defeat Diabetes program and the majority of those have put their diabetes into remission. So they are no longer even considered diabetic. We've shown to be scientifically true what we, sort of, thought was anecdotally the case: by changing your diet, by reducing the amount of carbohydrates that you have, you can put your type 2 diabetes into remission and that's really exciting.
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