Indian street seller selling tea – masala chai
Ani had poor control of his blood sugars despite following the dietitian-recommended high-carb diet and taking three diabetes drugs. In his frustration, Ani started doing research on his own and ran across Eenfeldt’s version of low-carb high-fat (LCHF) eating. After just one month of LCHF dieting, his blood sugars came down from 300+ mg/dl (16.7+ mmol/l) to an average of 97 mg/dl (5.4 mmol/l). His doctor reduced his drugs, too. Ani mentioned that eating LCHF in India is “a bit expensive.”
Although Ani’s high triglycerides dropped like a rock, I have a little concern about his total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, both of which rose. That bears watching.
Click through to Dr. Eenfeldt’s blog and you’ll find a photo of Ani. Note that he’s not obese. Like East Asians, Indians develop T2 diabetes at lower degrees of body fat (BMI) than do Americans and Europeans. Could that be genetic? You bet.
This story is interesting to me because I had no definite evidence that LCHF eating was effective for Indian type 2 diabetes. Due to potential genetic differences between Indians and other ethnicities, it’s a mistake to simply assume they would respond to the diet like Europeans, for example. My Low-Carb Mediterranean Diet is a version of LCHF; no Indian has ever reported back to me whether it helped them or not. Now I have one anecdote to support LCHF eating in Indians.
Steve Parker, M.D.
Diabetic Mediterranean Diet 
In my experience, cholesterol has proved irrelevant. After type I for 30 years and LCHF for 18, my CAC is zero in spite of high particle number. Moreover, I calculated from WOSCOPS that my chances of being protected by a station [“statin” rather than station. -ed.] were 1 in 72, the same as my chance of tossing a head six times in a row, very different from the 40% improvement in risk my doctor suggested.
LCHF diet works for South Asian Indian. One can verify from here.
http://www.forums.dlife.in/
HSD, thanks for visiting. Searching “south asian” at dlife.com brought up several articles I need to read. I didn’t have time to search the forums.
-Steve