Diabetic Diet: When Low Carb Eating Backfires

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Healthline has an article by Christina Crowder Anderson, a certified diabetes educator and pediatric registered dietitian nutritionist. It’s worth your time. A snippet:

While I was in my dietetic internship at Duke University, I met a person with diabetes who had morbid obesity and who had participated in Dr. Eric Westman’s “low carb clinic.” They did well on that regimen until they ended up gaining back all the weight plus some, along with a resurgence in their type 2 diabetes.

At that moment, my iron-clad nutrition paradigm started to shift, as the sadness and shame from “diet failure” was palpable. Most individuals would say they “didn’t try hard enough.” But when you meet an actual person and hear their story, you’ll learn there are many factors that play into their success with a specific dietary approach.

Even though I was moved by this experience, my practice philosophies still didn’t change in terms of my recommended dietary approach for type 1 or type 2 diabetes — low carbohydrate. Over the next few years as I worked in a pediatric and adult endocrinology clinic, I steered most patients toward the more severe end of the “low carbohydrate spectrum” and was enthralled by the ability of the low carb approach to produce a flat line continuous glucose monitor (CGM) tracing.

That was, until I worked with 10 young adults in a clinical trial (for my graduate thesis), who chose to participate for a total of 8 months: 3 months on the low carbohydrate diet (60 to 80g day), 2 months of a “washout” period back on their own preferred diet, and another 3 months on the “standard diabetes diet” of >150 g carbs per day.

Source: When Low Carb Eating Backfires for Diabetes

Steve Parker, M.D.

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