Intermittent Fasting Can Help People with Type 2 Diabetes

Intermittent fasting can help people with Type 2 diabetes lose weight, lower blood pressure and improve blood sugar levels, a rigorous new study has found.

The new research, published last 21 June 2024 in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that intermittent fasting had striking metabolic benefits that surpassed even the effects of prescription medications for people with newly diagnosed diabetes. Here are the findings:

1. Over the course of 16 weeks, people who were assigned to practice intermittent fasting lost more weight and improved their blood sugar control to a greater extent than people who were given metformin or empagliflozin, two commonly prescribed diabetes medications.
2. The research focused on a form of fasting called the 5:2 diet, in which people eat normally for five days a week and then fast for two days, consuming just 500 to 600 calories on their fasting days.
3. After 16 weeks, the fasting group lost an average of 21 pounds, almost double the 12 pounds on average that the people taking metformin lost. Those who were prescribed empagliflozin lost an average of about 12.8 pounds during the study.
4. Previous studies have examined whether intermittent fasting can help people with Type 2 diabetes, but they have been mostly small and did not compare the diet head-to-head with medications.
5. The study involved more than 330 overweight and obese adults who had recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

Courtney Peterson, an expert who was not involved in the study, said the results were "exciting."

"Often times we assume that drugs are more powerful than lifestyle approaches," said Peterson, an associate professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "But here they showed that a lifestyle approach was more effective for lowering blood sugar than putting people on drugs. That’s a very powerful statement."

In addition to losing weight, the fasting group saw their HbA1c, a long-term measure of their blood sugar levels, drop 1.9 percent - significantly more than the groups taking medication. About 80 percent of participants in the fasting group saw their HbA1c fall below 6.5 percent, the cutoff for diabetes, compared to 60 percent of the participants on metformin and 55 percent of the people taking empagliflozin.

Eight weeks after the study ended, the researchers followed up with the participants and found that most of the people in the fasting group had maintained blood sugar levels below the threshold for diabetes, suggesting that the diet “significantly and sustainably improves HbA1c levels,” the authors wrote.

The researchers found that the fasting group also had greater reductions in their waist circumference, blood pressure levels and triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in the blood, compared with the participants taking medication.

The researchers cautioned that more studies were needed to examine the long-term effectiveness of the 5:2 diet with meal replacements for Type 2 diabetes. But they said their findings suggest that the diet might be a good initial lifestyle intervention for people with early-stage diabetes.