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The most interesting thing I think is in the field of type 2 diabetes, because it's such an important disease. If you look at the number of people being affected with type 2 diabetes, it's skyrocketing. Since the 1970s we had an increase in obesity, and then we had an increase in type 2 diabetes. The most fascinating and most promising thing I've heard in a long time is that you can actually start to reverse this disease by changing the diet. What's interesting is that you have to understand that type 2 diabetes is largely a dietary disease. We treated it with drugs for a long time, and if you give drugs to a dietary disease, you're never going to fix it, because you haven't identified the core problem. To fix it, you need to change the diet to fix that dietary problem, and then the disease goes away.
Now we have data on intermittent fasting, for example, and also on low-carbohydrate diets. Dr David Unwin published his data in the UK on reversing type 2 diabetes by reducing carbohydrates, which shows that you can put about 50% of people into a completely drug-free remission state. Basically, you can cure 50% of those type 2 diabetics who are at risk of cancer, at risk of heart disease, at risk of strokes, at risk of blindness, at risk of kidney disease, nerve damage, and infections. All of these people you can help just by changing their diet, either by cutting down the carbohydrates or by using intermittent fasting. And it's free, and anybody can do it. I'm not talking about a drug that costs thousands of dollars, and I'm not talking about a surgery which is only available to the 1%. I'm talking about a treatment, which is intermittent fasting, that is available to everybody in the entire world for free, and yet it has the power to completely reverse their disease and make them so much healthier.
So the question is, why don't we do it? I couldn't answer that question for you. I try to do my part to tell people. But did you know I was going to ask you that question? No, I was going to ask you why we don't do it. What about systems, incentives, money? I think the real reason is that people are slow to catch new ideas. When people hear about new ideas, and I'm talking about academic doctors and so on, there's an intrinsic resistance to change. I started talking about intermittent fasting around 2016, when The Obesity Code was published. I talked about reversing type 2 diabetes around the same time. They're just very slow to say, "Hey, this makes a lot of sense," because they've invested so much in this calories-in, calories-out model. They've built their entire careers on saying that it's your fault that you're fat, that it's the foods you ate and the calories you ate, instead of trying to get to a deeper understanding. So people are very reluctant to change. In fact, it's been 10 years, and public interest in intermittent fasting has skyrocketed, and yet most doctors still won't prescribe it, won't talk about it, and know nothing about it. How much teaching do doctors get about intermittent fasting and why it might be helpful? Probably zero. We have this amazing tool, and doctors call it a fad. It's a fad diet, well, it's been around for 2,000-plus years. That's a long, long, long fad. It's proven effective. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. What's simpler than that? If you don't eat, you're going to use up your blood glucose, and your diabetes will get better. What's wrong with that? It's not hard to understand.
The diabetes code, I've got the diabetes journal here in front of me, and put simply, it talks about step one being to put less sugar in, and step two being to burn the sugar off. Step one relates to putting less sugar in, and it is all about low-carbohydrate diets, cutting down the carbohydrates. That's one effective way of reducing type 2 diabetes. In fact, the American Diabetes Association and their nutritional journals talk about it as having the most scientific evidence of any diet. There's no diet with more evidence for reversing type 2 diabetes than cutting down the carbohydrates. Step two is about burning the sugar off, and that's where fasting comes into the picture. If you think about it, it's not that hard to understand. Everybody can understand it. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. It's such a simple, powerful tool, but it threatens the whole apple cart. All these doctors and professors have built their entire reputations, and all these systems are in place.
Personal trainers work on a different level, because they talk about more exercise. When we talk about calories on this show, I think the people who tend to get quite offended are personal trainers. They would say they've got case studies of telling a client to monitor their calories and seeing a reduction in weight, so for them, that means it works. That's the calories-in, calories-out model. It is that, but it's a simplistic understanding, and that's my whole point. It's like if I were to ask you why the Titanic crashed, and most people would say "hidden iceberg." That's very simplistic. That's not the right answer.