Exciting news spread throughout the low-carb blogosphere this past week when a brand new study of mice published in the April 20, 2011 issue of the scientific journal Plos One revealed a rather surprising positive health effect of a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet for treating diabetic complications.
Lead researcher Dr. Charles V. Mobbs, professor and researcher at the Fishberg Center for Neurobiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, set out with the hypothesis that diabetes is just an accelerated form of aging. And as someone who has studied aging and metabolism throughout his career, he had already made the connection between complications from diabetes being the result of too much glucose metabolism. Along the way of examining aging, though, he noticed that the presence of ketone bodies would actually prevent glucose metabolism from happening which deeply intrigued him to become intently interested in this whole idea of a ketogenic diet as a therapeutic means for treating the various health problems associated with diabetes. Because nephropathy, or kidney disease, is easy to measure by the amount of protein in the urine, he and his fellow researchers focused in on that in conducting their study.
Dr. Mobbs acknowledges that the ketogenic diet (defined very specifically as a nutritional intake comprised of 87% fat, 8% protein, and 5% carbohydrate) has already been used for many years as a therapeutic measure for treating epileptic seizures thanks to a fabulous organization named The Charlie Foundation promoting it as an excellent nutritional alternative to medications. I’ve previously interviewed two outstanding experts about using ketogenic diets for epilepsy on my “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show” podcast in the past few years: Dr. Eric Kossoff and Dr. Deborah Snyder. While the mechanism for knowing why the ketogenic diet works for controlling seizures is still unknown, that doesn’t prevent it from being used when drug therapies are ineffective or undesirable. Dr. Mobbs wondered if the same mechanism that helps reverse the complications from epilepsy would apply to complications from diabetes. His study was meant to test that hypothesis on mice.
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