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you have joined the 285 million people around the world who have type 2 diabetes. It is a massive and rapidly growing problem worldwide. Over the last 20 years, numbers have risen almost tenfold and there is no obvious sign that this trend is slowing.
    Diabetes is associated with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, impotence, going blind and losing your extremities due to poor circulation. It is also associated with brain shrinkage and dementia. Not a pretty picture .
    One way to prevent the downward spiral into diabetes is to cut back on the carbohydrates and instead start eating more vegetables and fat, since these foods do not lead to such big spikes in blood glucose. Nor do they have such a dramatic effect on insulin levels. The other way is to try Intermittent Fasting.
How Intermittent Fasting affects insulin sensitivity
     
    In a study from 2005, eight healthy young men were asked to fast every other day, 20 hours a day, for two weeks. 12 On their fasting days they were allowed to eat until 10pm, then not eat again until 6pm the following evening. They were also asked to eat heartily the rest of the time to make sure they did not lose any weight.
    The idea behind the experiment was to test the so-called ‘thrifty hypothesis’, the idea that since we evolved at a time of feast and famine the best way to eat is to mimic those times. At the end of the two weeks, there were no changes in the volunteers’ weight or body-fat composition, which is what the researchers had intended. There was, however, a big change in their insulin sensitivity. In other words,after just two weeks of Intermittent Fasting, the same amount of circulating insulin now had a much greater effect on the volunteers’ ability to store glucose or break down fat.
    The researchers wrote jubilantly that, ‘by subjecting healthy men to cycles of feast and famine we changed their metabolic status for the better’. They also added that, ‘to our knowledge this is the first study in humans in which an increased insulin action on whole body glucose uptake and adipose tissue lipolysis has been obtained by means of Intermittent Fasting.’
    I don’t know what impact Intermittent Fasting has had on my insulin sensitivity – it’s a test that is hard to do and extremely expensive – but what I do know is that the effects on my blood sugar have been spectacular. Before I started fasting, my blood glucose level was 7.3 mmol/l, well above the acceptable range of 3.9 – 5.8 mmol/l. The last time I had my level measured it was 5.0 mmol/l, still a bit high but well within the normal range.
    This is an incredibly impressive response. My doctor, who was preparing to put me on medication, was astonished at such a dramatic turnaround. Doctors routinely recommend a healthy diet to patients with high blood glucose, but it usually only makes a marginal difference. Intermittent Fasting could have a revolutionary , game-changing effect on the nation’s health.

Fasting and cancer
     
    My father was a lovely man but not a particularly healthy one. Overweight for much of his life, by the time he reached his 60s he had developed not only diabetes but also prostate cancer. He had an operation to remove the cancer that left him with embarrassing urinary problems. Understandably, I am not at all keen to go down that road.
    My four-day fast, under Professor Valter Longo’s supervision, had shown me that it was possible to dramatically cut my IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor 1) levels and by doing so, hopefully, my prostate cancer risk. I later discovered that Intermittent Fasting had a similar effect on my IGF-1 levels. The link between growth, fasting and cancer is worth unpacking.
    The cells in our bodies are constantly multiplying, replacing dead, worn-out or damaged tissue. This is fine as long as cellular growth is under control, but sometimes a cell mutates, grows uncontrollably and turns into a cancer. Very high levels in the blood of a cellular stimulant, like