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.
Here’s my exclusive 30-minute interview with Dr. Mobbs recorded on Tuesday regarding his study of the ketogenic diet for treating mice with diabetic nephropathy and actually REVERSING this condition. You’ll hear him discuss the details of the study, his theory about why the ketogenic diet does what it does, the peculiar response he’s received by the media covering his research, the difference between a ketogenic diet and an Atkins-styled low-carb diet, his frustration at having difficulty getting the paper published, the apathy towards the high-fat, low-carb diet studies that still exists today, and so much more! Dr. Mobbs was quite frank with me throughout our conversations and I’m pleased to share this with you today:
I’ll be sharing this interview with Dr. Mobbs about his study on “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show” podcast in Episode 469 on Monday, May 9, 2011. But I thought the information provided needed to be shared with my readers and listeners as soon as possible. While Dr. Mobbs is indeed an interesting researcher who actually had never even heard of the clinical work on high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diets by people like Dr. Eric Westman or Dr. Mary C. Vernon, I have to admit I was a bit dismayed that his self-proclaimed purpose in examining the ketogenic diet for treating complications from diabetes is to create as he tells The Los Angeles Times “a pharmacological intervention that mimcs these effects.” Really? People can’t consume this intensive very high-fat, very low-carb diet for a period of time to reverse their health issues from diabetes and then transition to the Atkins diet, for example? I certainly think that’s a lot better option for people to try than to be placed on some drug for the rest of their life that has dubious effectiveness and side effects.
The future of this research is promising. But Dr. Mobbs admits that most researchers want to identify how a disease works rather than actually finding a cure for a disease. Funding for a clinical trial on humans would be very costly, but could be quite illuminating in the coming years if research like this could actually be done. It is the logical next step with this theory that holds such great promise for treating the complications of diabetes–a disease that continues to skyrocket as the low-carb solution espoused by people like the great Dr. Richard Bernstein continues to be ignored. Does it really matter WHY the ketogenic diet works if we’re noticing improvements and even reversal in things like diabetic nephropathy? Doesn’t that demand we give this a closer look for human application? I sure think so and hope that it happens sooner rather than later.
For more on this study, check out this interesting perspective by Peter at the “Hyperlipid” blog.
