Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University and his ludicrous diet plan.

When I first heard of the Roy Taylor's how to cure type two diabetes plan a couple of years back, I said it was ridiculous, nothing has changed. Roy is back on the case, this time a larger study, but pretty much the same madcap scheme. This is how it works. You get some overweight diabetics to starve themselves for a few months, guess what, they lose some weight, gor blimey who would have thought that ! You need to be a Prof to work that out eh. Some blubber is lost from the Liver and Pancreas and Bob's ya uncle off  you go lad. By the way, the grub eaten on this diet is a big earner for food I consider junk and unnecessary, and contains far more carbs than I would use in a good meat and three veg meal.

So, what happens when these 'cured diabetics' go back to eating the foods and sensible amount of calories after the trial. My money is they will be back to square one, unless of course they grow more beta cells, which is impossible.

Read Hannah Sutter's full post here. Some extracts below Eddie 

"The study that triggered this grant was small, lasted 8 weeks and was carried out by Prof Roy Taylor a couple of years ago. It involved 11 adults with type 2 diabetes who followed an 800 calorie-a-day diet that came from low-calorie shakes provided by Nestle. Guess what –if you starve people they will lose weight fast. I am not sure you need a study to show that but what you really want is a study that shows what happens after they have been on a starvation diet.

The new large study, which has now started, is being supported by a firm called Counterweight which is controlled by Cambridge Nutritional Food Limited which in turn owns the Cambridge Diet. The subjects in the trial will be getting Counterweight shakes, the same ones that Cambridge Nutritional Food Ltd has been flogging shakes to the obese and the overweight for over 40 years.

To be fair to the founder of Cambridge Diet, Dr Alan Howard, started his work in the 1960s with a genuine wish to find a practical solution to obesity and created the prototype of the current VLCD shake. By 1984 this great idea had been commercialised and is now a multimillion pound business selling shakes to the obese worldwide. Turnover of Cambridge Nutritional Food Limited last year was approximately £36,000,000

So Diabetes UK is throwing 2.5 million of cash at two professors who are busy working with Cambridge Diet to prove that, notwithstanding 40 years of unimpressive results, a VLCD is the way to solve the UK crises of obesity and diabetes."