Modest weight loss keeps diabetes at bay

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Australian scientists have shown obese people can prevent and even reverse the effects of type 2 diabetes by losing as little six kilograms.

For a long time doctors have warned patients about the link between obesity and diabetes.

This is because excess body fat triggers the production of pro-inflammatory immune cells which harden arteries and cause type 2 diabetes.

But now scientists say modest weight loss could bring down production of those attacking immune cells to the same level found in lean people.

For 65-year-old Sydney barrister Garry McIlwaine, the battle with weight gain began at an early age.

"My first memory of being overweight is probably in primary school when my mother and family sent me away to some friend's farm and they had lots of scones and jam and cream there," he said.

"I came back and my mother said she would have to get a new uniform for me. So I've been overweight since then.

"In 1988 I was 112 (kilograms). At that stage I started working at the bar and went up, at the worst, to 135 (kilograms)."

That is when Mr McIlwaine's doctor diagnosed him with type 2 diabetes and told to him to lose weight if he wanted to avoid having to take daily injections of insulin.

So that is what he did, with the help of lap-band surgery.

"I had the surgery in November 2007 and I was 125 (kilograms) ... and I'm down to about 88 at the moment," he said.

Along the way, the advancing diabetes has been reversed.

"All my medications have been reduced in half," Mr McIlwaine said.

He was one of 13 obese patients monitored for a landmark study looking at the benefits of weight loss.

The Associate Professor of Medicine at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Katherine Samaras, led the study.

"What we showed for the first time was that the inflammation that's in the circulation and in fat tissue that characterises the obesity that's associated with diabetes can be pretty much gutted by modest weight reduction," she said.

"I was heartened by it, deeply heartened I must say, because most people struggle so much to lose any amount of weight and here we can show a profound benefit with even a small weight reduction."

And it is cheaper than some of the options.

"People are spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each year buying antioxidants and taking fish oils and all sorts of other things which are supposed to have anti-inflammatory action," she said.

"A little bit of calorie restriction and a modest amount of weight reduction will have a profound benefit."

While the study is an important advance for obese people with diabetes and other associated ailments, Professor Samaras says people are much better off if they avoid becoming obese in the first place.