British researchers have developed what they say is a "cure" for Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease. And all you have to do is starve yourself for eight weeks. Roy Taylor, head of the magnetic resonance imaging unit at Newcastle University in Britain, and his colleagues studied 11 patients who had developed diabetes later in life and who had had it for several years. The patients averaged 220 pounds at the beginning of the study. Each was put on a 600-calorie-per-day diet that included a special diet drink and non-starchy vegetables, such as broccoli, asparagus and cabbage. The diet was followed for eight weeks. Taylor reported Saturday at a San Diego meeting of the American Diabetes Assn. and in the journal Diabetologia that, after one week on the diet, each of the patients' fasting blood sugar, taken before breakfast, had returned to normal. At the end of the eight weeks, the patients had lost an average of 33 pounds and had no signs of diabetes. Three months after returning to a normal diet, seven of them remained free of the disease. Average weight gain in that three months was 6.5 pounds.
