December 9

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066: Dr David Unwin – The Low Carb GP

December 9, 2021

Carnivore, Diabetes, Diet, Fasting, Food, Health, Intermittent Fasting, Keto, Ketogenic Diet, LCHF, Lifestyle, Low Carb, Nutrition, Podcasts, Real Food, Well Being

Dr David Unwin


 Dr David Unwin FRCGP works at the Norwood NHS Surgery in Southport near Liverpool, UK where he has cared for the same population since 1986 as a family doctor. To date 102 out of 201 of his patients with Type 2 diabetes have achieved drug-free remission. This gives a remission rate of 50% at 30 months duration of a lower carb diet, one of the best results for any clinic in the world.

For the past few years, he has been a UK Royal College of General Practitioners expert clinical advisor on diabetes.  

Dr Unwin’s work has been covered by both BBC, C4 & C5 television, The New Scientist, The Times, The Daily Mail and The British Medical Journal. As @lowcarbGP he has over 62,000 followers on Twitter

Southport (UK) GP, Dr David Unwin has seen a lot of changes to the health of his community over the years.  The surgery has over 9500 patients, which since 1986, has seen an 8 fold increase in Type 2 Diabetes.  As his patients were becoming sicker, he became increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t help them other than prescribing more medication.  That was until 2013 when one of his patients decided not to follow his advice.  Instead, she challenged him to look at how eating carbohydrates actually was making her sicker.  Now, as the ‘Low Carb GP’ Dr Unwin advocates for the use of low carbohydrate diets for not only Type 2 Diabetes but other health conditions such as high blood pressure and fatty liver. 


Dr David's Top Tips

  1. Never see yourself as a problem consider yourself as
  2. Interesting puzzles of your own body 
  3. Be curious - see yourself as a lifelong experiment which you are continuously refining by noticing what is working and do more of it.
  4. Look after your pet human - you


Resources Mentioned


Are we blaming salt for what sugar did: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyZVTsHyLU0 


Low carb down under Black Swan presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoCzm9-J_Ok  


Protein and kidney function article: 

https://journals.lww.com/co-endocrinology/Fulltext/2021/10000/Renal_function_in_patients_following_a_low.8.aspx


Roy Taylor: long silent scream of the liver: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3593165/



Quotes by Dr David Unwin

"So we did an audit of all the people in my practice with type two diabetes. In 1986, this is a practice of 9500 people, there were 57 individuals with Type 2 Diabetes. Fast forward, we've now got 473 in the same population."

"I’ve got an eightfold increase in the people suffering with diabetes in my lifetime."

"Every practice, I know, and every country that I've ever visited around the world has a similar problem."

"I see this avalanche of suffering."

"You know, when I was a child, there was only one fat kid in the entire school."

"I'd never heard of diabetes, there was nobody I knew with diabetes."

"So I’d got nothing but questions and no solutions."

"Everywhere I went I saw unhappiness and unhealthiness"

"My surgeries were full of unhappy people. And what was I doing for them? Not a lot. So it's very depressing."

"I have to say, I am often disappointed that the doctors are not more curious. As you know, you'd hope that being a scientific sort of mind means you're curious."

"I often say to patients, ‘oh, your doctor must be so proud of you. Has he not asked why and how you did this?’  I'm terribly disappointed if healthcare professionals are not interested. Some of them, I think they're so tired, as I was tired."

"I've had an eight-fold increase in the numbers of people with type two diabetes, but I've also had increases in hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and I don't have any more doctors in the practice now than I had years ago and no more resources. So actually, being a doctor now is much tougher. It's terrible. And I think many doctors are utterly exhausted."

"Well, I'm utterly fascinated. We've got all these things: type two diabetes improving; big fat bellies are melting away; blood pressure's improving; everybody's having more salt, and yet I'm stopping drugs for blood pressure."

"That's why we call it essential hypertension because we don't know what the cause is.”

"And it's all to do with insulin. And insulin pulls the whole thing together.”

"So insulin, it's the master hormone, it's got a finger in every pie.  One of the most important things that it does is keep you safe in terms of blood sugar.”

"High blood sugar rapidly damages the lining of your large blood vessels, which is the link between diabetes and strokes and heart attacks.  High blood sugar damages the small blood vessels of your eyes and kidneys, which is why we're so worried about the eyes and kidneys in diabetes. ”

"It's really key to get my patients to think. Oh, and let's try and get doctors to think as well.”

"There's an epidemic of people with fat tummies, central obesity, that is linked to eight different cancers”

"We're blaming the wrong white crystal. We're blaming salt for what sugar did.”

"I call it the Black Swan. They exist, and therefore you can't argue your way out of a Black Swan. They do exist, not all swans are white. If you find a Black Swan, once you found one Black Swan, you know they exist. So that patient’s experience was a Black Swan, and she shouldn't be ignored.”

"We've become obsessed with drugs as the answer to everything”

"It's simple but it's not easy.”

"The side effects of going low carb for me and most of my patients have been improvements.”

"Animals in the wild look great and compare that to what you see in any town or city in the developed world. Do those animals, human animals look healthy? No, they don’t.”

"On average by the time people get to 30 they don’t look like healthy animals."


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066: Dr David Unwin – The Low Carb GP
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  • This podcast featured many interesting and hopeful topics discussed by Dr David Unwin in this warm and engaging conversation.

    I feel so much better on low carb but as he said it is sometimes not easy, as I am one of those food addicts.

    Listening to the improvements others have experienced is so very encouraging. My hope is that in a generation or two being healthy will be the norm because of people like him.

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