Dr David Unwin has put more than 150 of his patients' type 2 diabetes into remission by changing what they eat rather than reaching for a new drug. Writing in The Telegraph for Diabetes Awareness Week, the Southport GP describes the patient who started it: in 2012 she stopped her metformin after losing almost three stone on a low-carbohydrate diet, and overturned everything he had been taught about a disease he thought was progressive and irreversible.
His approach is unglamorous and specific. Cut the sugar and starchy carbohydrates first: a baked potato, he points out, releases roughly nine teaspoons of sugar into the bloodstream, and a serving of white rice closer to ten, numbers most people would never guess from foods that do not taste sweet. Replace those carbs with green vegetables and protein, stop fearing the fat in full-fat yogurt, olive oil and nuts, track the changes.
Sound familiar? Where the CGM comes in
His fourth point is about tracking change, and it is where the continuous glucose monitor appears. Unwin calls it a useful tool for near-real-time feedback, letting people see how a food moves their glucose within minutes. He is right. A sensor turns an abstract warning about white rice into something you watched happen to your own body an hour ago.
A sensor on its own can mislead as easily as it informs. The reading is just a number, and what it means depends on context most people do not have. We see it in members who come to us after using an out-of-the-box monitor: a normal evening glucose dip, which is simply the body settling towards sleep, gets read as a problem to fix with food. Eating to correct it is one of the worst things you can do for sleep and for metabolic health, and it happens regularly. Chasing the number undermines the thing the number was supposed to help.
The part that Nico can help scale
What makes Unwin's results hard to copy: the weekly group meetings, the reassurance, someone who knows you watching the trend rather than the spike. Most people will never have a Dr Unwin in their surgery. That is the gap Nico was built to fill, pairing the sensor with a coaching layer that reads the data with you, so a dip at night reads as sleep rather than a snack, and a brisk walk after eating becomes a habit at the moment glucose is climbing rather than a fact you once read. The direction is the same as his: whole food in place of ultra-processed, fewer of the hidden sugars that drive inflammation, protein at the centre of the plate and enough of it to hold onto muscle while the body lets go of fat.
Unwin's patients succeeded because someone was paying attention with them. The sensor was never the intervention; the understanding was. The coaching the, community, the support - this is what Dr Unwin did, and this si what Nico does.