# 33 How to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Without Medication with Dr David Unwin
In this episode, Dr Elizabeth Thompson talks with Dr David Unwin, a GP based near Southport, about his journey from a conventional, prescription-first approach to becoming a leading voice in lifestyle medicine for type 2 diabetes. David reflects candidly on the years he spent frustrated with patients who weren’t improving, before realising the problem lay with the advice he was giving rather than the patients themselves. He describes how a shift toward low-carb, collaborative, and data-driven care, sparked by his wife Jen’s encouragement to run free evening clinics, transformed both his practice and his own health, as someone living with type 2 diabetes himself. The conversation covers the ethics of informed consent, the risks and benefits of GLP-1 drugs, the power of visual tools like his sugar-teaspoon infographics, and the remarkable outcomes his practice has achieved, including drug-free diabetes remission in as little as eight weeks for some patients. He shares his insights with over 100,000 followers as @lowcarbGP on Twitter.
KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- David’s practice has documented 159 cases of drug-free type 2 diabetes remission, with an average time to remission of just eight weeks using low-carb approaches and continuous glucose monitoring.
- Comparing his practice’s diabetes drug spending to 18 neighbouring practices via national open prescribing data, David has saved the NHS over £350,000 since 2018.
- A 93% remission rate was achieved among pre-diabetic patients who adopted a low-carb diet, sustained at nearly two years follow-up.
- David is candid about the risks of GLP-1 agonists (like semaglutide), citing two patients who ended up in intensive care, and stresses the need for informed consent around both drug and lifestyle options.
- He created teaspoon-of-sugar infographics to make glycemic load intuitive for patients, now translated into 39 languages and freely available online.
- A turning point in his career came when he stopped blaming patients for poor outcomes and recognised his own advice-giving as the common denominator in their lack of progress.
- Collaborative, choice-based care, offering patients options rather than instructions, improved both outcomes and the doctor-patient relationship, including reducing complaints when treatments didn’t go as planned.
- His own experience of childhood prejudice due to severe dyslexia shaped his sensitivity to avoiding judgment with patients.
- Audit and real-world data collection have been central to his practice’s credibility, resulting in over 30 peer-reviewed publications with statistician Dr Christine Dillon.
- He frames health change as a personal experiment, encouraging patients (and himself) to measure outcomes like blood sugar and blood pressure to discover what works for their own physiology.
About our guest:
Dr David Unwin is a family doctor at the Norwood NHS Surgery in Southport, UK, where he’s practiced since 1986. He’s helped 150 of his Type 2 diabetes patients achieve drug-free remission, one of the best results of any clinic in the world, by pioneering a low-carb approach to treatment.
A Royal College of General Practitioners clinical advisor on diabetes and Fellow of the college, David has published over 20 research papers on reducing dietary carbohydrate to improve blood pressure, cholesterol, and kidney and liver function. His famous “teaspoons of sugar” infographics have been translated into 35 languages and downloaded millions of times and his research has twice been recognised, including “paper of the year” from the International Academy of Nutrition Educators, and the most-read paper in BMJ Nutrition’s history.
Together with his wife, psychologist Dr Jen Unwin, he’s spoken to audiences worldwide, and his work has been featured by the BBC, the New Scientist, The Times, and the British Medical Journal, among others.
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