Doctors warn diabetes patients to shun 'yo-yo' weight loss and gain
The danger applies regardless of a patient's weight or other diabetes-related factors, according to the researchers, whose findings were based on observations of almost 1,500 people and were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Yo-yo dieting, sometimes called body-weight cycling, is when a person repeatedly sheds and puts on weight. Often carried out for years, the prevalence of the practice could be as high as 35% in men and 55% in women, the researchers say.
"We showed that high body-weight variability is associated with increased risk of different outcomes of diabetic kidney disease (DKD) progressions in people with type 1 diabetes, independently of traditional DKD risk factors," says Marion Camoin, a doctor with the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Bordeaux.
The fluctuating form of dieting had earlier been shown to increase risks of "cardiovascular events" in people with and without diabetes, including the more common and less dangerous type 2.
Recent decades have seen an explosion in the number of people worldwide who have been diagnosed as having diabetes, in large part due to increasingly sedentary work and lifestyles as well as surging consumption of sweet and processed food. Related conditions such as obesity and heart disease have become more prevalent at the same time.
The journal Clinical Nutrition recently published research in which a team of Finnish scientists showed how eating too much "ultra-processed" food accelerates biological ageing even among adolescents. Unhealthy eating has separately been shown to leave young people more vulnerable to developing diabetes later in life.
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