Although it is now a few years since Bob Krause died after living with type 1 diabetes for 85 years it is important to remember how he did it.
His regular diet was low carb and very low GI. Nuts and prunes (GI about 30) for breakfast, often no lunch, and meat and salad for dinner. ( sources differ, but not by much)
He used extra carbs on active days. Prunes may not be approved by the hard-line VLCers, but there is no argument about the low glycaemic load. He got plenty of fat from the nuts and meat.
There is no way that the Australian medical establishment would approve of such a diet. A Australian dietitian has recently been de-registered for promoting an eating pattern similar to this. Yet it got Bob to the age of 90.
Case study of one you say? Show me just one diabetic in good health who has made it to old age without some form of glycaemic load reduction, be it low carb, low GI, or just skipping dessert when all their friends didn't. Case study of zero.
Almost as important as his diet was Bob's education. He was a mechanical engineer. He knew how to model inputs and outputs of a system mathematically. He knew how to titrate inputs to effect. No, he didn't have formal education in the biological sciences. Not important.
My own informal study many years ago found that the majority of diabetics who met my pre-determined definition of being very successful had formal tertiary education in the non-biological sciences. My survey turned up many graduates in the hard sciences, but no lawyers or nurses, and perhaps most interestingly, no doctors who did not also have a science as well as a medical education at university level.
If one of your kids gets diabetes in their early teen years, you should look with more modern data at what sort of educations are associated with good diabetic outcomes and steer them in that direction, or at least give them the facts so they can make up their own mind.
Addit. 19.12.15 On second thoughts, his education was actually more important than his diet, as it was his education that led him to reject medical "evidence" and design his own diet.
added 1.3.16
To those readers who call my stories on Winsome and Bob selective information presentation, please forward me details of any or all similar Type 1s who have done as well by eating a population average amount and type of carbs as part of a low fat diet, and I will gladly include them here.
I have been unable to find any myself in my online sampling.
