http://naivenutrition.blogspot.ca/2008/11/httpwww.html
This is an old blog post I did. I have an old pet theory about vegan diets vs diabetes.
A lot of the specifics of the blog post I would have a problem with now. But the essentials might still stand.
Basically, in mice fed a diabetes-inducing diet, if you make them choline and methionine deficient, they won't get diabetes, their metabolism increases, and they get nice fatty livers.
Not hard to imagine a choline, methionine deficient vegan diet, as I said back then.
Where's the choline or methionine in the Rice diet? Not even green veggies are allowed. Fruit, rice, sugar? Not much there.
A fatty liver/pancreas can cause insulin resistance and diabetes. But it's not the triglycerides themselves that do the damage--it's the presence of certain metabolites of free fatty acid metabolism, in conjunction with elevated glucose, that causes damage to beta cells and liver cells. This has been shown ad-puke-um in various studies. There's a study on beta cell damage from glucolipotoxicity where oleic acid is shown to be protective. What's it do? It facilitates triglyceride synthesis--lowering the free fatty acid levels in the cells (more specifically, the palmitic acid levels). So I wonder if choline/methionine deficiency in the mice might have not only increased triglycerides and decreased ceramide etc. synthesis in the liver, but also done so in the pancreas. Triglyceride accumulation without glucose/lipotoxicity, to hammer a point on the head again.
Who knows? Maybe the diabetics who didn't respond to the Rice diet were just better at synthesizing choline.
Does lowering fat, causing a reversal of diabetes when people go on the Rice Diet make sense? Because after all, if they weren't digging deep into those fat stores, they wouldn't be losing weight. They might be on a zero fat diet, nearly, but they're certainly not on a zero fat metabolism.
Of course this would make the Rice Diet a "cure" for diabetes and a bit of a lobster trap, also--making people less protein tolerant (since protein equals methionine equals substrate for choline production).