Zoë and Jon Furniss discuss the challenges of living with Type 1 diabetes
Bio
Jon Furniss has used a real food, very low carb diet since 2019 to normalise his blood glucose whilst living with T1 diabetes. This is against a backdrop of 87% of type 1s in England who do not manage to achieve the (quite unambitious) NICE target while following conventional dietary guidelines. He is a passionate Public Health Collaboration charity ambassador, and trained health coach – providing metabolic information and coaching to support others living with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes who wish to normalise their blood glucose.
Jon has an engineering PhD and takes a root cause analysis approach to problem solving including the management of health problems. He is also a life-long competitive cyclist, having raced the national 24hr time trial championships, and ridden John O’Groats to Lands’ End in 7 days. Until 2019 he was ‘conventionally’ fuelled with large amounts of carbohydrates – and suffered as a consequence. Now fuelled by fat, Jon continues as a keen club level cyclist and delivers regular type 1 education events alongside Dr Ian Lake where Jon focusses on managing exercise with type 1. (The venue for these is Combe Grove Metabolic Health Centre, Bath, England).
Jon is keen to point out that in the metabolic health improvement and low carb world, many of us maintain that insulin is front and centre of the obesity and chronic disease epidemics but almost nobody in the population is actually measuring insulin. Except type 1 diabetics. As such, Jon's belief is that type 1s are very useful lab rats and there is a lot can be learned from observing them. Jon is a keen citizen scientist and has contributed to research and other studies, including the ZeroFive100 project.
On X: @furniss_jon
Show notes
Jon first approached me in September 2019 through a contact form on my site. He was (and still is) a subscriber to the Monday note. Jon thanked me for the information I had sent out on many topics and he shared that it had helped to transform his life with type 1 diabetes. At that time he was three months into a keto diet and was already seeing improvements (even given previous reasonable glucose control).
Since then, we have kept in touch and met at Public Health Collaboration conferences. Jon took part in the ZeroFive100 project that was discussed in my podcast with Dr Ian Lake – also a type 1 diabetic. Jon, Ian, a keto-dietician, a child psychologist, an Olympian and a couple of others ran 100 miles in 5 days completely fasted. They measured glucose and ketones throughout, as well as mood and hunger levels. The weight loss results were the least interesting part of the trial. This has been written up as a peer-reviewed paper in a Diabetes journal (Ref 1).
The hour’s podcast focuses on Jon and type 1 diabetes, but blood glucose levels and insulin are core to the health of every individual and thus type 1s can teach all of us much about glucose regulation.
- We started off with Jon’s type 1 diagnosis – when was he diagnosed and what happened next?
- We moved on to how quickly Jon realised that carbs were the issue and how he worked out for himself what he needed to do (real food, very low carb).
- I recently read Ben Bikman’s book “Why we get Sick”. Jon also referenced this as we discussed insulin being the driver for chronic disease (Ref 2). We touched on stress, exercise, insulin and weight in this section.
- Then we went into the ZeroFive100 project – why? What happened? What happened to the two type 1s in the group vs the non type 1s?
- This led interestingly into ketosis vs ketoacidosis. Jon gave a great explanation of the difference and why T1s deliberately going low carb, low glucose, low insulin and into nutritional ketosis is a world away from what happens with ketoacidosis.
- Lifestyle factors dominated the second part of the discussion. Exercise – how much? How intense? What time of day? Alcohol – OK or not OK? Different for diabetics vs non-diabetics? Coffee? Caffeine? Number of meals a day? Sleep… stress…
- We closed with what might cause T1D when it occurs beyond childhood, the gut, viral infections and a couple of resource recommendations. I learned new things – even having had a T1D brother since teenage years. There are many transferable insights for metabolic health for everyone. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
Ref 1: Ian Lake. Nutritional ketosis is well-tolerated, even in type 1 diabetes: the ZeroFive100 Project; a proof-of-concept study. Curr Opin Endocrinol Diabetes Obes. 2021. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34334612/
Ref 2: https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2024/10/ben-bikman-insulin-resistance/
