2025 VIC Senior Australian of the Year Dr Peter Brukner OAM

Australian Community Media

Meet your Australians - 2025 VIC Senior Australian of the Year Dr Peter Brukner OAM. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.

Transcript

00:00We have nearly 2 million Australians with type 2 diabetes.

00:06We have another 2 million with pre-diabetes who will probably go on to develop diabetes

00:10unless they change.

00:11It's actually the biggest health issue in this country, in the Western world.

00:16And the treatment has always been drugs and even bariatric surgery at times.

00:20And what we've discovered over the last decade or so is that diet can actually reverse, put

00:26type 2 diabetes into remission.

00:29Twelve years ago I was living in Liverpool, working for the football club there.

00:33And if you'd asked me then, you know, was I healthy, I'd have said, yeah sure, you know,

00:36I'm okay.

00:37The reality was I wasn't quite as healthy as I thought I was.

00:40So I was metabolically quite unwell and in retrospect I was pre-diabetic and I have no

00:44doubt that if I'd kept going the way I was, I'd have followed my father's footsteps and

00:48developed type 2 diabetes.

00:50Around that time I started to hear about suggestions that maybe we weren't eating the right things,

00:55that it wasn't fat that was the problem, it might have been sugar and carbohydrates

00:58that were the problem.

00:59So I decided I would just try three months of removing all the sugar and starches and

01:05carbohydrates from my diet.

01:07Anyway, to cut a long story short, at the end of three months, I'd lost 13 kilograms

01:11in 13 weeks without ever reducing what I ate.

01:15I was never hungry.

01:16And then when I did my bloods, all my metabolic issues had resolved.

01:20My fatty liver that I'd had for 10 years, gone, triglycerides normal, insulin normal,

01:25everything back to normal.

01:26And it made me realise that we've basically been giving people the wrong dietary advice

01:30and that there was hope for people with type 2 diabetes because at the moment they're not

01:35given much hope.

01:36So I started to write about it, talk about it.

01:39I started a charity called Sugar by Half with the aim of reducing the amount of added sugar

01:44by half.

01:45So the average Australian has about 18 teaspoons of added sugar a day.

01:49And the World Health Organisation recommends no more than six.

01:52So we thought, well, let's have a target, sugar by half.

01:55My COVID project was to set up a program called Defeat Diabetes that gave people the tools

02:02they needed to reverse their diabetes.

02:05So lots of video lectures, articles, meal plans.

02:10And we've now had over 12,000 people go through the Defeat Diabetes program.

02:16And the majority of those have put their diabetes into remission.

02:20So they are no longer even considered diabetic.

02:24We've shown to be scientifically true what we sort of thought was anecdotally the case.

02:29By changing your diet, by reducing the amount of carbohydrates that you have, you can put

02:34your type 2 diabetes into remission.

02:37And that's really exciting.

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