About five years ago, I was diagnosed with diabetes myself, and it came as a huge shock. I didn’t meet any of the criteria that people normally would. It was type 2, but I had never smoked in my life, never drank and wasn’t particularly overweight either. Diabetes can happen to just about anybody and for various reasons. For myself, it was because of an illness that attacked my pancreas. As soon as I was diagnosed, I did as most people do, and I went straight to the internet and started to look at ways to cure myself, or heal myself, of this terrible blight. I came across quite a few things that all talked about the same areas—about losing weight.

I’m not sure, Cabinet Secretary, if you’ve ever heard of the Newcastle study on the 600-calorie diet. This is something that you mentioned there was no magic pill for, but Newcastle University did some research that was funded by Diabetes UK, and they followed 11 people. They put them on a 600-calorie diet for eight weeks, and they had an additional 200 calories from eating vegetables. At the end of the study, seven of those 11 people were no longer diabetic. That is unbelievable. That is, if you have this terrible illness and you can suddenly be in a position where you are no longer diabetic, it’s phenomenal. I myself self-diagnosed this and did this myself. I lost six stone—some of you out there might be thinking ‘Holy cow!’ I actually weighed less than my wife. She doesn’t like it when I point that out, but it’s true—I weighed less than my wife. I managed to keep myself from going onto insulin for about two years as a result of this. My doctor just couldn’t believe how my blood sugar absolutely plummeted to the normal level. But it was unsustainable for me, and because my pancreas had been attacked, that’s why it didn’t have a long-term effect on me. But for people who are pre-diabetic or people who are type 2 diabetic because of a large amount of fat around the pancreas or other organs, I would exalt you, Cabinet Secretary, to look into this. It’s not one of those crazy things from the internet; the University of Newcastle, GPs and Diabetes UK all looked into this and followed this study.

Now, 7 per cent of the population has diabetes. It accounts for 10 per cent of the NHS spend, which in Wales is £500 million a year. Over half of the population in Wales is overweight. What a lot of people aren’t aware of is that if you’re female and your waist is over 31.5 inches, and if you’re male and your waist is over 37 inches you have just increased your risk of type 2 diabetes significantly.

When I first was receiving the symptoms of diabetes—when I was what’s classed as pre-diabetic—I think if I had followed this diet, I could have pushed things back even further with it developing to the state that it did. I myself will not die from diabetes. I will die from heart disease, I will run the risk of becoming blind, of having my limbs amputated, of having a stroke. Because people don’t die from diabetes—you die from the knock-on effects of it. Before I was diagnosed, I never went to the doctor’s. I just never went—I didn’t need to. Why waste my time and waste his time in going? Since then, I’m a regular and have many other illnesses that pop up from time to time that are directly related to the diabetes. If I was pre-diabetic, believe you me, knowing what I know now, I would do everything under the sun to stop this illness from developing to the state that it is in now—everything—because it is an absolute scourge and a curse. I hope, Cabinet Secretary, that you can take a look at this study and maybe trial it. I know from speaking to GPs that most of them are not aware of this, and certainly have no idea about how to push it out to people who would be able to do it. Let’s face it—to have only 800 calories a day for eight weeks, that’s quite a big ask. You need to be motivated to do that, but there will be people out there who will benefit from this. It’s not a magic bullet, but it can help some lives. Thank you.