The research comes from the team that produced The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet and has been released as part of Diabetes Australia's National Diabetes Week.

The research was jointly funded by Australian Pork Limited and the Pork Cooperative Research Centre and published in a paper titled The role of Australian pork in improving thiamine status, heart disease risk factors and glucose control in people with type 2 diabetes.

It found that people with type 2 diabetes and are overweight or obese can benefit from a high protein, lower carbohydrate diet that includes regular pork intake in conjunction with resistance exercise.

Such a diet will deliver weight and fat loss results, the researchers found.

Researchers also found regular pork intake reduced risk factors associated with the disease.

"High protein lower carbohydrate diets are becoming increasingly popular, but scientific studies in people with type 2 diabetes are sparse," research team leader Dr Manny Noakes said.

"This study has shown that a high protein diet including lean pork plus resistance exercise provides significant health benefits for weight and fat loss and diabetes control."

On monitoring the diet and health of participants with type 2 diabetes, the researchers found that a high protein diet that included lean pork and resistance exercise was very effective for weight and fat loss.

Furthermore, the thiamine status of individuals undergoing the weight loss programs was best maintained by the high protein diet, which included pork.

"Thiamine is a nutrient abundant in pork," Dr Noakes said.

"The potential role of thiamine in improving some diabetic complications has been reported."

This news follows a recent string of research into the benefits of pork for diabetics, which includes a study commissioned earlier this year by APL and carried out by scientists at the CSIRO and National Measurement Institute, whose findings revealed lean trimmed pork to be just as lean as skinless chicken breast.