Diet and Diabetes

A September 2021 study by the University of British Columbia and Teesside University said, 

• “Type 2 diabetes can be treated, and sometimes reversed, with dietary interventions,” 

• “However, we needed a strategy to help people implement these interventions while keeping an eye on their medication changes.”

• “Community pharmacists have expertise in medication management and can serve an important role in overall diabetes care,” 

• “When Type 2 diabetes patients follow a very low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diet, there is a need to reduce or eliminate glucose-lowering medications. Community pharmacists are ideally positioned to safely and effectively deliver interventions targeted at reducing diabetes medications while promoting Type 2 diabetes remission.”

• “The intervention was effective in reducing the need for glucose-lowering medications for many in our study,” 

• “This indicates that community pharmacists are a viable and innovative option for implementing short-term nutritional interventions for people with Type 2 diabetes, particularly when medication management is a safety concern.”

The glycemic index and healthier diets

A May 2022 perspective by Food Context, LLC said, 

• “The GI is increasingly used and interpreted as a measure of overall carbohydrate food quality, with some proponents advocating for its broader adoption as a public health tool. However, the GI model doesn’t address nutrient density or translate well to healthy dietary patterns, and its narrow focus on just one dimension of carbohydrate-containing foods may divert public attention away from approaches to improving health that are accessible, affordable, culturally appropriate and environmentally sustainable,”

• “At best, it’s an incomplete gauge of carbohydrate food quality. At worst, it may be counterproductive to achieving the dietary recommendations set forth in the DGA.”

• “The reliability of the GI has been scrutinized since its introduction more than 40 years ago, including critiques about methodology and questions about the relationship between a food’s GI value and true post-meal glycemic response,” 

• “Under the GI model, fat, protein and fiber are treated as entirely independent variables, but that assumption is at odds with current views about our understanding of how eating patterns influence health based on all food and beverage contributions,”

• “The Mediterranean Diet is one example of a dietary pattern that has been associated with reduced disease risk; yet, not every food in a Mediterranean eating pattern is low GI,” 

• “Evidence increasingly suggests that it’s the total diet that counts. Improving the overall quality of an individual’s dietary patterns can have beneficial effects on a variety of diet-related chronic disease, but the effect of any single food choice is mediated by the other foods and beverages eaten, physical activity and other lifestyle choices. While the GI may illuminate some narrow insights, it also keeps many of these relevant variables in the dark.”

Low GI dietary regime and diabetes

An August 2021 study found that low GI/GL dietary patterns “are considered an acceptable and safe dietary strategy that can produce small meaningful reductions in the primary target for glycaemic control in diabetes, HbA1c, fasting glucose, and other established cardiometabolic risk factors.”

“Our synthesis supports existing recommendations for the use of low GI/GL dietary patterns in the management of diabetes.”

Hunger and money decisions

A https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/tes-hg031821.php by the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston finds (as we’ve long suspected),

“…that ghrelin [“the hunger hormone”] might play a broader role than previously acknowledged in human reward-related behavior and decision making, such as monetary choices," 

"This will hopefully inspire future research into its role in food-independent human perception and behavior."

Sugar, Longevity, Uric Acid, Gout and Stones

A March 2020 study by the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Kiel University said,

• "Just like humans, flies fed a high-sugar diet show many hallmarks of metabolic disease - for instance, they become fat and insulin resistant."

• "Obesity and diabetes are known to increase mortality in humans, and so people always assumed that this was how excess sugar is damaging for survival in flies".

• "Water is vital for our health, yet its importance is often overlooked in metabolic studies. Therefore, we were surprised that flies fed a high-sugar diet did not show a reduced lifespan, simply by providing them with an extra source of water to drink. Unexpectedly, we found that these flies still exhibited the typical metabolic defects associated with high dietary sugar".

The researchers found that the excess sugar is related to a build up of uric acid but that,

• "the sugar-fed flies may live longer when we give them access to water, but they are still unhealthy. And in humans, for instance, obesity increases the risk of heart disease. But our study suggests that disruption of the purine pathway is the limiting factor for survival in high-sugar-fed flies. This means that early death by sugar is not necessarily a direct consequence of obesity itself".

• "Strikingly, just like flies, we found that dietary sugar intake in humans was associated with worse kidney function and higher purine levels in the blood."

• "It will be very interesting to explore how our results from the fly translate to humans, and whether the purine pathway also contributes to regulating human survival."

• "There is substantial evidence that what we eat influences our life expectancy and our risk for age-related diseases. By focusing on the purine pathway, our group hopes to find new therapeutic targets and strategies that promote healthy ageing".

Diabetes, Fasting in Ramadan

A March 2020 study by the University of California of a protocol called “Fasting Algorithm for Singaporeans with Type 2 Diabetes” (FAST) found greater improvements in glycemic control of fasting adults with type 2 diabetes for that “those who managed their condition in collaboration with their health care provider using [the protocol].”

Low carbohydrate diets are also something which should be considered.

Glycemic Index - a Resource

We like this resource:

http://www.the-gi-diet.org/lowgifoods/