Posted on 10/27/2022 8:57:00 AM PDT by ConservativeMind
While low-carb diets are often recommended for those being treated for diabetes, little evidence exists on whether eating fewer carbs can impact the blood sugar of those with diabetes or prediabetes who aren't treated by medications.
According to new research, a low-carb diet can help those with unmedicated diabetes—and those at risk for diabetes—lower their blood sugar.
The study compared two groups: one assigned a low-carb diet and another that continued with their usual diet. After six months, the low-carb diet group had greater drops in hemoglobin A1c, a marker for blood sugar levels, when compared with the group who ate their usual diet. The low-carbohydrate diet group also lost weight and had lower fasting glucose levels.
Approximately 37 million Americans have diabetes, a condition that occurs when the body doesn't use insulin properly and can't regulate blood sugar levels. Type 2 diabetes comprises more than 90% of those cases.
The study's findings are especially important for those with prediabetes whose A1c levels are higher than normal but below levels that would be classified as diabetes. Approximately 96 million Americans have prediabetes and more than 80% of those with prediabetes are unaware, according to the CDC. Those with prediabetes are at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks or strokes and are usually not taking medications to lower blood sugar levels.
The study involved participants whose blood sugar ranged from prediabetic to diabetic levels and who were not on diabetes medication. Those in the low-carb group saw A1c levels drop 0.23% more than the usual diet group, an amount Dorans called "modest but clinically relevant." Importantly, fats made up around half of the calories eaten by those in the low-carb group, but the fats were mostly healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats found in foods like olive oil and nuts.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Similar results can be had by greatly increasing your activity or reducing carbs well below use levels through a low total calorie diet, but these are typically harder for people.
Not being fat, exercising, managing stress, watching caloric intake, not getting hammered, meditation/praying, walking in nature, and getting proper sleep all help.
Billions could be saved in health care if people just cut their sugar intake and walked.
You don’t have to turn into Tom Brady. You simply have to be aware. And take the time. And get your kids out walking as well.
Darn. Almost met the complete list, save for the “hammered” part. Oh well.
Even this way of eating has gotten politicized. Used to be low carb\keto\carnivore was a diet for White tough mudder racing, rightwing nuts according to the left. Vegetarianism was the CORRECT way to eat. High carbs, high oxalates, high sugars but dammit if you eat anything with a face. When veganism became a religion in the 1990’s those people are now in their 40s and suffering from joint issues, bad cardiac health, hormone issues, and premature aging. Low-fat, High Carb, Low-calorie diets will eventually get you sick. “Ever meet an 80-year-old Vegan?” I stole that question from Mark Sisson(Paleo Diet guy)
I’ve read Mark’s Daily Apple for numerous years.
(Also a guy named Art DeVany who turned me on to Nassim Taleb)
I still get his emails on occasion.
Thx.
I picked the wrong week for that.
Lets get things straight. Diabetes is both a disease and a condition. The condition commonly call type 2 is generally controllable with diet and exercise being the stabilizer with some rare cases needing medication. The disease commonly called type 1 needs daily insulin injection(s). The two although related are not the same. Just sayin.
Agreed. Types 1 and 2 are completely different conditions that have common symptoms and effects. Type 1 is a disease. Type 2 should be called “Lifestyle Diabetes.”
Managing stress in today’s world?!?!
We’ve had to turn off the news and limit internet time. It’s hard to shut out the world when it keeps trying to barge in!
This seems like an obvious conclusion.
Sugar… is going to spike your sugar levels, healthy or not.
Not having sugar… is not…
If you have ‘pre diabetes’ you HAVE diabetes.
Consider sugar and starch poison.
You summed it up well - it applies also to overall health. I would also add reading and mental exercise - not for diabetes but staying healthy. My father was convinced that reading, which can also reduce stress, is good for physical wellbeing. He quoted a study that I have forgotten.
Here's a book I found interesting.
I specifically left in text where the write up says this speaks to Type 2 diabetes.
Just saying.
Diabetes and war
In 1997 I went to Bosnia for a postgraduate course organised by Chris Burns-Cox for doctors who had been cut off from the outside world for more than 4 years by the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996). In one session a Bosnian doctor asked me what I thought the solution was to the worldwide epidemic of type 2 diabetes. One answer that came to me because of where we were was “to have a war” but I thought this would be flippant and insensitive so I spouted out the usual stuff about diet and exercise. I then asked the doctor for her solution and she said “we know because we have tried it – to have a war” (Kulenovic et al, 1996).
This is actually an old observation. The French physician Apollinaire Bouchardat (1806–1886) had been an advocate of dietary carbohydrate restriction since the 1840s, his motto being “Mangez le moins possible”. Proof of this concept on the large stage came in the Franco–Prussian War during the siege of Paris (19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871) when he noticed that glycosuria disappeared in some of his patients.
A similar effect was seen during World War I when diabetes mortality fell in countries that were subject to a blockade and rose in unaffected countries such as Japan, Australia and Italy. Countries near the main theatre of war showed a fall whether they were belligerents (Germany and Austria) or neutrals supplying food to the central powers (Holland and Denmark). A strict naval blockade meant that the effect was seen in Germany as early as 1915 whereas in England it did not start until the submarine campaign in 1917.
https://diabetesonthenet.com/diabetes-digest/diabetes-and-war/
It is a tough diet to maintain long term however, as it's easy to have the carbs sneak back into your diet and suddenly you are getting back where you started. I've had to "re-boot" my diet several times since then and I'm coming up on that cycle once again.
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