NOT SO HOT. Many teens with type 1 diabetes need help maintaining tight control of their blood sugar. Cinnamon isn't the answer, a new study finds, even though the spice appears to help moderate blood sugar in persons with type 2 diabetes.
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Posted on 04/15/2007 12:53:48 PM PDT by neverdem
Cinnamon—it's not just for perking up the flavor of pies and applesauce anymore. A teaspoonful of the spice can have medicinal properties, at least for most people with diabetes, several trials have indicated. However, the latest study identifies one population that cinnamon doesn't seem to benefit: individuals suffering from what was once referred to as juvenile diabetes.
"Ours is just one study," cautions team leader Kevin M. Curtis of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. It was also a small study. Just 57 teens completed the 3-month trial. However, Curtis notes emphatically, "we saw no benefit" in blood sugar control. If anything, he says, there were hints that people who were not getting the cinnamon might have fared better than those who did.
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NOT SO HOT. Many teens with type 1 diabetes need help maintaining tight control of their blood sugar. Cinnamon isn't the answer, a new study finds, even though the spice appears to help moderate blood sugar in persons with type 2 diabetes. |
Insulin is a powerful hormone that the body needs to get energy—in the form of blood sugar, or glucose—into cells. Earlier studies tested cinnamon's potential to stabilize blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease in which the body makes ample insulin but cells don't respond adequately. Called insulin resistance, this condition typically occurs in people who are overweight and older than 40. However, with a rise in juvenile obesity in recent decades, a childhood epidemic of this type of diabetes is now under way.
Type 1 diabetes is a radically different disease. An autoimmune condition, it develops when the body mistakes insulin-secreting, or beta, cells for invaders and inappropriately attacks them. When enough beta cells die, the body can no longer make enough insulin to keep blood sugar in check. Its victims must regularly inject themselves with the hormone to survive.
The new 90-day study recruited adolescents 13 to 19 years old with type 1 disease and asked them to take a daily capsule that might contain cinnamon. Randomly assigned, half the volunteers got 1 gram of cinnamon a day, and the others instead received lactose, a complex sugar found in milk. All capsules looked the same and came packaged in identical pill bottles. During the trial, neither the teens nor the physicians administering the capsules learned who was consuming cinnamon.
Curtis' team selected adolescents for the study because their growth spurts and other body changes associated with puberty make tight control of blood sugar especially difficult. A lack of blood sugar control can result in serious complications, from heart disease to kidney failure, blindness, and even limb amputations.
The Dartmouth team looked primarily for changes in measures of hemoglobin A1C among the teens. A person's A1C reading indicates the proportion of red blood cells that have glucose stuck onto them. A high A1C reading indicates that the person's blood sugar has been too high for months. The researchers focused on this measurement, rather than periodic tests of blood sugar itself, because hemoglobin A1C "has clearly been the best predictor of complications in both type 1 and type 2 diabetics," Curtis told Science News Online.
At the end of the new study, teens taking both cinnamon and lactose had A1C values averaging roughly 8.75, according to a report in the April Diabetes Care.
By chance, the group assigned to receive lactose capsules for 3 months started the study with an average A1C value of 8.75. The teens getting the cinnamon capsules started the study with an average 8.4 A1C reading. Clearly, there was no advantage to getting the cinnamon treatment, Curtis says.
It's possible that the daily gram of cinnamon administered to the teens was too small to have a measurable effect in people with type 1 diabetes, the researchers say. On the other hand, the scientists note that this quantity was sufficient to improve glucose control in a 2003 study of people with type 2 disease (SN: 5/1/04, p. 282). More likely, Curtis' group concludes, is that "whatever effect cinnamon has on glucose uptake in type 2 diabetic subjects is not present in those with type 1 diabetes."
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References:
Altschuler, J.A. . . . and K.M. Curtis. 2007. The effect of cinnamon on A1C among adolescents with type 1 diabetes. Diabetes Care 30(April):813-816. Abstract available at http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/4/813.
Khan, A. . . . and R.A. Anderson. 2003. Cinnamon improves glucose and lipids of people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care 26(December):3215-3218. Available at http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/26/12/3215.
Further Readings:
American Diabetes Association. What is diabetes? Available at http://www.diabetes.org/for-parents-and-kids/what-is-diabetes.jsp.
American Diabetes Association. Type 1 diabetes complications. Available at http://www.diabetes.org/type-1-diabetes/complications.jsp.
Anderson, R.A., et al. 2004. Isolation and characterization of polyphenol type-A polymers from cinnamon with insulin-like biological activity. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 52(Jan. 14):65-70. Abstract available at http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/
jafcau/2004/52/i01/abs/jf034916b.html.
Anderson, R.A. 2003. Chromium and insulin resistance. Nutrition Research Reviews 16(December):267-275. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1079/NRR200366.
Raloff, J. 2004; Coffee, spices, wine. Science News 165(May 1):282-284. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040501/bob10.asp.
Sources:
American Diabetes Association
1701 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, VA 22311
Web site: http://www.diabetes.org
Kevin M. Curtis
Department of Emergency Medicine
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Lebanon, NH 03756
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070414/food.asp |
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From Science News, Vol. 171, No. 15, April 14, 2007 |
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Copyright (c) 2007 Science Service. All rights reserved. |
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CJC does nothing to my bg’s. With normal insulin and increased water consumption, however, I just vaguely feel a bit better. Urination is pleasant instead of fearful.
I take all my supplements with meals and shots, so it all just goes “into the mix”.
Oh, go ahead. I hear the freshly baked apple pie, with cinnamon, beckoning you: Over here redhead..... over here.... come on .....
Help me out, Jeff.
It is my son who has the diabetes, so I am not relating personally.
Did you have pain with urination?
No pain, but your urine composition is a fair indicator of bg control. When diagnosed, a very dangerous condition (ketoacidosis) is very well indicated by urine with an obnoxious, acetone-type odor.
As part of his assessment, your son’s doc will occasionally take urine samples (as well as blood A1C), to check on his kidney function. Small blood vessel damage can show up concurrently in the kidneys and eyes. In the urine, when the blood vessels aren’t optimal, protein can be passed, which is a very Red flag.
My diabetic husband takes cinnamon faithfully. We don’t think it helps him. But he still takes it because of the strength of what we’ve read.
Thanks...I was disappointed, of course that it won’t help my kaybugs.
BTW...I drink cranberry juice for my kidneys..and I don’t have diabetes..but I used to get bladder and kidney infections..
I don’t anymore.
Before getting DM1, I used to just LOVE the stuff to drink.
If they would make a CJ without ANY sweetener, I’d drink it. Love bitter/sour stuff.
What I take is, obviously, in capsule form, so no high-fructose corn syrup (or stupid federal farm subsidies) for me!
Just saw cinammon , either powder or capsules, yesterday at COSTCO. Was in a hurry and didn’t stop but it caught my eye. It is with all of their vitamins, next to fish oil.
My dad suposedly cured himself of diabetes by eliminating all forms of sugar, except fresh fruit, and he started running marathons. He was diabetes free for approx 20 years, then it came back and he’s been on insulin now for 10-15 years. I’m gonna tell him about the cinnamon thing. That would be really cool if he could go off insulin again.
Dang...yes, I hadn’t thought of that..I am still having to get used to thinking about things like that.
My granddaughter’s bs goes high so often that I am always having to test her ketones...I think she hates that more than testing her blood.
Yeah, it's known that auto-immune diseases are difficult to get diagnosed right or diagnosed at all. It took 7 years from the first hospitalization for me to get sarcoid diagnosed. Celiac was one of the things tried along the way. Dropping wheat gluten did nothing for me.
The MP is claiming a lot in terms of the various diagnoses it might address. However, all of them are also treated by the same set of corticosteroids, so this would not be the first thing to treat auto-immune disease as group.
The doctors describe sarcoid as 'a systemic disease of unknown origin'. The ones I saw pre-MP seemed to understand this as meaning sarcoid can attack any organ or system in the body, which makes it hard to diagnose as it can present almost any symptom in the medical lexicon. From my own experience, and talking to other sarcoid patients, it's clear that sarcoid is a systemic and progressive disease and it will eventually attack every system and organ in the body. Starting with high fevers and IBS symptoms, the sarcoid progressed to diabetes, thyroid symptoms, and retinopathy. It's not unknown for fibromyalgia to blossom into lupus, or lupus to become sarcoid. All of my sarcoid symptoms are gone or receding.
Once understood as a set of pathogens that use a shared trick to evade the immune system, it's understandable that a single approach (though with wide spectrum antibiotics) can cure a bunch of symptoms masquerading as separate diseases.
That's progress.
Most newer references seem to stress insulin resistance.
Those are the only mechanisms for cinnamon's effect on blood glucose that I've come across. Enter cinnamon and type II diabetes into PubMed's query box in the third link. You'll get 11 titles, most with abstracts.
I’m a type 2 diabetic and use cinnamon lot on apple sauce and grits, etc., and have never really seen a difference in my blood sugars.
I’ll try the caps. Thanks. cinnamon itself doesn’t seem to help.
If you make your own fresh, and don’t drink a ton of it, it’s not so bad for you. It’s how MUCH you drink that makes a difference. I only have a couple of ounces with my pills.
106 is a great reading! If I go below 90, my eyes get ‘splotchy’ and I get whoozy. I would be SOOOO happy with 106. It’s a normal reading—between 80 and 110 is good.
That is much better than the fishy aftertaste from taking fish oil capsules that are also supposed to control cholesterol.
for later reading
Cinnamon is easily available in capsules. I started out taking 2 three times a day, then cut back to one, then to 1 twice a day. It works well enough that an occasional “booster” is all I have needed to worry about. My morning sugars are now around 80, which is normal.
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