type 2 diabetes •

Whole Milk Better than Skim in Preventing Diabetes

April 9, 2016 By Jesse Skelton Leave a Comment

According to new research, whole dairy products may help cut diabetes risk by 46 percent.

Two separate studies suggest that whole-fat dairy products are better in preventing diabetes than their lower-fat/ zero-fat counterparts. One study also found that the consumption of whole diary may even cut the risk of weight gain on the long run.

According to the first study, published this week in the journal Circulation, full-fat dairy foods lowered the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 46 percent over a 15-year-long period. Researchers based their conclusions on laboratory tests of study participants’ blood samples.

A second research paper showed that people who often consumed high-fat dairy products had a lower risk of becoming fat or obese than people who ate only low-fat or no-fat products. The risk of adding extra pounds was 8 percent lower in the whole-fat dairy group.

The second study was based on data on over 18,000 participants that reported no history of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and had a normal weight at the beginning of the study.

Researchers noted that volunteers who regularly consumed full-fat dairy foods had a significantly lower risk of becoming obese than people who endorsed only low-fat. The research team believes that this may have something to do with the human body’s response to being deprived of dietary fat for too long.

Scientists explained that consuming too many low-fat products for too long may promote food cravings so people tend to indulge in foods that are rich in added sugars and ‘bad’ carbohydrates which are later converted by their bodies into body fat.

According to the latest version of U.S. Dietary Guidelines saturated fats should account for just 10 percent of total daily calorie intake. That may seem too strict since if you drink one cup of whole milk, you’ve just used a quarter of the recommended total.

Nevertheless, critics of the study think that changing the national guidelines on dietary fat consumption may be premature. They did call for a re-evaluation of the rules after they read the two studies.

Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy and lead author of the first study noted that the evidence his team found is ‘robust’ enough to recommend people not to consume only low-fat foods. But Mozaffarian acknowledged that the evidence is ‘insufficient’ to abruptly go full whole-fat.

Furthermore, the studies have some limitations. They didn’t provide an explanation to the link between whole dairy consumption and lower risk of diabetes and becoming overweight. Study authors believe that specific compounds such as fatty acids that are nonexistent in low-fat foods may provide an answer.

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Starvation Diet Could Help Cure Type 2 Diabetes in 2 Months

March 22, 2016 By Jesse Skelton 3 Comments

In a small trial, British scientists have demonstrated that type 2 diabetes can be reversed in just eight weeks.

Scientists at the U.K.-based Newcastle University have found that food restriction for eight months and associated weight loss could stop type 2 diabetes and even cure it. Scientists said that the starvation diet reversed the disease even in patients that had lived with the condition for up to a decade.

Furthermore, half a year after the diet, study participants were still free of the disease which suggests that the condition was finally cured.

The latest findings challenge the way scientists have perceived the disease for decades. Until recently, it was widely believed that once someone develops the disease there is no turning back and the condition was incurable.

But the recent study suggests that the disease can be reversed for good if the patient loses weight fast. Study authors believe that the starvation diet could help regulate the organ’ insulin production by trimming the excess fat around the pancreas, thus, reversing the disease.

Professor Roy Taylor, lead author of the study, recommends type 2 diabetes patients who want to eradicate the condition to try the crash diet, keep the extra pounds off, and return to normal.

In the latest study, 30 participants were asked to restrict their daily food intake to 700 calories, which is a third of what they used to normally consume. Plus, they were only given nutritious shakes and vegetables.

After eight weeks, volunteers lost 30 pounds (14 kg) on average. Surprisingly, 12 diabetics saw their condition reversed. After the diet, participants returned to their normal diets gradually.

Six months later, none of the volunteers gained the extra weight back, while none of the lucky former diabetics saw their condition return.

Researchers explained that the crash diet removed enough fat from patients’ pancreas to restore insulin production to normal levels, even though at the end of the trial all participants were still overweight.

The findings were published this week in the Diabetes Care medical journal.

Scientists wrote in their research paper that the study brings an ‘important paradigm shift.’ According to study authors, type 2 diabetes should be regarded as a metabolic syndrome that can be reversed rather than a lifelong disease.

Prof Taylor said that the small trial was a demonstration that diabetes can be cured even if the patient lived with the condition for a long time. For diabetics that had the diagnosis for more than a decade there is still hope, Taylor added, since blood sugar control can be greatly improved through the diet.

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Drinking Soda Daily Leads to Belly Fat

January 13, 2016 By Dustin Smith Leave a Comment

Drinking soft drinks daily can lead to increased belly fat.

According to a research published in the Circulation journal, drinking soda daily leads to belly fat in time. The abdominal fat can deposit over the pancreas and liver and can affect some hormones, like the insulin. When the insulin hormones stop working properly, the risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes increase.

The lead author of the study, Doctor Caroline S. Fox said that while previous studies only studied the link between sodas and obesity, this study focused on the fat distribution caused by drinking sweetened beverages daily. Fox is at the moment a volunteer at the National Institutes of Health.

The study revealed that while most people tended to gain abdominal fat in time, the people who drank beverages daily gained even more fat. For the study, data from 1,000 volunteers was collected. The participants in the Framingham Heart Study answered questions related to food and beverages frequency. Most of the people said that they drank a mix of diet soda and sweetened beverages. 13% of them drank sweetened beverages daily, 35% drank them frequently, 20% occasionally and one third claimed that they never consume sodas.

At the beginning of the study, the volunteers underwent a tomography and their abdominal fat tissue was measured. Another tomography was done six year later in order to see what changes occurred. After six years, the people who drank daily sodas had a 852 cubic centimeters increased belly fat while the people who didn’t drink soda at all had a 658 cubic centimeters increase. That equals a 1.8 pounds increase for the daily consumers.

Even though that might seem like a small difference, Fox said that it is enough to enhance the diabetes and heart disease risk. This study doesn’t show if the decrease of sweetened beverages would result in a decrease belly fat though.

According to the American Heart Association, 100 calories of added sugars is recommended for women and 150 for men, on a daily basis. If a person drinks 1 12 ounce sweetened beverage, that amount is surpassed, according to Jane Welsh from the Emory University. She said that the healthiest beverages are milk and water. She recommends diet soda for the people who want to reduce their sugar intake.

According to CDC, males consume more soda than women and the age group that consumes the most sweetened beverages consists of teenagers and young adults. Also, the people with low incomes consume more sodas than the people with higher incomes. The consumption of sugar drinks has majorly increased in the last years in the United States. Drinking soda daily leads to belly fat, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even obesity.

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Having Coffee in Moderate Amounts May Save You

November 17, 2015 By Melanie Quintal Leave a Comment

Having coffee in moderate amounts may save you. Or at least curb the risk of premature death due to type 2 diabetes, neurological disease, cardiovascular disease or even prevent you from suicide.

This is the main finding of a recently published study stemming from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A number of previous studies have brought joy to coffee lovers. Drinking coffee in moderate amounts keeps kidney problems away, may help your heart, keep you alert when need be and plenty of others. This study comes to add to the growing body of evidence that coffee is really not that bad.

Of course, drinking coffee in moderate amounts can be understood differently by different people. Also, if you’re not into a steaming hot of black coffee in the morning or two to five cups throughout the day, this is not an indication that you should start drinking coffee.

For everyone else, rejoice. Having coffee in moderate amounts may save you. And the finding applies to both regular coffee and decaf. As such, the benefits are not linked to caffeine, but rather to the coffee beans by themselves. Although the researchers weren’t able to pinpoint the link between drinking coffee in moderate amounts and curbing the risk of premature death, the results are telling.

Studying coffee consumption for people in three studies and their health records, the researchers crunched the numbers and this was the conclusion. An exciting beneficial association between drinking coffee in moderate amounts and curbing the risk of premature death. The studies used for this dataset included 74,980 women, 93,054 women and 40,557 men. These are the Nurses’ Health study 1, Nurses’ Health study 2 and Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The data gathered spanned 30 years.

While the Harvard study isn’t pinpoint a cause-effect relationship, Doctor Ming Ding with the Department of Nutrition explained that the bioactive compounds that can be found in coffee might be a reason for which it is so efficient. It reduces insulin resistance and thus reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes and premature death due to the disease.

At the same time, moderate coffee consumption keeps cardiovascular disease and neurological disease at bay. These findings come in addition to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Report stating that coffee is a safe and healthy component of a healthy diet.

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High Type 2 Diabetes Rates in the American Population

September 9, 2015 By Adam Martin Leave a Comment

Close to 50% of all adults in America have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, as new researches recently discovered. Up to 14 % of adults had clinically diagnosed or undiscovered type two diabetes in 2011-2012, and about 38 % had clinically diagnosed or undiscovered prediabetes, the scientists revealed. Prediabetes is determined as having raised glucose levels that are not high enough to be diagnosed as full-blown diabetic problems, according to the doctors.

Prediabetes places people at danger of having diabetic issues later on. About 1/3 of those people in America that have type 2 diabetes do not know that they have this medical problem, and the majority of individuals with prediabetes are unacquainted with their situation, according to the most recent studies. For those adults, the results must become a wake-up call to receive proper treatment and make changes in their way of life that include reducing weight and becoming more active.

Diabetes Type 2

Diabetic issues can be handled quite well by the sufferers, but only if the problem is diagnosed at the right time. The healthcare community has to be aware of the fact that there is a very high level of undiscovered diabetes in the American population.

Type 2 diabetes has its causes in people being overweight, with poor dietary habits and a sedentary lifestyle. This new review has been released on September 8 in Journal of the American Medical Association.

For this research, the scientists approximated the occurrence and risks of type 2 diabetes and undiscovered diabetes by using information from American. National Health or nutrition evaluation studies.

According to the research, of the more than 14 % of adults suffering from type two diabetes, around 8 % have been clinically diagnosed as having the condition and a little over 5 % had undiagnosed diabetes. Besides that, 39 % of American adults had prediabetes and more than 35 % remained undiagnosed, this increasing future problems both for the adult and young US population in the next decades.

Now this indicates that the stabilization in the level of obesity among US residents that has happened since 2000 could be linked to a level off in the occurrence of diabetic issues, starting in 2010.

Changes in social behavior toward being overweight, changes in nutritional plans, execution of ways to recognize individuals at risk for developing type 2 diabetes and assistance for lifestyle change could be the start of having an impact on the twin outbreaks of being overweight and suffering of diabetic problems. Even if improvement in the health of the general population have been made in the last years, extended and continual initiatives will be required to deal with such pressing medical issues.

Image source: Qsota

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