Diabetes Diet

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People with prediabetes who eat a lot of vegetables and fruits that are high in carotenoids cut their risk of getting type 2 diabetes. This is what three studies published in respected professional journals have concluded.

When we regularly eat vegetables and fruit, they can help us to manage our weight better. When we eat fast food and other stuff high in starch, we are more likely to be too heavy, and being overweight is one of the factors connected with getting diabetes.

But now we know that the antioxidants in the food we eat prevents the oxidation that can damage the cells of our body. Oxidative stress can lead to aging and to serious chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

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If you are healthy, you may not need to take a zinc supplement. But if your health isn’t good enough, a new meta-analysis indicates that you probably need to take one. The study categorizes people with type 2 diabetes as “non-healthy.”

The mineral zinc plays an important role in how our bodies use insulin and in the metabolism of carbohydrates. When non-healthy people take a zinc supplement, the new study found that they can “significantly reduce total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides.”

An earlier meta-analysis focused entirely on people with diabetes. It found that zinc helps us manage both our blood glucose and lipids better.

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The official Dietary Guidelines still advise us to limit the amount of saturated fat that we eat. But a large study of more than 15,000 adults published a few days ago concluded that when people eat a lot of full-fat dairy foods they are less likely to get the metabolic syndrome.

The metabolic syndrome is a group of five risk factors that can increase your chance of developing heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. One of these five risk factors is insulin resistance, which usually leads to prediabetes and on to diabetes. You can reverse prediabetes, but there is no cure for diabetes.

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We need to “consume less than 10 percent of calories per day from added sugars.” This is a key recommendation of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which the U.S. government released on January 7.

But previous versions of the guidelines didn’t set a specific goal. And the Nutrition Facts labels that we have now on all of our packaged foods are confusing because they still don’t separate added sugars from those that occur naturally.

For those of us who have prediabetes or diabetes, the added sugars are a special concern, and these new Dietary Guidelines recognize it. The guidelines include a statement that we have some evidence that indicates eating less added sugar is associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.

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You always knew that you should be eating more fresh veggies and fruit. But after reading this now, you will know why you need to and where you can get the potassium you need in your diet.

A study that the American Society of Nephrology published online November 12 in advance of print in its Clinical Journal, discovered that when we get more potassium in our diet, we have fewer kidney and heart problems. While only the abstract is free online, the lead author, Shin-ichi Araki, M.D., Ph.D., from the Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Japan, kindly sent me the full-text of the study.

It found that among more than 600 people with type 2 diabetes that they followed for an average of 11 years the more potassium they pee (technically “urinary potassium excretion”) the fewer of these problems they had. What goes in must come out.

Now, the Dr. Araki and his colleagues recommend interventional trials to see if increasing our the amount of potassium we get in our diet will help us. We don’t need to wait years for these studies to be set up, analyzed, and reported. We can increase the amount of potassium we get from our food now.

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Few Americans get all the fiber the experts tell us we need to eat. If you follow a very low-carb diet, following their advice is much more difficult. Grain, beans, nuts, seeds, fruit, and vegetables are the only sources of dietary fiber in our food, but when we go low-carb, we eat little if any grain or beans.

But it’s likely that the experts are wrong.

The National Academic of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) recommends that adult men and women 50 and younger get 38 and 25 grams of fiber and that older men and women get 30 and 21 grams respectively. That’s not easy for anyone and just about impossible on a very low-carb diet.

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