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It’s not uncommon for doctors to tell their Type 2 diabetic patients, "Watch out for carbs." The supposed concern is that carbs send blood sugar (glucose) levels soaring, which in turn sends insulin production into overdrive.
But a growing body of research is finding just the opposite. For people who need to watch their blood sugar, a very high-carbohydrate diet is actually good for you. What’s critical is the type of carbohydrate. Certainly, if you’re eating refined carbs like white bread and sugary desserts, blood sugar levels may shoot up.
The Right Carbohydrates
But if the bulk of your diet is fiber-rich, unprocessed carbohydrates like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans, you can actually normalize blood sugar levels and even reverse the diagnosis of pre-diabetes and diabetes, scientists are now discovering.
The latest investigation, conducted by UCLA researchers, followed 13 diabetic men at the Pritikin Longevity Center for three weeks. It reported that the Pritikin high-fiber, high-carb diet and daily exercise not only helped the men lose weight and improve cholesterol levels, it also decreased blood sugar levels by 20% and insulin levels by 30%.*
Reversing Diabetes
What’s more, by the end of their three-week program, 6 of the 13 men had controlled their fasting blood glucose, or blood sugar, so well that "they were not classified as diabetic," wrote lead investigators Drs. James Barnard and Christian Roberts of UCLA. The men left Pritikin completely free of their diabetic medications, "and others had their medication dosages reduced."
In addition to normalizing blood sugar and ameliorating classic heart disease risk factors like high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the Pritikin Program also substantially improved newly discovered risk factors, such as inflammation in the arteries.
Nitric Oxide, Healing Arteries
Prevention of heart disease, the #1 killer in America, is especially important for diabetics since heart attacks occur two to four times more frequently in diabetics. Diabetes damages the endothelial (inner) lining of the arteries, choking off blood flow to the heart. The Pritikin Program, the UCLA scientists found, increases the production of endothelial-healing substances like nitric oxide.
In related research, also newly published,** researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health followed 99 Type 2 diabetics for four months. Half followed a vegetarian diet similar to the Pritikin Eating Plan (very low in fat and very high in straight-from-the-earth unrefined carbohydrates like vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains).
The other half followed the standard dietary advice from the American Diabetes Association (higher in fat and refined carbs).
Losing Twice As Much Weight
The diabetics in the vegetarian group lowered their blood sugar more and shed twice as much weight (14 pounds) compared to the ADA group (7 pounds). They also lowered their LDL "bad" cholesterol more and ended up with better kidney function than the ADA dieters.
The scientists, lead by Dr. David Jenkins of the University of Toronto and Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, also reported that the very-low-fat, high-carb, high-fiber diet had no potentially harmful changes, such as higher triglycerides or lower HDL "good" cholesterol levels. The results of the vegetarian diet, in short, were all good.
Never before have studies on lifestyle change and blood sugar control been so critical because 40% of U.S. adults have the pre-diabetic condition called impaired fasting glucose, the Centers for Disease Control has estimated. Moreover, diabetes has increased rapidly and to epidemic levels in recent years with estimated prevalence increasing 600% from 1958 to 1993. Currently, about 20 million people in the U.S. have diabetes.
* Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, 2006; 73: 249.
** Diabetes Care, 2006; 29: 1777.
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