Fighting diabetes

Citation

(2012), "Fighting diabetes", Nutrition & Food Science, Vol. 42 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/nfs.2012.01742caa.008

Fighting diabetes

Article Type: Food facts From: Nutrition & Food Science, Volume 42, Issue 3

Health charity the Vegetarian & Vegan Foundation have recently launched a ground-breaking campaign – The Big-D – aimed at everyone at risk of or suffering from diabetes, their families and health-professionals all over the UK. In the UK alone 2.8 million people are diagnosed with diabetes, while it is estimated that up to half a million more people have not been diagnosed yet. With type 2 diabetes growing ever faster into epidemic proportions and general dietary advice and medication not achieving a substantial change, both, healthcare professionals and the public, should turn their attention to the diet that has been shown to be able to prevent and even reverse the disease or at least significantly reduce the need for medication. Type 2 diabetes is usually, albeit not always, linked to increased body weight and especially to abdominal obesity. When the body’s metabolism cannot keep up with the amount and type of food eaten, droplets of fat are stored also in muscle cells as intramyocellular lipids (Petersen et al., 2004). When the amount of this fat reaches a certain level, it starts interfering with the cells’ ability to react to insulin correctly. Studies show that these lipids start accumulating many years before type 2 diabetes manifests (Phillips et al.; 1996; Krssak et al., 1999; Petersen et al., 2004) and it has been confirmed that insulin resistance in muscles and liver is strongly linked to fat storage in these tissues (Delarue and Magnan, 2007; Morino et al., 2006). Under normal conditions, fat is metabolised by the cells’ own powerhouses – mitochondria – but it appears that people with type 2 diabetes have fewer mitochondria in their cells than they need to successfully burn all the supplied fat. As a consequence, the fat accumulates inside the cells faster (Barnard, 2007).

However, as shown by another study (Sparks et al., 2005) where young healthy men were put on a special, high-fat diet that drew 50 per cent of its calories from fat – a diet not too different from that of many people in Western countries – accumulation of fat inside cells can be extremely fast even in perfectly healthy people. It is well known that a lifestyle intervention approach can yield remarkable results but there is one diet in particular – the D-Diet – that can actually reverse the condition.

In one of the groundbreaking studies, researchers employed a combination of diet change and exercise (Barnard et al., 1994). The subjects were 197 men with type 2 diabetes and after just three weeks, 140 of them were able to discontinue their medication. Several studies followed (Barnard et al., 2006; Barnard et al., 2009a; Barnard et al., 2009b), each of them testing the effects of a plant-based, low-fat diet that emphasises foods with low glycemic index and all of them came to the same conclusion – that this type of diet is more effective than any other diet and even some medication. The D-Diet- a low-fat wholesome vegan diet – does not only help the body reduce the fat stores in the cells, which are causing insulin resistancy but it brings about improved blood sugar control, reduces blood cholesterol, helps to induce weight loss without portion restriction, prevents further kidney and nerve damage and helps to lower blood pressure. The usefulness of vegan diet was eventually endorsed even by the American Diabetes Association when in 2010, their Clinical Practice Guidelines stated that plant-based diets had been shown to improve metabolic control in persons with diabetes (American Diabetes Association, 2010).