For most people, eating a vegetarian diet is hardly appealing.
But now there’s a good reason to match the switch: It could stop diabetes.
According to a new analysis published in Cardiovascular Diagnosis and Therapy, vegetarian diets help lower a person’s weight naturally, control blood glucose, and improve blood pressure–all effects which can reduce the severity of type 2 diabetes. In theory, this too could even eradicate the disease, though experts emphasize that this isn’t clinically proven.
The analysis was led by Dr. Neal Barnard, a researcher from the George Washington University School of Medicine.
“No drug comes close to offering those with diabetes this kind of relief,” says Barnard. “One simple prescription could help reverse diabetes, improve blood sugar, and lower weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. And all this is possible, our analysis found, not with a new magic pill, but with tried-and-true simple changes to diet.”
For the analysis, researchers looked at the diets of 255 adults diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, whose diets varied greatly. Researchers specifically wanted to see which diets either increased or decreased the severity of their disease, and it didn’t take long for them to find their answer.
Measuring their HbA1c levels, something which measures the amount of blood glucose, researchers recorded whose HBA1c levels decreased. From there, they compared these readings against certain diets–and found that vegetarian diets helped lower these levels most effectively.
In addition, they found that those who followed a vegetarian had reduced other symptoms correlated with diabetes, including a bigger waistline and high cholesterol.
“Vegetarian (including vegan) diets have benefits for cardiovascular health, hypertension, body weight, and plasma lipids, and also provide nutritional advantages compared with omnivorous diets,” notes Barnard. “Combining the results of six prior studies, we found that a plant-based diet boosts blood sugar control considerably.”
What You Should Do
While diabetes has no known cure–at least in the form of a pill–more and more research continues to show that dieting may be your best defense against beating it. Luckily, now there’s research to back it up: And it shows that vegetarian diets are key.
But you needn’t adopt a vegetarian diet to reap these benefits, says Tracy Kelly, the head of clinical care of Diabetes UK. Instead, increasing your intake of vegetarian-friendly foods could help.
“The evidence does not suggest that everyone should adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet but there are benefits of increasing your intake of fruit, vegetables, whole grains and pulses and eating less saturated fat,” says Kelly. “We recommend an eating pattern that is mindful of portion sizes, contains all the food groups and is low in saturated fat, added sugar and salt.”
Your best bet? It’s time to clean up your diet–and adding more vegetarian-friendly foods could really help.
Readers: What do you think about vegetarian diets? Would you try it?
Sources:
Vegetable Diet WILL Beat Diabetes: Meat-Free Lifestyle Cures Killer Disease, Experts Claim – Express.co.uk
Physicians Committee Encourages Clinicians to use Dietary Interventions for Type 2 Diabetes Treatment – PRWeb.com
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