What Is the Best Diet for Diabetes?
The case for a plant-based diet to reduce the burden of diabetes has never been stronger.
There are all kinds of different scoring systems for rate diet quality. My favorite, for its simplicity, is the dietary phytochemical index: a fancy name for a simple concept. It’s just the percentage of your calories from whole plant foods, from 0 to 100. (See Calculate your healthy eating score.) The average American diet scores a 12 out of 100. So, on a scale of one to ten, our diet is a one.
when people are split Based on your score, researchers find that the higher the score, the better the metabolic markers when it comes to diabetes risk. As I discuss in my video The best diet for diabetesthere appears be a gradual drop in insulin resistance and dysfunction of insulin-producing beta cells as you eat more and more plant-based. The researchers reported that the highest group only scored around 30 (out of 100). Less than a third of their diet was whole plant foods. Not great, but better than the lowest group, who scored below standard American diet level, as you can see below and at 0:49 on my video.
No wonder diets centered around plants, “feeding patterns that emphasize legumes [beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils], whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds and discourage most or all animal products… are especially potent in preventing type 2 diabetes and have been associated with much lower rates of obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular mortality and cancer”—and not only prevent type 2 diabetes, but also treat it. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that eating vegetarian diets is associated with better blood sugar control, but by how much better?
One of the latest trials, a 12-week randomized clinical trial conducted in Asia, study the effect of a strictly plant-based diet centered on brown rice versus the conventional diabetic diet on blood sugar control in patients with type 2 diabetes. For the diabetes control diet, the researchers established exchanges of foods and calculated specific calorie and portion controls, whereas on the plant-based diet, people could eat as much as they wanted, which is one of the benefits of that eating pattern: the emphasis is on the quality of the food instead of quantity. However, the participants still lost more weight. Even after controlling for the greater loss of belly fat in the plant-based group, they still gained. Of course, it only works if you actually do it, but those who ate a healthier diet lowered their A1c levels by 0.9 percent. That’s what you can get taking the leading diabetes drug, but, eating plant-based, they only had good side effects.
Would it work in a marginalized population? researchers study The impact of a plant-based diet support program on the alleviation of type 2 diabetes in San Bernardino, the poorest city of its size in California. This was a randomized controlled trial, but not of a plant-based diet as the title suggests. It was a trial of an educational program that told people about the benefits of a plant-based diet for diabetes, then it was up to them. Participants still got a significant improvement in blood sugar control. As you can see below and at 3:10 in my video The best diet for diabetesthe numbers improved a bit in the control group, but a lot better in the plant-based instruction and support group.
And, more plant-based diets are effective not only in the prevention and control of diabetes, but also of its complications. One of the most devastating complications of diabetes is kidney failure. As you can see below and at 3:26 on my videoeight diabetics all presented a steady and inexorable decline in kidney function in one to two years before switching their diets. They were on a fast track to complete kidney failure and dialysis. But, after they switched to a special supplemented vegan diet, their kidney deterioration stopped dead in its tracks. Imagine if they had changed a year or two earlier!
However, most diabetics do not actually end up on dialysis because die first. “Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of premature mortality in the diabetic population,” so plant-based diets are perfect. “There is a general [scientific] consensus that elements of a plant-based and whole-food diet (legumes, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, with limited or no intake of processed foods and animal products) are highly beneficial in preventing and treating type 2 diabetes. Equally important, plant-based diets address the big picture for patients with diabetes by simultaneously treating cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, and its risk factors, such as obesity, the hypertension [high blood pressure], hyperlipidemia and inflammation”, and we can also throw cancer into the mix, which is our number two killer. The bottom line is that “the case for using a plant-based diet to reduce the burden of diabetes and improve overall health has never been stronger.”
If all a plant-based diet can do is prevent and reverse heart disease, the leading killer of men and women, shouldn’t it be the default diet until proven otherwise? I would say yes, and evidence for the benefits of a more plant-based diet continues to emerge for a variety of other life-threatening chronic diseases. To start, see How not to die of heart disease.
