A new study shows that there is a diet that works better than the conventional low-calorie diabetic diet to keep your weight and blood sugar under control.
It even completely cured a big portion of the study participants!
The only problem is that as much as some people praise this diet, the majority of people are going to absolutely hate it.
So, what’s it going to be? Suffer type 2 diabetes with all the complications or tolerate a diet that’s you’re going to hate?
The study was published in The Journal of the American College of Nutrition, in July 2017.
Czech, American and Italian researchers split their 74 subjects into two groups that adopted different diets for six months.
One group went on a vegetarian diet that was, in fact, close to vegan, consisting of vegetables, grains, legumes, fruits and nuts, with only the equivalent of one portion of low-fat yoghurt allowed per day.
The other group adopted the conventional diabetic diet as prescribed by the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, consisting of 50 percent vegetables, 25 percent lean proteins and 25 percent grains.
Both diets contained approximately 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day and meals were prepared for the subjects, so they didn’t have to struggle with concocting their own recipes.
After six months, the vegetarian group lost 6.2 kilograms of weight, while the conventional dieters lost only 3.2 (approximately 14 pounds versus 7 pounds).
The scientists also used magnetic resonance imaging to examine what type of fat their subjects were losing: subcutaneous (below the skin), subfascial (on top of muscles) and intramuscular (inside muscles).
While the two groups lost the same amount of subcutaneous fat, the vegetarian group lost substantially more intramuscular fat than the conventional dieters and only the vegetarians lost subfascial fat.
This is important for diabetics and prediabetics because it is in subfascial fat that a lot of your insulin resistance happens.
When they tested their subject’s glucose and insulin sensitivity, they found that the vegetarians indeed had lower fasting plasma glucose and improved beta-cell insulin sensitivity.
42 percent of the vegetarians could reduce their medication and around 10 percent reversed their conditions completely.