Going Gluten-Free Won't Help You Avoid Diabetes:
Gluten-free diets are all the rage these days, but for most people, shunning gluten may offer no benefit to overall health, a new analysis suggests.
In fact, the people in the study who ate more gluten were 13 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes over the 30-year study than those who ate less gluten, the researchers found.
Some people should not consume gluten — a protein found in grains such as wheat, rye and barley — for health reasons. For example, some people have an intolerance to gluten, and others have Celiac disease, the researchers said. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that affects mostly the small intestine; when people with this disease eat gluten, their immune system responds by attacking the intestine's lining. A gluten intolerance, by contrast, means that a person experiences symptoms such as abdominal pain, bloating or fatigue after eating gluten but does not actually have Celiac disease.
However, even some people who do not have Celiac disease or an intolerance to gluten believe that gluten-free diets are healthier than those that include gluten products, and the researchers wanted to see whether this belief might have any scientific merit, said lead study author Geng Zong, a nutrition research fellow at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
In the study, the researchers looked at surveys conducted every 2 to 4 years in which nearly 200,000 people reported what they ate. The researchers estimated the participants' gluten intake based on this information, and then looked at which participants went on to develop type 2 diabetes over the 30-year study period. Type 2 diabetes — the most common type of diabetes — occurs when the body has lost the ability to use insulin efficiently. This inability, in turn, leads to high blood sugar levels, which over time, can damage blood vessel walls, nerves and other tissues.
The researchers focused on studying the people's risk of diabetes because this condition is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., Zong said.
It turned out that, by the end of the study, nearly 16,000 people in the study had developed type 2 diabetes. Most people in the study ate less than 12 grams of gluten per day, the researchers found. When the researchers examined the relationship between gluten consumption and the people's risk of developing type 2 diabetes, they found that the people who ate the most gluten had a 13-percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during the study period than the people who ate the least gluten, according to the findings, presented today (March 9) at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention / Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health 2017 Scientific Sessions meeting.
This finding suggests that there might be a link between people's gluten consumption and their risk of diabetes, the researchers said. However, it is not clear why the people who ate more gluten were less likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than the people who ate less gluten, the researchers said.
One possible explanation is that the people who consumed more gluten also ate more fiber, which, as previous research suggested, may help to lower a person's diabetes risk. However, more research is needed to examine the relationship between gluten consumption and a person's risk of diabetes, the researchers said.
A whopping 21 percent of Americans are currently making an active attempt to eat gluten-free, according to a Gallup poll published July 23. That percentage dwarfs the 1 percent of the U.S. population diagnosed with celiac disease — the only medical condition that requires gluten-free products for someone with the disease to live a healthy life.
More and more Americans are on the anti-wheat warpath trend, as the label "gluten free" appears on everything from craft beer to cat food. For those with celiac disease, a life-threatening autoimmune disorder that destroys the gastrointestinal tract, going gluten-free is critical to avoid damage to the small intestine. For everyone else, though, it is an unnecessary, and potentially unhealthy, diet.
The gluten-free industry
Such facts haven't stopped the food industry from taking advantage of the trend, and gluten-free products have grown to represent a $9 billion market in 2014, according to the Burdock Group, which specializes in food market research, among other issues.
Gluten-free foods, especially refined foods processed to make them gluten-free (many made with potato starch or rice starch), cheat the consumer out of the many health benefits of whole grains — such as wheat, barley and rye — and can be seriously lacking in critical nutrients such as fiber, iron, zinc, folate, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, calcium, vitamin B12 and phosphorus.
To understand gluten , the protein in wheat, barley and rye, it helps to understand what's in a whole grain. A whole grain contains all three parts of a grain: the bran, germ and endosperm, as opposed to a refined grain which only contains the endosperm. The nutritional riches are mostly found in the bran and the germ.
Decades of research — conducted predominantly on gluten-containing whole wheat — has found that people who eat whole grains, containing all three parts of the grain, are less likely to be overweight or have diabetes, heart disease or even many cancers, including colorectal cancer, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal, and head and neck cancer in women, according to research published in Cancer Causes and Control.
The good in grains:
According to a 2010 comprehensive review in Nutrition Research Reviews, whole grain cereals can protect the body against the disease and aging process caused by oxidation. Oxidation is involved in all the major chronic diseases: metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes, cancers and cardiovascular disease.
Whole-grains contain 31 different antioxidants, which are beneficial in several ways. For example, the whole grain's structure and rate of digestion increases the feeling of fullness — helpful for weight management — and releases blood sugar slowly, recommended for type 2 diabetes. Dietary fiber in whole grains improves gut health (as a prebiotic), and the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of most of these compounds can help prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a group of scientists convened to offer nutrition recommendations for Americans to the federal government, has said, "dietary patterns of the American public are suboptimal and are causally related to poor individual and population health and higher chronic disease rates." The scientists recommended diets higher in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains than is currently consumed. "Across all ages and both sexes," they added, "the U.S. population does not meet the goal for whole grain intake, The inadequate intake of whole grains leads to underconsumption of several … nutrients of public health concern."
'Metabolically Healthy'?
Obesity often brings with it a host of health problems, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and risky cholesterol levels. But a lucky few appear to buck the trend: They are obese, and yet don't have any of these typical risk factors for heart disease or diabetes, a new study finds.
Researchers analyzed information from about 1.3 million U.S. adults who were either overweight or obese. None had previously been diagnosed with diabetes. The researchers looked to see whether these participants had any of four common risk factors for heart disease and diabetes: High blood pressure, high levels of fat in the blood, low levels of "good" cholesterol or elevated blood sugar levels.
Among those who were obese, 10 percent did not have any of these four risk factors. It's not clear why some people with obesity are able to avoid these problems. In the past, researchers have dubbed this group the "metabolically healthy obese." However, people who fall into this group may still not be totally healthy, said study researcher Gregory Nichols, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland. Obesity also increases the risk of other conditions, such as cancer, joint problems and kidney disease, he said.
"They might be metabolically healthy, but that does not necessarily mean they are healthy overall," Nichols told Live Science. What's more, although these participants were free of metabolic risk factors at the time of the study, they could soon develop them in the coming years, he said. Some previous studies have found that even "metabolically healthy" obese people are at higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, compared with people of normal weight.
Thus, people who are obese should still aim to lose weight, even if they appear otherwise healthy, Nichols said. "Weight loss could improve other types of health [problems], and might reduce the likelihood of developing cardiometabolic risk factors," he said.
They found that 18.6 percent of the people who were overweight did not have any of the four metabolic risk factors, and 9.6 percent of those who were obese did not have any of the four. Looking at only those who were morbidly obese, they found that 5.8 percent did not have any of the four risk factors.
Being "metabolically" healthy was more common among those who were younger about 30 percent of all adults ages 20 to 34 in the study did not have any of the four metabolic risk factors, compared with just 6.3 percent of those ages 65 to 79. Several factors could explain why some overweight people and some obese people remain metabolically healthy. "Diet and exercise almost certainly play a role," Nichols said. However, the new study did not assess these factors.
In addition, the distribution of a person's fat can also affect their risk of cardiovascular disease, with fat stores in the belly area (visceral fat) posing a greater risk to health than fat found just beneath the skin (subcutaneous fat) in other parts of the body. Some previous studies have found that obese people who are metabolically healthy have less visceral fat than obese people who aren't metabolically healthy. However, a person's BMI measurement, used in this new study, cannot distinguish between visceral fat and subcutaneous fat.
Ultimately, future studies are needed to follow metabolically healthy obese people forward in time, to see if they remain metabolically healthy over a long period, or even a lifetime, Nichols said. Such studies could determine whether metabolically healthy obesity "is even a real thing, or merely a matter of timing," Nichols said.
In addition, studies should look at the order in which people develop metabolic risk factors, and whether this order affects their risk of developing subsequent heart disease and diabetes, he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment