Are Plant Based Diets Effective In Treating Type 2 Diabetes? – By Author Brenda Davis

Intro

there is another cohort that we’ve been following since about 2007 and this is in taiwan they’ve been comparing um a similar health conscious uh non-vegetarian buddhists with the vegetarian buddhists and the vegetarian buddhists are very near vegan they don’t really consume much dairy at all if any they have a little bit of egg once in a while but not a lot so they’re very very near vegan and the rates of diabetes were 51 percent lower among vegetarian men and 74 to 75 percent lower among the vegetarian women and i just want to tell you about the pictures on this slide so this picture right here

The Cafeteria

is a picture of a typical um and the the colors aren’t very good on with this powerpoint projector they’re actually much more vibrant in in real life but but basically you go into the cafeteria it’s completely vegan from what all i could see and and it’s the most colorful buffet food buffet you’ve ever seen that’s their cafeteria food and then i i

The Kitchen

was taken on a tour of the kitchen and i was absolutely stunned when i walked in and there were bag these bags were this high just all of these bags of organic greens the nuns had just picked from the hospital gardens and i asked i said well what are what are these and they said oh this is the main food for our patients they need organic greens to heal their bodies and i went what a concept feeling feeding hospital patients healthy food it just is mind-boggling

India Study

but i was i was so impressed by what they were doing there and then there was a study in india as well a large study comparing fairly young people 20 to 49 years of age and the lacto-ovo vegetarians in this study were 33 percent less likely to develop diabetes than non-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians were about 24 less likely so that’s

Vegetarian Rates

sort of what we know about vegetarian rates versus non non-vegetarians when we control for for other factors like smoking and drinking and so forth vegetarians seem to be at lower risk so what about plant-based diets in the treatment of type 2 diabetes well the the research

Plant Based Diets

on this i would say really began with a pioneer by the name of james anderson very famous nutrition researcher and he did a series of studies between 1976 and 1991 comparing people eating a plant-based diet versus people eating a more conventional american diabetes association diet in people with type 2 diabetes the plant-based diet was actually 70 percent carbohydrate so this is a very high carbohydrate plant-based diet and this diet contained 35 to 40 grams of fiber per thousand calories so this is really quite shocking because in a 2000

Fiber

calorie diet that’s 70 to 80 grams of fiber which is more than most vegans even would be eating so it was a very whole food plant-based diet before we called it that and the vegetarians had more favorable plasma glucose glucose tolerance insulin sensitivity and blood lipids and what was so impressive is most of the plant-based patients had to discontinue or dramatically reduce their insulin or medication and be before we used to call it reversal many of these patients actually did experience reversal

David Jenkins

david jenkins is a researcher from toronto canada and he is one of the uh he’s really one of my heroes he is just an extraordinarily brilliant man who is a very strong ethical vegan and so in his research he has um done so much he’s the architect of the glycemic index so that’s one of the things that has made him quite famous he did many research studies showing favorable metabolic changes in people eating a very carefully designed diet that he called the portfolio diet which is a diet that that maximized many of the wonderful components in plant-based diets and again it was largely a whole food plant-based diet and then we’ve got some research out of Czech Republic europe from the czech republic this randomized control trial with 74 participants followed over 24 weeks and compared they basically compared a vegetarian diet and the animal products in this diet were limited to not more than one low-fat yogurt per day and they compared that to a conventional diabetic diet and the vegetarian diet was more effective than the conventional diet in improving insulin sensitivity reducing medications reducing visceral fat reducing oxidative stress markers and reducing cholesterol levels so very successful and the lead author of this of these studies that came out of the czech republic is now one of the key researchers at the physicians committee for responsible medicine so they’ve joined forces and pcrm the physicians committee for responsible medicine has done a series of of research articles the first three probably being the most important in terms of looking at um specifically diabetes change the changes in in diabetes so uh they they did a pilot study in 99 and then in 2006

Study

they followed 99 people for 22 weeks and then 2009 they reported the results of following those same people for 74 weeks and they found both the low-fat vegan diet and the american diabetes association diet improved glycemic and lipid control but these improvements were actually significantly greater with the low-fat vegan diet and they didn’t see a lot of rev diabetes reversal but they did see a lot of people reducing medications and then we had a res korean research team comparing a carbohydrate root vegan diet versus a conventional diabetic diet and both diets reduced a1cs but the vegan diet again more than double the conventional diet it reduced the a1c by about 0.5 points and in highly adherent patients it was 0.9 points so even even better results there and then this study that dr fuhrman told you about yesterday very small study 13 participants but just exceptional results so he dropped a1cs from 8.2 percent to 5.8 percent 2.4 points at 7 months sixty-two percent of the participants achieved normal glycemic measures and uh they lost an average of 74 pounds their triglycerides dropped almost 70 milligrams per deciliter on average their ldl dropped over 15 milligrams per deciliter and hdl actually increased by 6.3 milligrams per deciliter which is very unusual with plant-based diets we often see a reduction and so these results were really quite stellar and showed reversal we don’t have a lot of studies that have solidly showed reversals so

Conclusion

this is really a very promising we have many uh reviews and meta-analyses 2016 three uh two in 2017 three in 2018 uh one so far one in 2019 and they all said the same thing we have strong consistent evidence that whole food plant-based diets improve blood glucose improve insulin sensitivity improve blood lipids and that they reduce or eliminate the need for medication and the risk of complications of this disease