Can Eating Protein Before Meals Help Control Postprandial Blood Glucose?  A recent study has shown that eating whey protein before meals lowers the postprandial blood glucose (BG) peaks. Here is the research paper. The study subjects consumed 15 g of whey protein in a beverage 10 minutes before eating the meal. They found that this procedure reduced the prevalence of daily hyperglycemia by 8% thus increasing the time spent in daytime euglycemia (normal BG levels) by 9%. Nighttime BG levels were not affected.  Now, this study concerned only whey protein, in a beverage, but there's no ..read more

 Your gut and your brain are in constant communication. This is not really surprising, as essentially everything in your body is connected, as I've noted before. But some connections are stronger than others. Your gut contains zillions (really scientific term) of bacteria, which are not only helping you to digest what you eat but are also releasing what to them are waste products but may be active compounds that will get into your circulation and affect your physiology. In other words, you should be kind to your gut bacteria as much as you can because if you are, they will help you. This ..read more

Sometimes the short-term (acute) effects of some stimulus are different from the long-term (chronic) effects. One well-known example of this is the effect of free fatty acids on insulin release. In the short term, they stimulate insulin release, but in the long term they inhibit it. Now it has been found that the effects of prednisone depend on how often you take it.  Daily prednisone promotes obesity, but weekly prednisone promotes increased lean body mass. The researchers also found that the weekly prednisone caused an increase in adiponectin, a hormone that protects against insulin res ..read more

Can marine snails lead to better insulins for human use? Could be. It seems that the cone snail uses a type of insulin as a weapon. It drops the blood sugar of the fish they hunt so quickly that the fish become paralyzed. And a new insulin for humans has been based on the cone snail insulin. It's not yet commercially available. Of course, there are already relatively fast acting insulins like Humalog, Novolog, and Apidra, but they take about 15 minutes to start working. The goal with the snail-type insulin would be to have it start working even sooner. Human insulin tends to associate into hex ..read more

Can the level of light in your bedroom affect your blood glucose (BG) levels? These researchers say yes.  The study was in only 20 people, so the results would have to be confirmed with more subjects, but it is suggestive. The full text is here. Moderate light exposure is considered to be 100 lux, and "dimly lit" is considered less than 3 lux. This gives some examples of different levels of light. Most people do turn the lights off, or at least way down, when they sleep, but not everyone has that option. In a crowded home without a lot of spare rooms, one person might need light to study ..read more

 Our gut is apparently modified by what we eat. This makes a lot of sense. If we usually eat a lot of some food and the body ramps up the enzymes that digest that food, then we should get more energy from that food, and until relatively recently, getting as much energy from our food as posible was the body's goal. It's only in the recent past that most of us have too much food available so that obesity and not starvation is the problem. Here is a study showing that if you eat a lot of food, your gut expands so you can digest more food. It had previously been shown that cold does the same ..read more

Sometimes it seems as if a new factor that affects diabetes is announced every week. The latest one is called fabkin, which sounds to me like a detergent or a new diet craze. And fabkin is not one factor but a complex of of several. The name comes from fatty-acid-binding protein 4 (FABP4), which forms a functional hormone complex with two kinases, adenosine kinase (ADK) and nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDPK) to regulate extracellular ATP and ADP levels. It's postulated that fabkin affects beta cells, blunting their effects. The interesting thing is that using antibodies to neutralize fabkin ..read more

 I don't know how many people have been following this, but NuSI (the Nutrition Science Initiative) was founded in 2011 with the goal of improving the quality of nutrition research, which would allow clarification of which diet was best for weight loss. Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories and Bad Calories as well as many articles in various media supporting low-carb diets for weight loss, and Peter Attia, a physician interested in longevity, were the founders, and thanks to the John Arnold Foundation, they were able to throw a lot of money at studying the issue. They completed a few stud ..read more

 I haven't seen a lot of new treatments for type 2 diabetes lately. Most research seems to concern refining current approaches, but here is a study about a drug, phenylbutyrate, commonly prescribed for urea cycle problems, that seems to help in type 2 diabetes. I confess I'd never heard of phenylbutyrate, as I haven't had urea cycle problems, but the drug helps to remove urea from the blood. It also seems to improve insulin sensitivity and the oxidation of glucose. No adverse effects were found in the cited study, but the study was short term. The idea that phenylbutyrate affects glucose ..read more

 Another article highlighting the fact that we're not simple machines, that what works for one person may not work for another, has hit the popular press.  This time it's not diet but exercise they're speaking of. Some people, despite sticking closely to an exercise program, see no improvement in their fitness. They're called nonresponders.  Unfortunately, most health care providers don't have the time to investigate your lifestyle closely, so if you are supposed to go on an exercise program but fail to improve your fitness, they probably think you're "cheating," and not exercis ..read more