Vegetables that Balance Blood Sugar

Hello everyone. I'm Dr. Deanna Minik and welcome to Nutrition Research Digest. In this episode, I'm going to be featuring a study that looked at the relationship between bitter vegetables and blood sugar balance. Please note that this video is intended to be educational, informational and not prescriptive or therapeutic. Always check with your healthcare provider about your health needs. We know that type 2 diabetes is on the rise. It's one of the biggest health challenges of the 21st century. And in fact, it's increasing. It's expected to increase even more as we progress through the decades. So the question becomes, how do we use lifestyle, which includes nutrition, in order to potentially help and blunt some of this rise in incidence? We have this article that was just published in May of 2021 by Danish researchers looking at whether or not strong and bitter vegetables from traditional cultivars and cropping methods could help to improve the health status of type 2 diabetics. This was a randomized controlled trial. I'm going to make it very easy for you to understand. The study design was very straightforward. There were three tracks, they lasted 12 weeks. One was a control with just their normal level of vegetables that they were taking in. Then there was another tract, this red track here, which had mild sweet tasting vegetables, 500 grams per day. The third tract, the blue one here, was with bitter, strong tasting vegetables. And essentially the vegetables that were used in the B and C tracts were similar. The only thing that differed was the taste. So they had a sensory team that would actually try the vegetables to be sure that they classified them correctly, that they were either mild and sweet or bitter and strong. Which vegetables were included in this study? Well, if you think of the Nordic diet, many times we hear about the Mediterranean diet, but this was using more of a Nordic diet, which more root vegetables and cabbage. So in the bitter tasting and the mild sweet tasting groups, they had curly kale, white cabbage, pointed cabbage, red cabbage, celerac, carrot and beetroot. So some of these foods are found throughout the world. We can apply this to thinking about bitter foods in general. A lot of the cruciferous vegetables, if we look at the study design, what we see is that they brought in a large number of people, they SW screen them, they then randomize them to one of those three tracks that I described. So it was either the control group or the mild sweet group or the bitter strong group. And they set them on the 12 week course with their allocated amount of vegetables. Now, I'm going to share with you the results because I find that this is really profound. You're going to see four panels, A, B, C and D. The green bar refers to the control group. The red bar refers to the mild sweet tasting vegetable group. The blue bar refers to the bitter strong tasting vegetable group. So what you see here is in this first panel we have the oral glucose tolerance test. And what we want to see is a reduction. And that's definitely what we see in the bitter strong tasting group. We see this nice reduction. You see how this bar goes down, we see a reduction in the area under the curve. We then look at B over here which is looking at fasted glucose levels. So what is the change of glucose? Right. And what we see is that in the bitter strong tasting vegetable group that that decrease was much greater than it was in the mild sweet tasting vegetable group or the control group, hemoglobin A1C. Down here what you see is that in general you see these nice reductions in the both of the vegetable groups, but in the bitter strong tasting group just slightly greater. Although that difference was not statistically significant. Then the Homa score, HOMA score is basically an equation looking at glucose and insulin. And what we see here is that there is a nice reduction in the bitter strong tasting group. So in general, what would we, what would we say about bitter strong tasting vegetables? Well, I would say just from looking at this that they may effectively moderate and help to bring down these measures that relate to glucose. The researchers also plotted in the article the different glucose curves. So this would be for 240 minutes. And what you see here was before they started the study and then after the study, after having the vegetables over time. And what you see, so in the first panel here in A you could see blood glucose basically similar before and after the study. And then in B, what we see is basically the same here, not a huge change in those curves. And then in C we do see a bit of a difference. So the solid line here is before they started, the dashed line here comes, comes underneath that. So for a nice decrease. So we are seeing a nice reduction in the oral glucose tolerance test results. Bitter was better. Here's a quote from the actual paper. It said, we found great health improvements in both vegetable groups caused by the daily intake of 500 grams of root vegetables and cabbages. But interestingly, the bitter and strong tasting vegetables had the greatest impact on insulin sensitivity, lipid profile, body fat mass and blood pressure. Now I'm not showing you all of those results, you can actually get to the study and read it yourself. But this was the takeaway and that's really what I want to focus on for you is how do we take scientific knowledge and turn that information into action? Well, here are some ideas and I'd like to hear more ideas from you. Specifically, taste is important. Taste your food, which means chewing it, allowing it to be in the mouth a little bit longer so that we can digest properly. I think people are eating their foods very quickly and not truly tasting food, not smelling and tasting. Number two, aim for a variety of tastes. Having sweet, sour, bitter, salty. Having small amounts of many different tastes can help to satisfy the palate more. And as we can see, bitter foods especially, number three, include bitter foods in the diet. Because many people don't like the taste of bitter foods. They, they don't find them as pleasurable as sweet tasting foods. But we do know that bitter can be better. We have bitter receptors throughout the body. We're learning much more about that. These bitter receptors are found whether it' in the gastrointestinal tract, they're in the respiratory tract. And we're learning that these bitter receptors are keying into bitter substrates from foods and changing our physiology. And so what we learned from this study is that bitter, strong tasting vegetables can help to change blood sugar parameters even more than mild sweet tasting vegetables that are of the same variety. I think that that's really promising that we can start to make these subtle changes and that even within 12 weeks time, we can start to see changes in our physiology. Thanks for joining me everybody. Stay tuned and I look forward to seeing you again for our next episode.