Glucophage, Onglyza, Januvia…
If those words are Greek to you, count yourself lucky.
Millions of diabetics know those words all to well. They’re three of the most common drugs prescribed to patients with type 2 diabetes or patients in danger of developing diabetes.
The shame is that many doctors will prescribe those drugs in goose-step without ever even knowing about the enormous role that vitamins may play in controlling blood sugar.
One vitamin in particular appears to be a medical must for complete diabetes care.
Letting go of the sacred cow
We’ll start with prevention…
In a study I first alerted you to in 2009, healthy subjects with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D were more than THREE TIMES more likely to have metabolic syndrome risk factors–a sure path to type 2 diabetes.
Those factors included high triglyceride levels, low HDL levels, and excess abdominal fat compared to subjects with high D levels.
Subjects with high D levels were much less likely to have any of those risk factors. In addition, subjects in this group also had higher HDL and lower triglycerides.
With results like that–and virtually no side effects–you can be sure that if vitamin D were a drug with a name like Onglphage or Glucovia, doctors couldn’t reach for their prescription pads fast enough to give it to their type 2 diabetic patients.
Jump forward two years and we have another study that shows excellent results for diabetic patients who supplement with D.
In this trial, 90 adults with type 2 diabetes were divided into three groups. Each group drank a yogurt beverage daily for 12 weeks. One group received plain yogurt, one received yogurt fortified with 500 IU of vitamin D, and the other group’s yogurt contained 500 IU of D and extra calcium.
Even the researchers were surprised by the results: Blood sugar levels in the plain yogurt group increased while sugar levels in both supplement groups dropped significantly.
More importantly, hemoglobin A1C went up in the plain group and down in the supplement groups. As I’ve shown you before, A1C gives an accurate assessment of blood sugar control over a span of several weeks.
As an added bonus–a bonus that’s very important for diabetics–subjects in the supplement groups lost two-to-five pounds on average over three months, while weight in the plain yogurt group stayed about the same throughout.
As tradition seems to require, one of the study leaders felt it necessary to warn against interpreting the study’s results. He told Reuters Health that there was no reason for all of us to be eating yogurt with extra vitamin D yet.
And I couldn’t agree more. You don’t need to rush out and buy vitamin D fortified yogurt. There are many better ways to get your D without the added sugar, dairy and calories.
But if you DO want to stay on the low side of D, you can take this additional suggestion from that same researcher: Follow the current Institute of Medicine recommendation for daily D intake: 600 IU.
Oh brother–these hardcore mainstreamers just hate to let go of their sacred cows.
You can go here to find out why 600 IU of vitamin D daily is only a laughably small fraction of the total D most of us need daily–especially those with blood sugar control concerns.
Jenny Thompson is the Director of the Health Sciences Institute and editor of the HSI e-Alert. Through HSI, she and her team uncover important health information and expose ridiculous health misinformation, most notably through the HSI e-Alert.
Visit www.hsionline.com to sign up for the free HSI e-Alert.
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