People with prediabetes could turn their health around by eating more polyunsaturated fats and less saturated fats, according to a new study.
New research, conducted at King's College London, revealed that replacing foods that are high in saturated fats with foods like tofu and fatty fish stalls the progression of type 2 diabetes in patients with prediabetes who have problems absorbing glucose.
Many people with prediabetes go on to develop type 2 diabetes. Prediabetes, characterized by higher than normal blood glucose levels that are not high enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes, is divided into two different conditions. One condition involves the liver producing too much glucose and the other involves muscles that don't absorb glucose properly.
Researchers said that latest findings pertain to the second kind of prediabetes where the muscles have problems taking up glucose.
The latest study involved people across a wide spectrum of glucose levels including healthy individuals, individuals suffering from prediabetes, and individuals suffering from type 2 diabetes.
"We aimed to examine the impact of dietary fatty acid intake on fasting and 2-hour plasma glucose concentrations, as well as tissue-specific insulin action governing each. Normoglycemic controls, athletes, and obese, as well as people with pre diabetes and type 2 diabetes, were queried about their habitual diet using a Food Frequency Questionnaire," researchers wrote in the study.
After analyzing blood samples taken from participants, researchers found that participants with the prediabetes condition with abnormal muscle glucose uptake experienced a significant decrease in progression towards type 2 diabetes after replacing saturated fats in their diet with polyunsaturated fats.
"Dietary saturated fat intake corresponded to higher fasting plasma glucose and 2-hour plasma glucose concentration, as well as their physiologic regulators, whereas dietary trans fats and polyunsaturated fat had opposing effects that were limited to processes regulating 2-hour plasma glucose. Further, self-reported dietary fat intake was corroborated by examining the fatty acid composition of phospholipids in red blood cell membranes, dramatically strengthening the objectivity of the results. Together, these data support the notion that diets may be tailored to the subtype of prediabetes for the purpose of diabetes prevention," researchers wrote in the study.
"The findings suggest that increasing dietary intake of polyunsaturated fats may have a beneficial effect for patients with a certain type of prediabetes but also illuminates why certain dietary changes may have no effect on progression of type 2 diabetes in the other subtype. We intend to build on this work with larger studies, and ultimately test this idea in a randomized trial," researchers concluded in a university release.
The findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.
