A recent scientific study confirms the benefits of a vegetarian diet as an effective treatment to combat and treat diabetes.
The diabetes is considered along with obesity as an epidemic of the XXI century, since the number of people living with both diseases continues to rise. In fact, as many specialists and medical experts’ state, we find that it is the first time in history that a non-infectious disease is considered a serious threat to global health.
As you surely know, diabetes is a chronic disease, which appears when the pancreas does not manufacture the amount of insulin – a hormone responsible for maintaining normal blood sugar values - that our body needs, or it does produce it but insulin is of inferior quality.
While type 1 diabetes cannot be prevented, type 2 diabetes (which is the one that tends to appear most frequently) can be effectively prevented by maintaining a healthy lifestyle, such as avoiding overweight and obesity, doing physical exercise on a regular basis and following a balanced and healthy diet.
In this sense, a recent study which analyzed 255 people with type 2 diabetes in different countries (United States, Czech Republic and Brazil), has found that adults who they followed a diet low in fat and in meat they managed to reduce their HbA1c levels by between 4 and 7%.
According to the results of the study, following a plant-based diet could reduce the levels of this protein in the blood, which tends to rise when a person has diabetes and causes many of the complications related to diabetes, such as eye problems, cardiovascular disease and nerve damage.
Therefore, the nutritional qualities that following a vegetarian diet would bring is highlighted, by helping to improve blood sugar levels, helping to regulate high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and to lose weight.
