Diabetes: Can cheese control blood sugar?
A new study shows that cheese improved insulin sensitivity in prediabetic rats, but industry funded the research.
According to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), 30.3 million adults in the United States live with diabetes, and the condition is the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
In type 2 diabetes, a person's body is unable to properly use insulin to absorb sugar from the blood into cells.
Cheese loaded with fat and salt is a contentious subject when it comes to diabetes and health in general.
While many people enjoy it as part of their diet, the ADA recommend reduced-fat varieties over regular fat cheese.
The big problem with research into the effects of cheese is that many studies receive backing by dairy organizations.
Often, it is not clear how much a funder is involved in the design and interpretation of a particular study. Public mistrust of these studies is unsurprisingly high, particularly when they make bold claims that counter public health advice.
A recent study adds fuel to the fire by showing that both regular-fat and low-fat cheese improve insulin sensitivity in prediabetic rats. Dairy Farmers of Canada funded the study.
Cheese improves insulin sensitivity
For the study, Catherine Chan — a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada — and her collaborators looked at how prediabetic rats fared on a diet of regular cheese compared with low-fat cheese.
The team fed the rats a high-fat diet for 4 weeks to make them prediabetic. Then they added either regular Cheddar cheese or low-fat Cheddar cheese to the diet of some of the rats for an additional 10 weeks. The rats in the control group received a low-fat diet throughout the study.
There were no differences in the levels of fasting blood glucose or fasting insulin after the rats had been on their respective trial diets for 10 weeks.
When the team tested how well the animals were able to regulate their blood sugar after an injection of insulin, the animals who received cheese in addition to a high-fat diet had results similar to those on a low-fat diet. However, the results were significantly different from those of the rats on the high-fat diet alone.
Chan explained the following about her results in a press release: "The cheese didn't totally normalize the effects of insulin, but it significantly improved them. And it didn't matter whether it was low-fat or regular cheese."
Yet, when the team used a different test — the Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT), which measures blood sugar levels before and after a high dose of glucose — they found no difference in the way that the animals reacted.
This shows that in the prediabetic rat model used in the study, all the rats were able to deal with a spike in blood sugar in the same way, irrespective of whether they were on a low-fat diet, a high-fat diet, or ate cheese.
