Eating chocolate might be good for people whose metabolisms show up as stressed in blood tests. Though I have to wonder whether attacking the underlying causes of high stress hormones would be more likely to deliver a real benefit.
The "chocolate cure" for emotional stress is getting new support from a clinical trial published online in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. It found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in the bodies of people feeling highly stressed. Everyone's favorite treat also partially corrected other stress-related biochemical imbalances.
One big problem with research on benefits of food on health: research that turns up a positive result is more likely to get published than research that turns up a negative result. So the body of all published research has a bias toward showing benefits.
Another big problem: short term effects do not always translate into long term reduction of illness or death. We end up with lots of promising studies that suggest dietary practices which are unproven or disproved many years later. Long term research takes too long and is so expensive that the number of hypotheses that get tested by long term research ends up being pretty short.
This study reminds me of a third problem: Some studies produce positive results because they happen to use experimental subjects most likely to benefit. Subsets of people who have more stress, a lousier diet to start with, or other problems are probably more likely to benefit from a diet change. Should you eat chocolate? The answer might depend on your levels of stress hormones.
In the study, scientists identified reductions in stress hormones and other stress-related biochemical changes in volunteers who rated themselves as highly stressed and ate dark chocolate for two weeks. "The study provides strong evidence that a daily consumption of 40 grams [1.4 ounces] during a period of 2 weeks is sufficient to modify the metabolism of healthy human volunteers," the scientists say
So does eating chocolate deliver a benefit? I'm still not convinced. But at least with chocolate my taste buds think I ought to lower my standard of evidence.
Update: Big population studies of diet and health will become a lot more useful once it becomes affordable to genetically sequence each person. My guess is that in some of the studies that find a benefit from a dietary practice for some of the people in that study their genomes were well matched to the dietary practice under study. The inability to control for genetic endowment is one of the causes of positive results that fail to generalize to hold up in other studies.
Similarly, if we all had implanted nanosensors reporting our metabolic condition our cell phones could query our nanosensors, report the results to a web site, and then get back recommendations for, say, exercise or chocolate or cruciferous vegetables.
The team, led by Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at Warwick Medical School Dr Oscar Franco, has discovered that simultaneously having obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar are the most dangerous combination of health factors when developing metabolic syndrome.
How dangerous are these factors? Way more.
In his study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, Dr Franco has identified the most dangerous combination of these conditions to be central obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. People who have all three of these conditions are twice as likely to have a heart attack and three times more likely to die earlier than the general population.
His team looked at 3,078 people to track the prevalence and progress of Metabolic Syndrome as part of the Framingham Offspring Study.
What to do about it? Exercise and a better diet of course.
Intensive lifestyle changes aimed at modest weight loss reduced the rate of developing type 2 diabetes by 34 percent over 10 years in people at high risk for the disease.
My own advice: eat lots and lots of vegetables, drug no sweet drinks, and avoid food that has high fructose corn syrup or sugar in it. Start reading labels.
I suspect the benefit of frequent interaction with health-care professionals mainly came in the form of repetitive encouragement to lose weight and eat better and less food.
The DPP results showed that intensive lifestyle changes, including exercise, reducing calories and fat intake and frequent interaction with health-care professionals, reduced the development of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent after three years. Those assigned to two daily doses of metformin but no lifestyle changes reduced the development of the disease by 31 percent over the same period.
Of course you could just take the drug. It'll only deliver about half the benefit but with much less effort.
We've all heard about the damage that reactive oxygen species (ROS) – aka free radicals – can do to our bodies and the sales pitches for antioxidant vitamins, skin creams or "superfoods" that can stop them. In fact, there is considerable scientific evidence that chronic ROS production within cells can contribute to human diseases, including insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
But a new report in the October 7th Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication, adds to evidence that it might not be as simple as all that. The researchers show that low levels of ROS – and hydrogen peroxide in particular -- might actually protect us from diabetes, by improving our ability to respond to insulin signals.
Unfortunately, toxins are essential elements of human metabolism. We use reactive oxygen species to perform essential functions at the expense of aging more rapidly. This is why we need to develop the ability to do repairs: Fix cells, replace cells, and replace whole organs.
There really is too much of a good thing. At least when it comes to food. I still haven't come across an equivalent report for sex.
"Our studies indicate that 'physiological' low levels of ROS may promote the insulin response and attenuate insulin resistance early in the progression of type 2 diabetes, prior to overt obesity and hyperglycemia," said Tony Tiganis of Monash University in Australia. "In a way, we think there is a delicate balance and that too much of a good thing - surprise, surprise - might be bad."
Tiganis' team found that mice with a deficiency that prevented them from eliminating physiological ROS didn't become insulin resistant on a high-fat diet as they otherwise would have. They showed that those health benefits could be attributed to insulin-induced signals and the uptake of glucose into their muscles. When those animals were given an antioxidant, those benefits were lost, leaving the mice with more signs of diabetes.
About 5 months ago some Harvard, Leipzig and Jena University researchers also reported vitamins C and E reduce exercise benefits and interfere with glucose metabolism in ways might boost diabetes risk. Also see my 2004 post Excessive Antioxidant Activity Risk Factor For Type II Diabetes. Vitamins are not a panacea. Stem cell therapies, gene therapies, and nanobot repair machines - they are the panacea!
Carnitine might help reduce insulin-resistant diabetes in humans if the results with rats translate well to humans.
DURHAM, N.C. – Supplementing obese rats with the nutrient carnitine helps the animals to clear the extra sugar in their blood, something they had trouble doing on their own, researchers at Duke University Medical Center report.
A team led by Deborah Muoio (Moo-ee-oo), Ph.D., of the Duke Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center, also performed tests on human muscle cells that showed supplementing with carnitine might help older people with prediabetes, diabetes, and other disorders that make glucose (sugar) metabolism difficult.
Carnitine is made in the liver and recycled by the kidney, but in some cases when this is insufficient, dietary carnitine from red meat and other animal foods can compensate for the shortfall.
After just eight weeks of supplementation with carnitine, the obese rats restored their cells' fuel- burning capacity (which was shut down by a lack of natural carnitine) and improved their glucose tolerance, a health outcome that indicates a lower risk of diabetes.
No guarantee here that carnitine will help you if you have blood glucose that is too high and possible early stage insulin-resistant adult onset diabetes. If you are obese then weight loss is a more sure way to improve your lipids, sugar levels, and other aspects of your health.
Low carnitine limits the ability of sugar to enter mitochondria and get broken down for energy.
Carnitine is a natural compound known for helping fatty acids enter the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, where fatty acids are "burned" to give cells energy for their various tasks. Carnitine also helps move excess fuel from cells into the circulating blood, which then redistributes this energy source to needier organs or to the kidneys for removal. These processes occur through the formation of acylcarnitine molecules, energy molecules that can cross membrane barriers that encase all cells.
Researchers at Duke had observed that skeletal muscle of obese rats produced high amounts of the acylcarnitines, which requires free carnitine. As these molecules started to accumulate, the availability of free, unprocessed carnitine decreased. This imbalance was linked to fuel-burning problems, that is, impairments in the cells' combustion of both fat and glucose fuel.
So does carnitine lower blood sugar level in humans with elevated blood sugar? Does it work as well for humans who normally eat a lot of red meat (and hence normally get more carnitine in their diet)?
While I'm asking questions: Do any other compounds have similar effect to carnitine in enhancing glucose transport and lowering unhealthily elevated blood glucose?