Broccoli Could Greatly Benefit Diabetics
Broccoli Could Greatly Benefit Diabetics
Diabetes is a disease in which a person’s body can’t make or react to insulin correctly. As a result, glucose levels stay at a higher than normal level. This increase can cause a lot of damage to the person’s health.
More than 29 million people in the United States have the disease and if you add in the amount of people who don’t know they have it, more than 37 million people are diabetics.
Those numbers, which increase every year, are one of the reasons that studies are ongoing in the hopes of finding something that can either slow or reverse diabetes. Now, thanks to a new study, one vegetable is standing out as promising in helping those with diabetes – and that vegetable is broccoli.
It contains something called sulforaphane. This compound is a powerful antioxidant with anti-cancer capabilities. Patients who were heavily overweight were part of a study using sulforaphane.
When taking the concentrated compound, the results showed that diabetics have better control over the level of glucose in their blood. The compound also lowered the production of glucose.
This two-fold health boost meant that side effects of having diabetes – such as heart problems, neuropathy, and eye damage – could be reduced or even avoided altogether. For diabetics, the sulforaphane study means a potentially improved way to keep diabetes under control so that long term complications don’t negatively impact their health.
In people with diabetes who have a BMI of over 30 or their weight is 20% above the normal healthy range for their age and height, they’re considered to be obese. It’s this extra weight that makes the liver unable to be as sensitive as it needs to be with insulin.
As a result of this, the liver can’t help the body keep glucose levels normal. That’s one of the reasons why those in the medical field urge people with diabetes to change the way that they eat.
By losing weight, you can increase your liver’s ability to function properly with insulin production. Still, just losing weight isn’t always enough – especially if someone has been a diabetic for years.
While there are standard medications (such as metformin) used to treat diabetes on the market, many of them come with side effects such as fatigue, stomach cramps or bloating.
Because of these side effects, the study focused on finding relief for diabetics that didn’t cause pain or discomfort. The research of the study led to the finding that sulforaphane was the most helpful in lowering glucose levels in those who were obese.
When sulforaphane was tested during a three month study, it showed that by giving diabetics powdered broccoli extract, it could even reduce fasting blood sugar levels. The good news is that by lowering fasting blood sugar levels, it means that it also lowers the odds of developing diabetes related health problems.
Plus, the broccoli compound didn’t cause the same unpleasant side effects that diabetes medication causes. Superfoods that prevent and reverse disease are abundant, but for diabetics, broccoli may be the answer to your search for nutritional help.
