Gut bacteria do appear to play an important role in type 2 diabetes and obesity, Weinstock said, but scientists aren’t yet able to pinpoint which are the heroes and which are the villains. Nutritionists were equally good at predicting how a person would fare on a given diet, the team found. But the computerized approach could reach more people, the researchers say.
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The Glycemic Index is used closely with a food’s Glycemic Load, which takes into account the total carbohydrate content in the actual serving. Bad diets sent blood sugar skyrocketing. Eran Segal and Eran Elinav, co-lead investigators from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, enlisted the help of 100 participants.
A dietitian who reviewed the study expressed doubt about how useful this information might prove, however.
“Ever wonder why that diet didn’t work?” More and more evidence suggests, glucose intolerance, and diabetes, and the study demonstrates that specific microbes did correlate with how much blood sugar rises after a meal. The hypothesis of the study was that the Glycemic Index, the grading curve developed decades ago to measure a food’s effect on blood sugar levels, wasn’t absolute. There’s no doubting it’s a useful starting point to gauge how foods can impact glucose levels, but it’s based on studies that average out how groups of people respond to food – not particular individuals like you or me.
Dr. Gregory Austin, head of the General Gastroenterology Section, in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Colorado Denver, said the study findings are surprising. For example, a large number of the participants’ blood sugar levels rose sharply after they consumed a standardized glucose meal, but in many others, blood glucose levels rose sharply after they ate white bread, but not after glucose.
The differences were due to factors like age and body mass index. Sorting through it with the help of a computer, the researchers concluded that gut bacteria were a major factor causing people to metabolize foods differently.
Compliance can be the bane of nutrition studies. The participants recorded their food intake, along with providing data and stool samples. All the meals throughout the week were monitored with the help of a mobile app. Furthermore, all participants were asked to wear glucose monitors registering glucose levels each five minutes.
Is it really possible that a food widely considered to be healthy can be really bad for a few people? In one case, a middle-aged woman with obesity and pre-diabetes, who had tried and failed to see results with a range of diets over her life, learned that her “healthy” eating habits may have actually been contributing to the problem. Now a new study finds that even if we all ate the same meal, we’d burn it differently and have different blood sugar levels afterward.
According to Minisha Sood, director of inpatient diabetes at Lenox Hill Hospital in NY City, the Israeli study “highlights the importance of individualized nutrition – dietary advice should vary from person to person and should be tailored to meet the needs of a given individual based on their reactions to different foods”.
The study monitored week-long glucose levels in 800 healthy and pre-diabetic people in Isreal over the course of 46, 898 meals.
Each participant also gave a stool sample so the researchers could analyze their gut “microbiome”-the collection of bacteria that reside in the digestive system”.
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The new study focused largely on people’s blood sugar levels two hours after eating a meal-also known as the post-prandial glucose response. Interestingly, although the diets were personalized and thus greatly different across participants, several of the gut microbiota alterations were consistent across participants.
