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 “This new study gives a ray of hope for a condition where there are
no other good treatments,” said Dr. Neal Barnard, the study's lead
author and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, a non-profit organization that promotes a vegan diet,
preventive medicine, and alternatives to animal research.
Most people with type 2 diabetes will develop peripheral diabetic
neuropathy, the researchers write in Nutrition and Diabetes. People
with the condition may feel pain, burning and numbness in their
body's extremities.
“For an individual patient, it can be miserable and also depressing
because there are no good treatments and it just gets worse and
worse,” said Barnard, who is also affiliated with the George
Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C.
“By setting aside animal products and oily foods, you can become
healthier, and your pain can diminish and perhaps even go away," he
told Reuters Health in an email.
Type 2 is the most common form of diabetes and is often linked to
obesity. In type 2 diabetes, the body's cells are resistant to the
hormone insulin, or the body doesn't make enough of it. Insulin
gives blood sugar access to the body's cells to be used as fuel.
The disease is thought to interfere with the ability of nerves to
signal the brain about pain, light touch and temperature.
Anti-seizure medications and antidepressants help relieve nerve pain
in some patients but may have unpleasant side effects.
For the new study, the researchers recruited 35 adults with type 2
diabetes and painful diabetic neuropathy.
They randomly assigned 17 participants to follow a low-fat vegan
diet and take B12 supplements for 20 weeks, with weekly support
classes. The other 18 were instructed to take B12 supplements but
maintain their normal diet.
The vegan diet focused on vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes.
Overall, most participants on the vegan diet appeared to avoid
animal products and about half stuck to low-fat diets throughout the
study.
After 20 weeks, those on the vegan diet lost an average of about 15
pounds, compared to about one pound among those in the comparison
group.
Several other measures of health, including blood pressure, improved
among the participants on the vegan diet, compared to the control
group.
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Those on the vegan diet also reported a much greater drop in pain,
compared to the control group, the researchers report. A test of the
nerves in the foot also suggested that the vegan diet may have
slowed or halted nerve function decline, compared to the control
group.
There was also a suggestion that the overall quality of life of
those on the vegan diet improved, compared to the control group. The
difference may have been due to chance, however.
Barnard and his team acknowledged larger trials would still be
needed to show a vegan diet helped relieve pain related to type 2
diabetes.
Dr. Stuart Weiss, an endocrinologist at NYU Langone Medical Center
in New York, said the study was “kind of cool,” though the number of
participants was small and the length of the study was short.
“We always talk about diabetes and diabetes control being about diet
and exercise, but we end up prescribing a lot of medications and
don’t really focus that much on diet and exercise because that’s not
easy,” said Weiss, who was not involved in the study.
Weiss told Reuters Health that he typically advised patients to eat
less processed and refined foods and not overeat.
“It might be that eating less of that in a plant-based diet might be
helpful (in reducing inflammation), but again it was just 20 weeks
and it takes years and years for neuropathy to develop,” Weiss said.
“We need to see long-term and nobody’s going to pay for that.”
While Weiss said it was exciting that researchers were looking for
an alternative to medication, he cautioned that not everyone would
go for a vegan diet.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1J4ZYiT Nutrition and Diabetes, online May 26,
2015.
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