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 “Although recent public health recommendations have increasingly
focused on advocating overall diet quality improvement, evidence has
been limited on whether changing overall diet in adulthood has a
long-term preventative impact on diabetes prevention in general
population,” said lead author Sylvia H. Ley of the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard
Medical School in Boston.
“We provide evidence that improving diet quality in adulthood is
associated with type 2 diabetes prevention, while worsening diet
quality is associated increased risk for diabetes,” she said by
email.
The researchers analyzed data on more than 124,000 adults who did
not have diabetes at the start of three large, long-term studies of
lifestyle and health outcomes and who were observed for at least 20
years. Participants rated their diet quality on a healthy eating
index every four years.
There were 9,361 cases of type 2 diabetes during the studies. When
dietary quality scores declined by more than 10 percent between
four-year surveys, diabetes risk went up by about 34 percent, the
researchers found. Improving diet quality by the same amount led to
a 16 percent decrease in diabetes risk.
A “healthier” diet included higher intakes of vegetables, fruits,
whole grains, nuts, and legumes and lower intakes of red or
processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages and fruit juice, trans fat
and sodium, as well as moderate alcohol consumption.
“Cumulative scientific evidence has supported that improving and
maintaining overall quality of healthful diet is beneficial for
long-term chronic disease prevention,” Ley said. “Chasing after the
latest short-term fix is not likely to offer sustained benefits in
the long term.”
Improving diet was associated with decreased diabetes risk
regardless of how a person ate at the start of the study or how much
excess weight they carried. Over time, losing weight explained some,
but not all, of the change in diabetes risk, according to the
results published in Diabetes Care.
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“Improving overall diet quality as an adult regardless of where you
start, whether you have poor or better initial diet quality, seems
to be beneficial for diabetes prevention,” Ley told Reuters Health.
“It is known that Western dietary patterns and diets with high
glycemic index are associated with a greater risk of developing type
2 diabetes, whereas the opposite has been observed for prudent
dietary patterns and Mediterranean diets,” said Jordi Salas-Salvado
of Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, who was not part
of the new study.
“Three key points to prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes
are: stay lean, follow a frugal diet and include plenty and large
variety of vegetables,” he told Reuters Health by email.
Diet quality, as well as body weight, are important for diabetes
risk, said Dr. Marc Y. Donath of University Hospital Basel in
Switzerland, who also was not part of the new study.
“However it remains to be shown how important are qualitative
changes in diet compared to calorie restriction,” Donath told
Reuters Health by email. “Based on clinical (experience), my
impression is that changes in body weight are much more important.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2d0IOFI Diabetes Care, online September 9,
2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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