Nuts and Soy: Diabetes’ Killjoy

If you combine the number of the people undiagnosed and diagnosed, it’s believed that approximately 10 percent of Americans have Type II diabetes. That’s a startling statistic. Much of this has to do with the prevalence of obesity in this country, one of the more common ways people come to be diagnosed with diabetes.

With this in mind, I’m always looking for studies that show how people can avoid diabetes through their choice of food. If you find yourself ever doing the same thing, you’ll be “nuts” about this latest finding.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the regular consumption of any kind of nut – peanut or walnut, almond or cashew, hazel or filbert – reduces the chances of getting Type II diabetes by nearly 40 percent!

Researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Shanghai University gave questionnaires to 64,227 women of Chinese descent, asking them what kinds of foods they ate most frequently. All of the women had no medical history of diabetes, cardiovascular disease or forms of cancer. These women were then monitored for about four and a half years.

Based on the diets they consumed and what some women were diagnosed with over the four and a half year period, the researchers believe that the women whose diets included nuts were 38 percent less likely to develop Type II diabetes compared to those that didn’t consume them regularly. Even more noteworthy were the women whose diets included soybeans. Those women were almost 50 percent less likely to develop Type II diabetes!

Now, before you go off to the store to grab a few cans of mixed nuts and a half pound of soybeans, the researchers acknowledge that this study has its drawbacks. For instance, because the study only included women of Chinese descent, they aren’t sure the results can be translated to people of other descents. But I’ve written extensively about nuts in the past and see no reason to doubt that this study can, in fact, be translated to people of all backgrounds, as there are a number of studies done on nuts and their positive impact on blood sugar levels.

What I haven’t written much about in the past are soybeans, specifically. I’m a HUGE advocate of soy, and have written extensively on soy. I’m therefore pleased to see that soybeans are believed to be beneficial in keeping Type II diabetes at bay.

While these researchers will no doubt perform follow-up studies on soy and the favorable finding they found for diabetes sufferers and those that wish to avoid it, a separate study on the power of protein found in soybeans confirms the aforementioned study even further. This study, a smaller, clinical trial, found that the damage done to the body’s organs by diabetes – the kidneys, in particular –can be lessened by consuming a diet grounded in soy protein. Nephropathy, a progressive disease that often leads to kidney failure, is just one of the many medical maladies that one is subject to if diagnosed with diabetes.

Again, this study is an exciting one because it only solidifies what I’ve long been saying about nuts and soy: make them a regular part of your diet if you want to keep your weight in check, decrease your risk of cardiovascular disease and keep your life free of diabetes.