Mulberry Fights Diabetes

Mulberry Fights Diabetes

Dance for Your Life!
 
Diabetes is one of the worst, yet one of the most easily preventable, of the chronic degenerative diseases that afflict us as we get older—and it’s becoming pandemic. Because of our self-indulgent lifestyle—too much rich food, too little exercise—we tend to be overweight, out of shape, and prone to high cholesterol and high blood pressure. That’s a recipe for insulin resistance and then full-blown diabetes, which opens a Pandora’s box of awful consequences. 

The solution is obvious. Not so obvious, however, is the fact that there are nutritional supplements, such as mulberry, that can help us fend off diabetes while we strive to follow a healthier lifestyle. Among the many forms that such striving can take is dancing, which is probably the most enjoyable way to exercise ever invented (“the vertical expression of a horizontal desire,” as George Bernard Shaw put it). So get out there and dance! And if you should happen upon a mulberry tree … well, you’ll know what to do.
 

 

The antioxidant, antiatherosclerotic effects of mulberry are gratifying, of course (and here we’re making the assumption that the effects seen in laboratory and animal experiments would be seen in actual human beings as well), but there’s more to the story than that. Mulberry leaves have long been used in Chinese medicine for the prevention and treatment of diabetes, because, as we now know, they contain chemical compounds that suppress high blood sugar levels (hyperglycemia) following a carbohydrate-rich meal.



Controlling blood sugar (glucose) levels is vitally important. When these levels rise sharply, as they do after ingesting foods with a high glycemic index, such as potatoes or sweets, the body responds by producing more insulin to deal with the overload. But if this demand for more insulin occurs too strongly too often, the ability of the pancreas to produce enough insulin may become impaired, and our cells may become resistant to insulin as it tries to do its job of facilitating glucose transport through the cell walls. The result is insulin resistance, a dangerous condition that, if unchecked, leads to type 2 diabetes. Its primary cause is obesity. Generally speaking, if you are obese, your risk for diabetes is high; if not, it’s low (unless you happen to have a genetic predisposition for diabetes).



There Are Different Ways to Attack Diabetes
 

Diabetes is a complicated disease with many ramifications, among which are increased risks for atherosclerosis and cataracts, both of which are strongly linked to oxidative stress caused by insufficient blood levels of antioxidants. The fact that people with diabetes have significantly lower antioxidant levels than normal suggests that this disease is affected by oxidative stress—a view that is supported by the well-known clinical efficacy of lipoic acid (“the antioxidant’s antioxidant”) in preventing and treating diabetes. It is reasonable to suppose that many other antioxidants are also beneficial against diabetes, and some have indeed been proven to be effective. One of these is the compound EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate), a green-tea polyphenol that also happens to be a potent anticarcinogen.



But there are other therapeutic approaches to diabetes as well. One is through compounds that mimic the effects of insulin, such as MHCP (methylhydroxychalcone polymer), a constituent of cinnamon. Another approach is through compounds that inhibit the action of intestinal enzymes called alpha-glucosidases, whose function is to break disaccharides (double sugars, such as sucrose, maltose, and lactose) down to monosaccharides (single sugars, such as glucose, fructose, and galactose) so that they can pass through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream.





Mulberry Controls Blood Sugar
 

Another research group in Japan has found that white mulberry leaves contain compounds that inhibit these intestinal enzymes.³ In experiments with normal rats, they found that certain nitrogen-containing sugars in mulberry-leaf extract, notably one called 1-deoxynojirimycin, strongly inhibited the intestinal metabolism of disaccharides (especially sucrose), thereby restricting the amounts of monosaccharides that entered the circulation. They also found that pretreating the rats with mulberry extract before feeding them carbohydrates significantly suppressed the normal postprandial (after-meal) rise in blood glucose levels.

This beneficial effect occurred in a dose-dependent manner. The doses were, however, very large: 0.1–0.5 g/kg of body weight, which, for a 70-kg (154-lb) human, would be 7–35 g. (A lower dose, 0.02 g/kg, corresponding to 1.4 g for a human, was ineffective.) Nonetheless, the researchers suggested that mulberry extract might be beneficial in preventing human diabetes by suppressing intestinal alpha-glucosidase activities.

Sources: http://www.life-enhancement.com/magazine/article/992-mulberry-helps-control-blood-sugar-and-more