I don’t know if you’ve been reading any of the newer “it’s not what you eat, it’s when you eat” books, but suddenly the tiniest differences in the timing of your meals appears to make a difference in your body weight.
Now this variation has extended to the use of the Mediterranean Diet and diet-diabetics, also called Type II diabetics. It turns out that skipping breakfast and having a big lunch complete with wine isn’t worse for you than eating multiple meals throughout the day.
The study tested three different diets for diabetics. “The three diets were a low-fat diet, a low-carbohydrate diet and a Mediterranean diet.” The low fat diet contained far more carbohydrates and increased blood sugar the most. The low-carbohydrate diet contained mostly fats and continued the trend showing that diabetics do better with lower carbs. The high fat content of the low-carbohydrate diet elevated blood fats including triglycerides.
But it was the Mediterranean diet that gave the most interesting information. “The Mediterranean diet was composed of only a cup of black coffee for breakfast, and with all the caloric content corresponding to breakfast and lunch during the other two test days accumulated to one large lunch.” Despite this, “with a massive lunch with wine (the Mediterranean Diet), did not induce higher blood glucose levels than the low-fat diet lunch, despite such a large single meal.”
“Our results give reason to reconsider both nutritional composition and meal arrangements for patients with diabetes.” Certainly a nice thought that we might still have a little flexibility in when we eat.
Here’s the complete free article.
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- One Meal A Day Better For People With Type 2 Diabetes (medicaldaily.com)
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- The case for ALKALINIZING your meals and eating LOW Glycemic Indexed foods (phecinfo.wordpress.com)
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Alternative Holistic Health Answers 
Reblogged this on naturopathvet and commented:
A low carb diet with lots of antioxidants and good quality fat (fish, nuts) as in a Meditteranean diet is found to be helpful in controling diabetes. Again avoiding processed wheat (which is a different form of wheat than that grown on Selenium rich soils in the Italian and Greek area) is part of the picture of healthy eating.
Thanks for the comment and the reblog. I found it fascinating because we would assume that a larger meal with a longer fasting period would logically create a higher sugar fluctuation. My sense is that we still treat the body as a zero-sum machine with food stuffs going in and energy and waste being secreted. Instead, the body is a constantly changing set of processes by which two different individuals eat the same meals and have entirely different reactions. I really haven’t seen that sort of individualization in studies, just looking for trends within the population.