Cinnamon & other supplements DO help blood sugar problems....

Today's Post:  Friday, 8-30-2013

1.  An email I get had an article on cinnamon as a way to help blood sugar problems.

It was horribly inaccurate and biased to such a degree it came off as if it was paid for deliberate disinformation by a drug company or pharmaceutical group that thinks sending out such unethical disinformation is an OK thing to do.

Nearly everything in it was inaccurate or extremely biased.  Yikes!

How did I get it?

Jillian Michaels is an excellent fat loss motivation coach though others have methods that work better for some of her advice.  (To be fair much of her advice is excellent.)

To monetize her free emails of health information to people who request them she did a deal with a health information media company.

As I know someone who has low level type 2 diabetes and once met a truly unfortunate young woman who was being horribly harmed by it and it’s such an important problem, I chose to ask for the emails with information on it.

It, in turn is supported by ads for drugs and blood sugar testing companies at least to some degree.

No problem with any of that.

But their recent email about using cinnamon to lower high blood sugar was unspeakably bad.

2.  As I’ve heard the story, though others may have known it before, some researchers had found that eating most pie, between the sugar in the pie filling and the refined grain crust, caused an extra boost in blood sugar after people eat it. So testing them 2 hours or so after would show this effect reliably.

They decided for some reason to test apple pie.  The effect did NOT show up!  What!  I think they tested cherry pie next and got the expected dessert boost of blood sugar a couple of hours after people ate it.  They checked the recipe and the significant difference was the high amount of cinnamon traditionally in apple pie.  They provided some apple pie without cinnamon to see and got the expected effect. So, it WAS the cinnamon!

Cinnamon supplements have been tested since then to produce this protective effect as have several other supplements.

There is even now a supplement that combines 5 of the most effective ones that I’d not have believed so effective had I not seen a recent test of it.

(So what did the article do?  Literally everything you’d expect of an inaccurate paid and unethical disinformation piece.

It said but offered no data to support that you’d have to use so much cinnamon as a spice to get any effect it would be aversive to do.

It made it sound like there were no cinnamon supplements and if there were they’d not be effective.

THEN, it suggested that the proper thing to do was to wait until a drug company made a drug from the ingredients in cinnamon that provided this effect.

Say Steve Jobs favorite negative explanation when he ran across something horribly bad:

This is *(*(^&*(^*%^!!     

Right, they ask you to wait to see if the drug is safe and effective and side effect free – and it WILL be expensive to pay the development and testing costs. 

Meanwhile the inexpensive, side effect free, and effective cinnamon supplements won’t even be looked at or tried by a doctor or consumer who believes this article and doesn’t know better.

This is unspeakably unethical in my view.  It’s certainly incompetent.

One recent test of cinnamon found this in a set of meals of standard but somewhat high sugar content that were exactly the same:

(An exactly the same size oatmeal and maple syrup breakfast was tested.)

When tested with no supplement before the meal the blood sugar went up 34.9%.

When a cinnamon supplement was taken before the meal it went up by 9.3 %!

(This is the same supplement the article suggested was ineffective!  Right! My Steve Jobs comment about that article is almost not forceful enough to express my opinion of that article!)

Another supplement known to be protective and help people with blood sugar issues is alpha lipoic acid.  (It’s also protective because is a superb antioxidant.)

When alpha lipoic acid was taken before the meal the blood sugar after went up 17.4 % after.

That’s half what taking nothing did but not as good as the cinnamon.

But there is an R lipoic acid that is only the right handed isomer of this supplement that is more effective though it does cost more.

Someone who knew these effects for these two supplements and that one called berberine was possibly even more effective decided to try adding those three, cinnamon, r lipoic acid, and berberine and two others into a single supplement with slightly larger amounts of each.

It’s called IC5.

This test tried 3 of those capsules in this exact same test and the results were better.

How much better?  Wow! is an understatement.

The blood sugar increase was so tiny it almost was the same measurement! It was 1.2%!

Warning:

Using this supplement to keep eating high sugar and high glycemic foods often will be helpful but those foods will still harm you and your health in other ways if you eat them often!

Your health will also suffer if you fail to eat the more nutritious foods instead most of the time like oatmeal with raw walnuts instead of maple syrup or steamed broccoli with a bit of cheese from a 100 grass fed source and two eggs from hens actually fed naturally on pasture.

Also, IC5 is quite pricey at $69 a bottle.

Adding cinnamon to oatmeal and maple syrup will have less of an effect but will still be a great tasting food and is dramatically cheaper.  Using half as much maple syrup too will save money.

Or taking a CinnamonForce supplement and one 100 mg alpha lipoic acid before the meal will be less effective; but as you see here, it will make a lot of difference and is far less expensive than IC5.

However, if you can afford IC5 and need or want that much of an effect, this test suggests it will do the job for you.

Meanwhile how does this make that article look? 

Steve Jobs was right.  There is a time when his comment is needed and deserved!