By Kennedy Shelley
Doctors and patients have to be confused. For many years the American Diabetes Association has been recommending eating six small meals a day as a way of stabilizing blood sugar.
Then in 2014, a new study came out of the Czech Republic suggesting that only eating breakfast and lunch was the best way to go.
But doctors at Tel Aviv University just released their findings which show that six small meals actually increase the use of insulin and other drugs to keep blood sugar levels in check.
Their research shows that six small meals tend to keep blood sugar high, which results in an increased need for more and more insulin.
Their suggestion was to go back to three meals centered around our biological clock.
Dr. Daniela Jakubowicz said in the journal Diabetes Control:
“The traditional [diet for people with diabetes] specifies six small meals spread throughout the day. “But [this diet] has not been effective for sugar control, so [people with diabetes] require additional medication and insulin. And insulin injections lead to weight gain, which further increases blood sugar levels.”
They switched people to a diet that put any carbohydrates or starches in the morning and limited these in the later two meals, which led to greater blood sugar control.
They had their test subjects eat more in the morning and less throughout the day, so they fasted at night.
This led to less dependence on insulin compared to those who ate their calories scattered amongst six meals a day.
Those who did the six meals a day didn’t lose weight and had no change in their blood sugar levels.
Those who ate three meals a day saw a reduction in weight and better blood sugar control.
This latest study has similar results to a 2014 study from the Czech Republic which showed that just two large meals produced better control of weight and blood sugar than six small meals.
In this study, they also restricted calories so the participants ate 500 fewer calories than normal.
While both of their groups lost weight, those who did two large meals lost more.
But surprisingly neither study looked at carbohydrate restriction.
As Freedom Health News reported back in June of this year, a recent peer review study showed that carbohydrate restriction was actually highly effective at getting diabetics free of insulin and allowed people to lose weight without calorie restriction.
Virta Health and the University of Indiana teamed up to study a ketogenic approach to diabetic care.
Their results showed many insulin-dependent diabetics were able to stop insulin in less than two weeks once carbohydrates were restricted to less than 20 grams per day.
This goes along with the findings at Duke University who have been studying carbohydrate restriction diets for over 20 years.
There is mounting evidence that it is possible to control blood sugar and end insulin dependence by working to end dietary spikes in blood sugar by reducing food frequency (also known as intermittent fasting) and reducing carbohydrate intake.
