n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids help diabetes

By Jimmy Downs

Some dietary modifications may help reduce risk of diabetes.  Reported yesterday is the study in the Dec 14-28 2009 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine suggesting that drinking coffee and tea may help prevent the disease.

Beseechers reviewed previous studies on coffee, tea and diabetes and found that people who drank coffee, even decaffeinated coffee, or tea were at reduced risk of diabetes.

The studies considered in the meta-analysis are not trials, meaning that drinking coffee or tea does not necessarily reduce diabetes risk because many other factors were not considered and the results of these studies may carry sizable errors and biases.

However, dietary modification may have a potential impact on the risk of diabetes mellitus which affects an estimated 20 million of men and women in the United States.

One recent study published Dec 8, 2009 in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research found that increased plasma omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid was associated with improved insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes.

The study led by Huang T and colleagues at Zhejiang University in China sought to examine the relationship between plasma phospholipids fatty acid composition and insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes mellitus. 

The case-control study involved 186 type 2 diabetes patients and 180 healthy subjects.

The researchers found "increased plasma PL n-3 PUFA, 20:5n-3, 22:6n-3 and ratio of n-3:n-6 PUFA was associated with decreased HOMA-IR in type 2 diabetes. Increased plasma PL n-3 PUFA improves insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes."