“I wanna live
with a cinnamon girl
I could be happy
the rest of my life
With a cinnamon girl.”
“Cinnamon Girl” by Neil Young
Most people my age know and love the much loved song quoted above. “Cinnamon Girl,” the closest our generation ever came to Hip Hop, was one of our favorites.
I don’t know how healthy living with a Cinnamon Girl would be…according to the rest of the song it would be a very sweet life. I do know, however, the latest spicy news on cinnamon and its health benefits for people with diabetes and high blood sugar.
Cinnamon has always been related to sugar – although not the blood sugar type of sugar. But now, it seems cinnamon can be an extremely good spice for helping to control the blood sugar in people suffering from diabetes.
Cinnamon comes from the bark of trees. It has long been considered a medicinal plant. There are several varieties, all harvested from southern China to Southeast Asia.
For years, there have been hints that adding cinnamon to your diet can help control blood sugar. And a recent spate of studies adds to the evidence that the effect is real.
“Yes, it does work,” says NAME, a research nutritionist with the University of California, Davis. He authored a recent article published in the Journal of Medicinal Food that concluded that cinnamon lowers fasting blood glucose.
“According to our results, it’s a modest effect of about 3 to 5 percent,” Davis says. This is about the level of reduction found in the older generation of diabetes drugs, he says.
That makes the findings of interest not just to the 25 million Americans who already have diabetes, but also to the 80 million other people — of us — who have elevated fasting blood-glucose levels. Doctors refer to this as pre-diabetes, meaning blood sugar that doesn’t meet the cutoff for a diagnosis of diabetes but that does indicate a high risk of developing the disease (www.npr.com).
Cinnamon comes in two varieties – Ceylon cinnamon and cassia cinnamon. Cassia cinnamon is the kind most Americans use for baking and cooking. It’s also the variety most researchers have used when they’ve studied cinnamon and diabetes.
Some of this research has shown that cinnamon may lower blood sugar by decreasing insulin resistance. In people with Type II Diabetes, the sugar-lowering hormone insulin does not work as well. This leads to higher blood sugar levels.
The objective of a study done by the American Diabetes Association was to determine whether cinnamon improved blood glucose, triglycerides, total cholesterol, HDL Cholesterol, and LDK cholesterol levels in people with Type II diabetes.
In this study, volunteers ate from one to six grams of cinnamon a day for 40 days. One gram of ground cinnamon is about half a teaspoon. Researchers found that cinnamon reduced cholesterol by about 18 percent and blood sugar levels by 24 percent.
The results of this study demonstrate that intake of one, three, or six grams of cinnamon per day reduces serum glucose, triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, and total cholesterol in people with Type II diabetes, and suggest that the inclusion of cinnamon in the diet of people with type 2 diabetes will reduce risk factors associated with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
In another random study, volunteers ate cinnamon and rice pudding after a meal. These volunteers had reduced blood sugar levels.
In other studies, cinnamon did not decrease blood sugar or cholesterol levels (www.webmd.com).
If you and your doctor decide cinnamon is right for you, pay close attention to your blood sugar levels. Let your doctor know if your blood sugar levels fall too low.
Taking cinnamon with drugs that affect the liver may increase the risk of liver problems. If you take any prescription medication, talk to your doctor before taking cinnamon.