In the news today is another story about the benefits of cinnamon on post-prandial glucose regulation (In English--that's how much your blood sugar changes after eating). In healthy volunteers, adding over a teaspoon of cinnamon to a rice-pudding dessert lowered the amount that blood glucose increased after eating the dessert.
Desserts such as the rice pudding used in this study are composed not only of simple sugars, but also of more complex carbohydrates (starches--in this case rice) as well as some fat and protein. The increase in blood glucose after eating these foods is dependent in part upon the rate of gastric emptying (how long it takes to digest the food). The researchers in this study showed that cinnamon delayed gastric emptying--and that may be an important component of cinnamon's blood glucose effects.
That's nice. But what does it mean?
In people with impaired glucose handling (diabetics), chronically elevated blood glucose levels are associated with many health complications, including heart disease, eye disease, and kidney disease. One of the goals of diabetes management is to keep blood glucose levels from fluctuating too wildly.
However, despite the mythology about the evils of sugar in your diet, in healthy people, normal elevations in blood glucose following meals is benign. If you haven't got any issues with blood glucose regulation, adding cinnamon isn't going to drastically enhance or impede your health.
What you need to know
There is a lot we don't know about the chemical components of foods, particularly concentrated sources like spices. Research in this area is exciting, and, I believe, in the long run will yield many benefits. However: Just because data are sexy enough to be picked up by Reuters and AP doesn't mean that you need to run out and jump on the cinna-band-wagon.
This was a very small study using 14 healthy people. A strength of this study was that all participants were exposed to both diet conditions: Rice pudding with 6 g cinnamon and rice pudding without. It would have been nice to have seen another condition with a different type of non-sweet meal (maybe a cheese sandwich--but I guess toasted cheese and cinnamon might be gross), but I can live with the study design.
They report blood glucose only as changes in blood glucose; they don't give us the actual blood glucose values--and I would like to see those and compare them to other normal subject values, but alas we don't have that information.
What's more important is that this study didn't include people who really need that benefit on blood glucose--those studies are yet to come. If you're diabetic, don't rely on this to help you today.
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