Transcription
Let's talk about diabetics and honey, specifically as a model of this diabetes and sugar suggestion that I'm making. And we'll move from there, but this is all framed in the conversation of artificial sweeteners: good or bad. I'm going to show you lots of interesting evidence in humans and animal studies in this podcast showing that they're harmful for you in many ways, including worsening your insulin sensitivity. So I don't think anyone should be eating these—even people who are diabetic. Definitely, if you're not diabetic, there is zero reason to have any artificial sweeteners in your diet.
So the first paper I want to show you guys is this one. It's an eight-week randomized controlled clinical trial done in 2009, looking at the effects of natural honey consumption in diabetic patients. These are humans, all right. This is 48 type 2 diabetic patients who were put into two groups. They received oral natural honey for eight weeks, and the control group did not take honey. So that is the only intervention; they gave these people honey and no honey. How much did they give them? You can see here in the experimental design: the first two weeks, they got one gram per kilogram per day of honey; the second two weeks, 1.5 grams per kilogram per day; the third two weeks, two grams per kilogram per day; and the last two weeks, 2.5 grams per kilogram per day. So I'm about 70 kilograms, 75 kilograms—about 165, 170 pounds. So at the end of this study, somebody who's like me, five nine, moderately muscular (probably would have different body composition as a diabetic), but a 170-pound person would be getting around 170-plus grams of honey per day at the end of the study. That's a lot of honey—170 grams of honey, that's 10 or 11 tablespoons of honey per day. These diabetics were getting, at the end of the study in the last two weeks, at the beginning of the study, a 70-kilogram diabetic is going to get 70 grams of honey, and they're going to get 105 grams of honey, then they're going to get 140 grams of honey per day, and then at the end they're going to get 175 grams of honey per day, 70-kilogram human. So a lot of honey being given to these people over eight weeks.
Now I want to show you guys the results of the study. What these researchers found was that insulin sensitivity improved and lipids improved in the honey group. Now, blood sugars went up—I'll show you this in a moment. Hemoglobin A1c went up, but fasting blood glucose, the best metric of insulin sensitivity, went down in these diabetics. This was the only intervention they did. These people didn't get rid of seed oils; they didn't get rid of anything else that I think is a problem for diabetics. They could have done a study way better if you actually wanted to reverse these people's diabetes: give them an animal-based diet, give them meat, give them organs, give them raw dairy. Get them into Animal Base 30, which is happening now. Go to animalbase30.com to sign up and join us at Heart and Soil if you want to do Animal Base 30. It's a free 30-day animal-based eating challenge. We've had so many diabetics do this challenge, and they all lose weight and get significantly better. So in eight weeks, if you give me a diabetic person, I can significantly improve their diabetes just by changing their diet and could even give them honey. But in this trial, none of that happened. They did not do an animal-based diet; they did not improve the quality of the diet. All they did was give them honey in significant amounts, and what happened? They got more insulin sensitive; they didn't get less insulin sensitive; they became more insulin sensitive.
So you can see here in the honey group, also lost weight. They started at 71.3 kilograms plus or minus 12.7, and they ended the trial at 69.5 kilograms. That's basically two kilograms in eight weeks, so about four pounds or more than four and a half pounds over eight weeks, and all I did was give them more honey; they lost weight. The control group did not lose any weight—the exact same weight at the beginning. So the honey group lost weight; that was statistically significant. The honey group reduced the fasting blood sugar from 153 milligrams per deciliter to 124. The standard deviations here are 43.9 and 37.5 respectively, but the honey group lowered their fasting blood sugar. That is the most important metric that this study did. I would have loved to have seen their fasting insulin, but if your fasting blood sugar is going down from 153 to 124, you're technically not even diabetic anymore. Obviously, a fasting blood sugar of 124 is way too high, but these people would now be considered pre-diabetic at eight weeks by giving them 175 grams of honey per day. Right? The control group: 135 milligrams per deciliter, 131.9 at the end of the study. So that I think is fascinating.
Now let's talk about the blood sugar. If you give any human 175 grams of honey per day, that blood sugar is going to go up, which means you're going to see a hemoglobin A1c go up; you're going to see an increase in average blood sugar over the course of 90 days, which is what hemoglobin A1c measures. If you're curious about hemoglobin A1c and whether this measures fructose, see the previous video I did on my YouTube channel about the hidden dangers of a ketogenic diet and how hemoglobin A1c definitely measures fructose glycation. And there's no real concern if you're worried about eating fruit and honey and having this glycate your cells; you will see it in the hemoglobin A1c. It's not hidden; there are no dangers of eating fruit and honey. In that video, I talk about hidden dangers of eating a ketogenic diet, which I'll talk about in a future podcast, but if you're—you want the, uh, the preview, you should look up a molecule called methylglyoxal, which is a problematic advanced glycation end product that goes up significantly on a ketogenic diet, probably because the glycerol backbone of triglycerides, which are increased from increased glycopolysis on a ketogenic diet, forms methylglyoxal—not a good thing.
Back to this study: hemoglobin A1c went up from 7.1 to 7.7 in the honey group—not surprising. You give people more honey, their blood sugar is going to go up, but their insulin sensitivity got better; their fasting blood glucose went down. I think if you'd made other changes in these people's diets, they would have improved the hemoglobin A1c, and over time that hemoglobin A1c is going to come down because there's no way that somebody who's getting more insulin sensitive is going to have a rising hemoglobin A1c long term. I think it might peak out at 7.7 or a little higher, and it's going to come down as it catches up because they're just going to keep getting more insulin sensitive if you change the diet. Imagine what would have happened if we removed the seed oils from these people's diets. Now, interesting: mainly the control group went from 7.1 to 7.3, so even the control group increased their hemoglobin A1c. If you want to know the average blood sugar conversions, 7.1, which is where both groups started, is about 157 milligrams per deciliter. At the end of the study, the control group was at 163 average blood sugar, and the honey group was at 174. So giving people 175 grams of honey for the last two weeks (and then I outlined how much honey they got before that) only increased the average blood sugar 11 milligrams per deciliter, and the fasting blood sugar went down; they lost weight; they got more insulin sensitive; and their lipids got better as well. So all the metrics got better, and the hemoglobin A1c went up because their blood sugar went up. We know this is going to happen. You can see here on these blood work results: the triglycerides went from 190 to 148 in the honey group; the HDL went from 59 to 66; the LDL went from 125 to 107. So all of these metrics got better in a honey group in diabetics. So I think this flies in the face of the convention that sugar is horrible for diabetics, that honey is horrible for diabetics, you should never do this. If you're completely myopic and you only think about your blood sugar, which misses, in fact, the actual pathology, the roots of diabetes, you might see that as a problem. But if you're looking at the causative things here, if you're looking at the insulin sensitivity, fasting blood sugar, lipids as an indicator of insulin sensitivity, you'll see very clearly that giving honey to diabetics actually made them less insulin resistant, caused them to lose weight, lipids improved, and improved their health overall.