Diabetic? A high-protein diet can help you manage blood sugar

If you are a diabetic, you may want to load up on a high-protein diet as it improves blood sugar control, according to a new study.

The Charite University Medicine study shows that high protein diets, from both animal and plant sources, improve blood sugar control in patients with type 2 diabetes without any adverse effects on kidney function.

This new research compared the effects of two high-protein diets with the same number of calories, one from animal protein (AP) and one from plant protein (PP)--on metabolic functioning and liver fat.

The authors concluded that in diabetic subjects, the 6-week high-protein diet leads to an improvement in glucose metabolism and decrease in liver fat independently from the protein source. The high-protein diet has no adverse effects on kidney parameters, moreover the kidney function actually improved in the plant protein group.

The authors say that long-term observational studies with a much bigger cohort are now needed to confirm their findings. They are now looking at the expression of key genes involved fat metabolism, glucose metabolism, inflammation in blood cells and in adipose tissue to see if there are any diet-induced alterations and to understand the effect of the higher amino acid uptake at the molecular level.

The study was presented at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD).