What were the surprising results of a crossover study that randomizes hundreds of people with diabetes into one and third millet each day?
How does millet come to help people with diabetes? A significant portion of millet starch is resistant starch, which provides a good insect blessing in our colon, as it means it is resistant to digestion of our small intestine. In my video, at 0:28 below, there is a table showing how the benefits of millets against diabetes are what different millets do. As you can see, they are all much higher in resistant starches than common grains such as rice and wheat, but Proso and Kodo Millets lead the pack.
what happened? Millet protein matrix not only acts as a physical barrier, but also partially sequesters starch munching enzymes, and millet polyphenols can also act as the starch blocker itself.
Millets have significantly slower stomach empty times than other starchy foods. When you eat white rice, boiled potatoes, or pasta, it takes about an hour to digest the stomach before it starts to slowly release into the intestines. However, eating sorghum or millets doesn’t even start to empty your stomach for a couple of hours and can take five hours to empty halfway through, as shown at 1:22 in my video.
This was true for both thick millet pridges and millet couscous. “The diet of non-viscous millet couscous was equally slowing down (stomach)empty, suggesting that there are essential properties of millet itself that help slow the rate at which the stomach becomes empty. What happened when it was put into the test?
In fact, millet caused a surge in blood sugar that is about 20% lower than the same amount of carbohydrates in the rice form. Remember how excited I was to show that I was only about half of the body of insulin to handle sorghum compared to grains like corn? Well, as you can see here, in my video, Millet got even better at 2:07.
When a group of prediabetic patients were fed about three-quarters of millet per day, their insulin resistance was very low within 6 weeks, which turned to prediabetic blood sugar levels at 2:22 in my video, as shown below.
This “self-control clinical trial” is a sly way of saying it is an uncontrolled trial with the same subject before and after. There were no control groups in which participants did not add millet or anything else. They know that people can eat better in other ways, only being scrutinized in research. So, no matter what role millet itself plays, we don’t play. What we need is a randomized, controlled crossover trial where the same person eats food with or without millet, allowing us to see which works. And then we’ll go here: a randomized crossover study with hundreds of patients who left an American Diabetes Association type meal with about 1 cup and a third millet free or third millet free each day. Researchers found that a millet-based diet lowers hemoglobin A1C levels. This means that long-term glycemic control was improved and side benefits such as lowering cholesterol.
The recommended goal for good glycemic control by the American Diabetes Association is A1c below 7. Participants started at 8.37, but after a few months, the millet and the A1C fell to an average of 6.77, as seen here in my video.
Is that because they lost weight? No, it suggests that it is an intrinsic effect on millet. However, researchers did not only give them millet. They can mix millet with split black lentils and spices and improve long-term measurements of glycemic control, such as A1C levels, from dozens of randomized controlled trials, with or without diabetes, consuming beans, split peas, chickpeas and lentils. Thus, researchers concluded that “millets may have a protective role in the management of diabetes,” but a more accurate conclusion may be that a mix of millet and lentils may be protected. The spices could have helped too. The researchers did not say which spices were used and were unable to contact the authors, but similar studies conducted by one of the same researchers included a tablespoon of a mixture of fenugreek, coriander, cumin and black pepper, perhaps fifth spices, and possibly cinnamon or turmeric.
