More about carbohydrates

Abstract

Letters to the Editor Is Diabetes Responsible for an Increase of the Mean Red Cell Volume? Dear Sir, The Short Communication of Davidson et al. [1] deserves some comment: The authors, who reported a higher mean red cell volume (MCV) in a group of 100 diabetic patients compared with a control group, were asking other investigators to contribute to the understanding of this result. We would like to make the following suggestions based on studies that we have carried out. We studied the MCV values in two populations of normal subjects (485 men in the first study [2], 995 men and women in the second one [3]), and we found in both cases a significant increase of MCV related to alcohol and tobacco consumption. The regression equations drawn from the second study showed that a difference of MCVvalue under 2 cu ~m, as observed by Davidson et al. in Aberdeen, might be due to relatively small differences in alcohol intake and/or smoking habits between the two groups. Thus, the small differences reported by Davidson et al. in the group of women are consistent with our findings. Unfortunately no data were given on alcohol and smoking habits. In addition, we were somewhat puzzled by the total absence of information regarding the control group. Hence, it was probably insufficient simply to exclude those subjects known to have an excessive alcohol intake. It would be necessary to perform further studies in order to assess precisely the possible effects of alcohol and smoking habits on MCV values. We are attempting to do this in our studies on diabetic subjects in order to throw further light on this interesting observation.

Dietary Fiber in Management of Diabetes

“…In the 1979 policy statement, the ADA recommended reducing the intake of fat and increasing that of complex carbohydrates to -5 0 % of the total calories with the ingestion of foods high in fiber as desirable (2). Dietary advice to patients with diabetes continues to emphasize the virtues of complex carbohydrates rich in fiber, but the dogma is coming under closer scrutiny and remains a controversial issue (3)(4)(5)(6). These diets are substantially different from the average American diet, and it has been suggested that they may not be effective if the insulin secretory capacity is compromised.…”

Blood glucose and plasma insulin responses to various carbohydrates in Type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes

“…Diet is a basic factor in the treatment of diabetes. Nevertheless, recent controversies concerning the composition of the diet in diabetes have highlighted the relative paucity of experimental data or clinical studies on this subject [17,20,21,32,33,37]. A conclusion from some recent studies is the favourable effect of a high dietary fibre intake, which improves tolerance to carbohydrates and ensures a better metabolic control of diabetes [1,2,6,13,29,30,34,[41][42][43]47].…”

Carbohydrate in the diabetic diet.

“…However, in this later study the source of the carbohydrate energy (sucrose vs corn syrup) did have an effect with sucrose-containing diets requiring lower insulin concentrations to maintain euglycemia than did the corn syrup-contain ing diets. Nevertheless, the issue of how much carbohydrate should be in the diabetic diet remains controversial [8,9].…”