Bitter Melon Aids Insulin Sensitivity
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you are insulin resistance, your body is basically not very good at removing sugar from your blood and into your cells where it can be metabolized as energy. People who have insulin resistance, tend to store carbs as fat.
Increasing your sensitivity to insulin means that your body becomes more efficient at removing sugar from your blood. Accordingly, good insulin sensitivity means that you are less likely to store carbs as fat and less likely to develop sugar diseases such as metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Recently, evidence from animal studies has begun to mount for the herb Bitter Melon with regard to improving insulin sensitivity.
On study from Department of Health and Nutrition in China makes the claim that Bitter Melon is as effective as AZT (an anti-diabetic drug) at reducing insulin resistance. The claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since the experiments in the study were on rats, not humans.
Objectively speaking, the evidence for Bitter Melon improving insulin sensitivity in animal studies is fairly decent. Does that translate to humans? We will have to wait for human studies on Bitter Melon to be sure.
If you don’t have ulcers or heartburn and want to try Bitter Melon, its readily available at most nutrition or vitamin stores. Try it before carb meals. We will keep tabs on Bitter Melon in our forums. If you take it or try it, post your experiences. We would like to get some anecdotal feedback from users.
Reference:
Bitter melon (Momordica charantia L.) inhibits adipocyte hypertrophy and down regulates lipogenic gene expression in adipose tissue of diet-induced obese rats.
Huang HL, Hong YW, Wong YH, Chen YN, Chyuan JH, Huang CJ, Chao PM.
|
|
Print Article
Email to a friend