Eating pork fights type 2 diabetes

16-07-2009 | Home | News

A high protein diet with regular pork intake and resistance exercise is an excellent way for sufferers of type 2 diabetes to lose weight, new research has found.

The research was jointly funded by Australian Pork Limited and the Pork Cooperative Research Centre and published in a paper titled ‘The role of Australian pork in improving thiamine status, heart disease risk factors and glucose control in people with type 2 diabetes’.

It found that people with type 2 diabetes and are overweight or obese can benefit from a high protein, lower carbohydrate diet that includes regular pork intake in conjunction with resistance exercise. Such a diet will deliver weight and fat loss results, the researchers found. Researchers also found regular pork intake reduced risk factors associated with the disease.

“This study has shown that a high protein diet including lean pork plus resistance exercise provides significant health benefits for weight and fat loss and diabetes control,” research team leader Dr Manny Noakes said.

This follows a recent string of research into the benefits of pork for diabetics, which includes a study commissioned earlier this year by APL and carried out by scientists at the CSIRO and National Measurement Institute, whose findings revealed lean trimmed pork to be just as lean as skinless chicken breast.

The report — which based its research on actual pork cuts purchased in retail stores across Australia to accurately reflect the pork that ‘real’ consumers purchase every day and whose findings were published in the Pork Nutrition Study — concluded that pork is lean and loaded with essential vitamins such as B12, B6, thiamine, niacin, minerals such as zinc and selenium and nutrients that include iron and magnesium.