High Protein Diets May Not Reduce Diabetes Risk

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In a small weight-loss study, women on a high-protein diet did lose weight but didn’t see improvements in insulin sensitivity, which can help lower diabetes risk.

The women who ate less protein lost weight, too, but they also had a 25 to 30 percent improvement in their sensitivity to insulin. Principal investigator Bettina Mittendorfer, professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said:

“That’s important because in many overweight and obese people, insulin does not effectively control blood-sugar levels, and eventually the result is type 2 diabetes.”

Mittendorfer and her colleagues studied 34 women with obesity who were 50 to 65 years of age. Although all of the women had body mass indices (BMI) of at least 30, none had diabetes.

The women were randomly placed into one of three groups for the 28-week study. In the control group, women were asked to maintain their weight.

In another group, the women ate a weight-loss diet that included the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of protein: 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. For a 55-year-old woman who weighs 180 pounds, that would come to about 65 grams of protein per day.

In the third group, the women ate a diet designed to help lose weight, but they consumed more protein, taking in 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, or almost 100 grams for that same 180-pound woman.

“We provided all of the meals, and all the women ate the same base diet,” Mittendorfer says. “The only thing we modified was protein content, with very minimal changes in the amount of fat or carbohydrates. We wanted to home in on the effects of protein in weight loss.”

Keep Muscle To Lose Fat

The researchers focused on protein because in postmenopausal women, there is a common belief that consuming extra protein can help preserve lean tissue, keeping them from losing too much muscle while they lose fat.

“When you lose weight, about two-thirds of it tends to be fat tissue, and the other third is lean tissue,” Mittendorfer says. “The women who ate more protein did tend to lose a little bit less lean tissue, but the total difference was only about a pound. We question whether there’s a significant clinical benefit to such a small difference.”

The women who ate the recommended amount of protein saw big benefits in metabolism, led by a 25 to 30 percent improvement in their insulin sensitivity.

Such improvements lower the risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The women on the high-protein diet, meanwhile, did not experience those improvements.

“Changing the protein content has very big effects,” Mittendorfer says. “It’s not that the metabolic benefits of weight loss were diminished—they were completely abolished in women who consumed high-protein diets, even though they lost the same, substantial amounts of weight as women who ate the diet that was lower in protein.”

It’s still not clear why insulin sensitivity didn’t improve in the high-protein group, and Mittendorfer says it’s not known whether the same results would occur in men or in women already diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. She plans to continue researching the subject.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health

Gordon I. Smith, et al
High-Protein Intake during Weight Loss Therapy Eliminates the Weight-Loss-Induced Improvement in Insulin Action in Obese Postmenopausal Women
Cell Reports; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2016.09.047