Never mind the gas. Time to pile on the beans and skip the white rice. Research now confirms that white rice is linked to a pre-diabetic stage known as 'metabolic syndrome'.
By Adam Marcus
New York (Reuters Health) Sep 01 -- Beans and
rice are a classic combination throughout the western hemisphere, but a
study in Costa Rica finds that the bean half of the equation may be
better for health.
Researchers found that people who regularly
swapped a serving of white rice for one of beans had a 35% lower chance
of showing symptoms that usually precede diabetes.
"Rice is very easily converted into sugar by the
body. It's very highly processed, it's pure starch and starch is a long
chain of glucose," said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and
epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, who was
part of the study team.
"Beans compared with rice contain much more
fiber, certainly more protein and they typically have a lower glycemic
index -- meaning they induce much lower insulin responses," he told
Reuters Health.
Dr. Hu's group looked at the diets of nearly
1,900 Costa Rican men and women participating in a study of risk factors
for heart disease between 1994 and 2004. None of the participants had
diabetes at the start of the study.
As Costa Rica has become richer and more
urbanized, rice consumption has risen while intake of beans has fallen,
Dr. Hu said. Meanwhile, the rate of diabetes in the country has soared.
The extra rice might be at least partly to blame,
the Harvard group concludes. They found that people who ate more white
rice over time had higher blood pressure and elevated levels of sugar
and triglycerides and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein
cholesterol.
But in those who substituted a serving of beans
for a serving of white rice the risk of metabolic syndrome was reduced
by 35%, the researchers reported August 3rd in the American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition.
Although rice may be a larger part of diets
outside the U.S., the findings have important implications in this
country, Dr. Hu said. Americans are consuming more rice than ever, up
from 9.5 pounds per person in 1980 to 21 pounds per person in 2008,
government figures show. Consumption of dry beans is markedly lower, at
about seven pounds a year per person, according to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture.
That's a bad trend, said Dr. Hu, especially if
people are eating white rice rather than brown rice. From the body's
perspective, a serving of white rice "is like eating a candy bar - the
fiber and other nutrients are stripped away," said Dr. Hu, who added
that the trend "will have long-term metabolic effects."
"It would be useful to introduce more legumes,
including beans, into our diet to replace white rice and some of the red
meat," he told Reuters Health.
The Harvard team's findings do not prove that white rice raises diabetes risk or that beans lower it. In previous research, Dr. Hu and his colleagues have found that eating brown rice may protect against type 2 diabetes.
"It doesn't surprise me that you get better
health outcomes in bean eaters," said Dr. David Jenkins, a nutrition
researcher at the University of Toronto who developed the concept of the
glycemic index to help diabetics gauge the effect various foods would
have on their blood sugar. "Beans are notable among plant foods" for
having a modest effect on blood sugar, he explained.
Although Dr. Jenkins said the health benefits of
different beans might vary, "as a class they hang together pretty well,
and much more uniformly than other foods."
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