Swedish men with diabetes showed a dramatic drop in their blood sugar after 3 months on a "Paleolithic" diet, according to researchers in Sweden, who found that a diet free of grains and dairy products worked better than the oft-recommended "Mediterranean" diet.
Of 29 men with heart disease and diabetic conditions, 14 showed blood sugar returning to normal after restricting themselves to lean meat, fish, fruits, root vegetables, eggs, and nuts. What's more, their glucose tolerance improved by 26%, as shown when glucose levels were tested after they ate sugars. But the 15 men on the Mediterranean diet, whose intake included grains and dairy products, showed only a 7% improvement in glucose tolerance, according to Lund University physician Staffan Lindeberg, whose study was published online this month in Diabetologia. Lindeberg says the study was inspired when he learned in the 1990s that Papua New Guinea's Trobriand islanders, who live on a "preagricultural" diet, had no heart disease or diabetes.
Lindeberg speculates that a Stone Age diet may owe its success with diabetics to the absence of "bioactive substances," such as the casein protein in milk and lectin in grains, which may impair glucose tolerance--as they do in studies of rats.
Evolutionary nutritionist Loren Cordain of Colorado State University in Fort Collins says the study is "significant" because "it represents one of the first well-controlled trials of a modern paleolike diet to ever have been conducted."
