Consumption of healthy plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, coffee, and legumes, is associated with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D)
According to a new research published in Diabetologia, the consumption of healthy plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, coffee, and legumes, is associated with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D) in generally healthy people and support their role in diabetes prevention.
The study was conducted by the Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA, and aimed to identify the metabolite profiles related to different plant-based diets and investigate possible associations between those profiles and the risk of developing T2D.
Recent technological advances in the field of high-throughput metabolomics profiling have ushered in a new era of nutritional research. Metabolomics is defined as the comprehensive analysis and identification of all the different metabolites present within a biological sample.
The metabolomics data of the study revealed that plant-based diets were associated with unique multi-metabolite profiles, and that these patterns differed significantly between the healthy and unhealthy plant-based diets. In addition, metabolite profile scores for both the overall plant-based diet and the healthy plant-based diet were inversely associated with incident T2D in a generally healthy population, independent of body mass index (BMI), and other diabetes risk factors, while no association was observed for the unhealthy plant-based diet.
The authors concluded that their findings support the beneficial role of healthy plant-based diets in diabetes prevention and provide new insights for future investigation