Increasing muscle mass, not just losing weight, will help prevent diabetes

Saturday, August 06, 2011 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: muscle mass, preventing diabetes, health news

(NaturalNews) If you want to avoid developing type-2 diabetes, you may need to do more than eat better and lose weight. New research published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism reveals that building and maintaining healthy muscle mass is also important in diabetes prevention, as high muscle mass is directly correlated with lower levels of insulin resistance, a known precursor to diabetes.

Preethi Srikanthan and her colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles' (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine evaluated data on 13,644 adults that they compiled from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III (NHANES III). They observed that for each ten percent increase in skeletal muscle index, which represents the ratio of muscle mass to total body weight, there was a related 11 percent reduction in insulin resistance, and 12 percent reduction in pre-diabetes.

"Our findings suggest that beyond focusing on losing weight to improve metabolic health, there may be a role for maintaining fitness and building muscle mass," Srikanthan is quoted as saying in USA Today.

This means that not only is it important to get plenty of cardiovascular exercise, which will help to shed the pounds, but also to perform weight lifting and other muscle-building exercises as well. In other words, it is not good enough to simply lose weight apart from a corresponding bulk-up in the muscle department.

"Extra fat has bad effects, but more muscle has good effects," added Daniel Ruben, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of Endocrinology at Temple University's School of Medicine. "These data are also consistent with data we see on exercise, that it helps decrease diabetes risk, and that a lack of exercise and weigh gain increase risk."

To learn more about diabetes and how to both prevent and treat it, visit:
https://www.naturalnews.com/diabetes.html