To clear away heat and lower blood sugar in summer, good food therapy products can help.

To clear away heat and lower blood sugar in summer, good food therapy products can help. The summer in Alberta is hot and long. How to maintain a healthy and refreshing life through diet. Today I recommend to you Qing...

The summer in Alberta is hot and long. How to maintain a healthy and refreshing life through diet. Today I recommend to you the best dietary therapy product for clearing away heat, detoxifying and lowering blood sugar: jujube bitter melon.

>Bitter melon, a plant of the genus Momordica genus of the Cucurbitaceae family. Bitter melon fruit tastes sweet and bitter. It is mainly used as a vegetable and can also be candied. The mature pulp and arils can also be eaten.

In Chinese folklore, bitter melon has the quality of "not spreading its suffering to others", "has the virtues and merits of a gentleman", and is known as "a gentleman's dish". In traditional Chinese medicine, bitter melon is believed to clear away heat, improve eyesight, and detoxify. Traditional Chinese medicine calls diabetes diabetes, and the nutritional benefits of bitter melon for diabetes have been recorded hundreds of years ago.

The Shanghai Institute of Life Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully extracted the active ingredient cucurbitane triterpenoids from bitter melon, and confirmed its effect in lowering blood sugar and improving insulin resistance in in vitro experiments. This research was published in Chemistry & Biology, a sub-journal of the authoritative academic journal Cell, in 2008.

Unfortunately, the hypoglycemic effect of bitter melon is still not recognized by mainstream Western academic circles. The main reason is the lack of evidence from clinical studies, especially the lack of randomized double-blind controlled clinical trials, which is recognized as high-quality clinical evidence. In recent years, a number of clinical studies from India and the Philippines have supported the hypoglycemic effects of bitter melon. These clinical trials have not been widely recognized because they did not adopt a randomized double-blind control method. Additionally, there are currently no relevant clinical trials underway in the United States.

This summer, Arizona State University, Department of Nutrition and Health Promotion (School of Nutrition and Health Promotion) launched two scientific research projects, aiming to confirm the blood sugar-lowering effect of bitter melon and improve insulin resistance through randomized double-blind controlled clinical trials, and compare it with the blood sugar-lowering effect of exercise. We squeeze bitter melon into juice and add sugar substitute to improve the taste. As one of the leaders of these two projects, I am now recruiting volunteers:

Project 1 recruits 12 type 2 diabetes patients. Volunteers need to visit the laboratory twice, for 2 hours each time. After drinking bitter melon juice, they can collect blood from their fingertips. Each volunteer will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. Registration website (Project 1) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GHLG9FM Project 2 Recruit 24 healthy adults with abdominal obesity. The waist circumference is required to be greater than 102cm for men and 88cm for women. Volunteers need to visit the laboratory once, which lasts about 2.5 hours. After drinking bitter melon juice, a small amount of blood sample is taken from the vein of the elbow. Each volunteer will receive a $25 Target gift card. Registration website (project 2) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GHR6V8W Contact person: Ma Tongyu. Tel: 6025662501. Email: tongyuma@asu.edu