Study Finds Low-Carbohydrate Diet Helps Kids and Teens with Type 1 Diabetes
New Delhi: A study suggests that a low-carbohydrate diet may benefit children and young adults with Type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition that results in the loss of insulin-producing beta cells, requires lifelong insulin therapy due to insulin deficiency.
Researchers from Charles University and Motol University Hospital in the Czech Republic found that a short-term low-carbohydrate diet improved glycemic control.
Effective management of Type 1 diabetes involves regular insulin administration, careful monitoring of carbohydrate intake, and physical activity. While achieving these targets can be challenging, particularly for children and adolescents, dietary changes may offer a promising approach to better control, according to the researchers.
The American Diabetes Association defines a low-carbohydrate diet (LCD) for adults as consuming more than 130 grams of carbohydrates per day or less than 26% of daily energy intake from carbohydrates.
The study comes amidst clinical guidelines from the International Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Diabetes (ISPAD) recommending against low carb diet for children and adolescents with or at risk for developing diabetes.
Despite ISPAD’s recommendation of 45-50 per cent of daily energy intake from carbohydrates for children and young people with type 1 diabetes, there is growing evidence that carbohydrate reduction is a popular strategy, the team said.
For the study, they investigated whether a short period of tightly controlled low-carbohydrate diet leads to a higher time in range without increasing the associated risks in children and young people with diabetes.
They included 35 children and young people with type 1 diabetes in a randomised controlled cross-over study. The interventions were five and five weeks of ready-made food box deliveries of isocaloric diets in random order: either a low-carbohydrate diet (LCD) or recommended carbohydrate diet (RCD).
Children are known to be at risk of hypoglycemia -- a condition when blood sugar levels drop too low -- with a low-carb diet.
However, the study results published in the journal Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice showed that short-term LCD led to an improvement of glycemic parameters without increasing time in hypoglycemia.
It did not “disturb the lipid profile or negatively affect the quality of life of children and young people with diabetes”, said the researchers.
