Imagine if you could control your diabetes just by taking a walk. Well, experts believe that by taking a ten-minute stroll after every meal it could aid type two diabetics to manage their condition.
Patients who took a constitutional jaunt three times a day, after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, had lower blood sugar levels compared to people who went for a single 30-minute walk each day.
Although type two diabetics are encouraged to embrace regular physical activity – there has been no consensus among experts about when to exercise.
But now scientists, whose results were published in the Diabetologia medical journal, are calling for exercise guidelines.
Researchers discovered that people who took regular exercise within five minutes eating a meal noted that their blood sugar dropped 22 percent immediately after their walk and that their blood sugar levels were 12 percent lower overall than people who went for a single walk a day.
The researchers, from the University of Otago in New Zealand, noted that despite spending the same amount of time into walking, individuals who walked after each main meal showed significantly greater overall activity.
‘The improvement in overall postprandial glycemia was largely accounted for by lower blood glucose levels after the evening meal when carbohydrate consumption was high and participants tended to be more sedentary.’
The researchers did not explore definitively why exercising after meals proved to be more effective than one thirty minute session, but previous research suggests muscular contractions shortly after eating helps transport the newly digested glucose into the muscle cells, without the need for insulin.
Also published in the Diabetologia journal, a second report suggests that regular exercise by healthy people significantly reduces the likelihood that they will develop diabetes.
The University of Cambridge and University College London researchers suggest that people who walk for 30 minutes a day, five times a week, are 26 per cent lower less likely of developing type two diabetes.
