For the study, 15 obese people, 12 people with impaired glucose tolerance, or pre-diabetes, 18 with type 2 diabetes, and 9 people who were healthy and not obese, ate a high-fat meal after an overnight fast. Before and after the meal, researchers compared levels of endotoxins in the participants’ blood, which are the bacterial fragments that enter the bloodstream from the gut and are associated with inflammation and heart disease.
The results were that all the participants had elevated endotoxin levels after eating the fatty meal, but this was a significantly high amount in those with type 2 diabetes compared to the healthy, non-obese participants. However, the limit of the research is that it does not prove a cause-and-effect relationship, but scientists could still find the results useful. The findings could explain at least one way that obesity and type 2 diabetes can lead to inflammatory damage in blood vessels and other tissues, and therefore aids the development of new ways to prevent this damage.
According to the news release by lead investigator Alison Harte, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick, ‘High-fat, low-carbohydrate diets are often promoted to patients with type 2 diabetes as they have been suggested to aid weight loss and control blood sugar, but if confirmed in larger studies, our data show that being healthy is not just about losing weight, as these particular diets could increase inflammation in some patients and with it the risk of heart disease’.
She concluded that the research was not finished here, but ‘The next phase of our research is to understand the effects of small, frequent meals versus large, infrequent meals on endotoxin levels in type 2 diabetics. We’d also be interested to find out the effects of meals of different fat and carbohydrate contents’. However, you should consider these results to be preliminary at present, as they are not yet published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.