Red Meat’s Hidden Diabetes Sugar

All right, so my phone has been blowing up with this headline. Scientists link a strange sugar in red meat to a 63% higher diabetes risk. And patients keep asking me if they need to throw out their steaks. Somebody even asked, I'm not kidding, if you could still have his birthday biscuit. Hi, I'm Dr. Ergen. I'm an endocrinologist at the Diabetes Thyroid and and Hormone Center of the Treasure Coast in Port St. Lucie and Vero Beach. And here on this video, SugarMD, we like to actually show the study before we panic. So let's do that together. First, what is this strange sugar? It's called Neu5Gc. If you want to impress somebody, you can definitely talk about this study while you're eating steak. It is a sugar molecule that sits on the surface of cells in most mammals. Cows, sheep, pigs. But here's the weird part. Humans cannot make it. Somewhere back in our evolution, we lost the gene. It's called CMAH. So, our bodies don't produce it, or God decided that we should be a little bit different than animals. So, when we eat a lot of beef or lamb, we are taking in this molecule our body sees as kind of foreign. The theory is, and this is a theory, that it can build into our own tissues, and the immune system reacts to it with low-grade inflammation. Researchers have a fun name for that. It's called xenosialitis and chronic inflammation. Diabetes inflammation, as you know, is a big driver of insulin resistance, so that's why it matters. So today, the study, this was presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting in Milan this fall. A French group, the lead author, Dr. Leopold Fizeau, used a big cohort called NutriNet Sante, almost 80,000 adults, median follow-up about seven years. And during that time, 960 people, the Developed type 2 diabetes. Now they split everybody into five groups by how much new 5GC they ate. The top group compared to the bottom group had a hazard ratio of 1.63. That is your 63 increased risk. Now here's where I put on my honest hat. The 63 is a relative risk. Out of almost 90,000 people, 960 got diabetes over seven years. That is roughly one in a hundred. So when you hear 63 higher, You're talking about a percentage of a fairly small number. The study summaries did not report the absolute numbers per group. So I am not going to make one up here. But the absolute difference is a lot smaller than that headline makes you feel. Secondly, this is observational. They asked people what they ate. Do you remember what you ate yesterday? Three days of food records and estimated the new 5GC. They did not measure it in anybody's blood either. Either third and And this is the big one. When they adjusted for total red meat intake, the new 5GC link was no longer statistically significant. So we really cannot tell if it is the sugar or the saturated fat or the heme iron or the processed meat. Just the fact that people eating 97 grams of red meat a day might be eating fewer vegetables. That's also a possibility because a lot of people are meat and potato people and they end up with diabetes because they don't eat vegetables. There's a lot of compounding factors. Also, interestingly, new 5GC from dairy showed no association with diabetes. So cheese lovers, you can breathe. So what does this mean for you? Honestly, it lines up with what we already knew. Loss of red meat, especially processed red meat, is tied to more type 2 diabetes in a lot of studies. This is not the first one. This just gives us one more possible reason why. And here's what I tell my patients. You don't have to go vegan. You don't have to turn into a rabbit. it. Unless you want to, that's fine. Think of red meat as a side guest, not the headliner. A couple of times a week is reasonable. A reasonable portion, unprocessed, grass-fed, grass-finished is perfectly fine. Just get your vegetables in 8 to 10 servings. That sounds a lot, but a lot of Americans are eating two servings on average. So if you're an average American, you are eating broccoli occasionally, but 8 to 10 servings is what you're looking for. Now, the grass-fed beef the new 5G story, but it is what it is. It is a mammal thing, not a farm. Now, on the other days... You can do like fish, chicken, eggs, beans, lentils. So make sure that your diet has a good variety. Now, in the PREDIMED trial, a Mediterranean-style pattern lowered diabetes risk compared to a low-fat controlled diet. And that is the kind of eating I would lean into. And this is also a big one here. What you eat with your steak matters. Put a big salad next to it or before it. Vegetables, fiber, olive oil. Go for a 10-minute walk after dinner because your muscles soak up glucose when you move. free medicine. For my patients who are already insulin resistant or pre-diabetic, I also often add sugar MD super berberine into their regimen because it contains dehydroberberine, which is a lot better absorbed form of berberine. It doesn't affect the gut microbiome. As you know, berberine and dehydroberberine works on AMP kinase. Think of it as your cell's fuel gauge and helps your muscles pull sugar out of the blood. It's not a license to eat 20 ounces of ribeye every night, But it is a good support for for the lifestyle work that you're already doing. So, birthday brisket, yes, enjoy. Daily brisket, let's talk about it. Now, if you want more on how to eat for blood sugar and you wanna check out SugarMD Super Berberine or other blood sugar support supplements, go to SugarMDS.com. While you're on the YouTube channel, drop a comment. Tell us, what is your favorite red meat swap? I'm always looking for new ideas. See you next time, thank you for watching.