Mindful munching

It’s that time of year again: Christmas buffets abound and at every turn you find yourself offered enormous meals fit for a Viking returned from a stirring few months of plunder having been sustained only by salt herring and splinters from the ship’s oars. Quite aside from the serving sizes, your challenge is to navigate your way through foods largely consisting of fat wrapped in sugar and then dipped in fat again. It is a culinary minefield out there and your blood fats and blood sugars are the things that could explode, unless…you follow the advice of a new study and apply a little mindfulness to your eating.

The study was done on people aged between 35 and 65 who had all been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes for at least one year. All of them had a BMI (body mass index) that put them in the overweight category. They also all had a HbA1c reading of at least 7. HbA1c is a molecule used to measure what has been happening with your blood sugar levels over the past few months. In your blood are red blood cells that include the molecule haemoglobin. Glucose sticks to the haemoglobin to make a “glycosylated haemoglobin” molecule, called haemoglobin A1C or HbA1c. A normal non-diabetic HbA1C is less than 5.7 per cent, pre-diabetes is 5.7 per cent to 6.4 per cent, and diabetes is 6.5 per cent or higher.

The subjects in the study were randomly assigned to either be in the mindful eating group or in a group given a traditional diabetes self-management program. The study went for eight weeks and each group spent the same amount of face-to-face time with their trainers.

The mindfulness program involved sessions with trainers who encouraged the participants to cultivate “inner wisdom” (mindful awareness when eating) as well as “outer wisdom” which involved seeking personal knowledge of optimal nutrition for diabetics. Each session involved a guided meditation oriented toward the subject’s relationship with food. The subjects also took away a CD to help with home meditation practice. The mindfulness group were encouraged to tune into their bodies before eating and make conscious choices about how much to eat.

The traditional treatment group were given general information about diabetes with emphasis on nutrition and food choice. It looked at types of carbohydrates, food labelling and healthy options when dining.

In both groups HbA1c levels dropped by around 0.7 to 0.8 per cent. The traditional diet group tended to lose a little more weight than the mindfulness group but the differences were not significant and both groups lost between 1.6 and 2.7 kilos over the eight weeks. So while education about food is effective for diabetics it appears that mindfulness when it comes to eating is almost as effective.

The extension of this is that a touch of mindful mastication might get you through the festive season. But it could also be your ticket to year-round healthy eating.