Milk Thistle extract and Type II Diabetes

Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death in the US. A recent study looked at giving silymarin – an antioxidant constituent of the milk thistle plant – in addition to medication for lowering blood sugar in diabetics. They found that after 120 days, compared to placebo, the group receiving silymarin experienced a significant decrease in fasting and after-meal blood sugar levels, total and LDL cholesterol and liver enzymes.

“We don’t know the exact mechanism of action for this effect, but this work shows that silymarin could play an important role in treating type II diabetes,” says lead author Fallah Huseini, who works at the Institute of Medicinal Plants, which is based in Tehran, Iran.

Diabetes is an astoundingly costly disease to treat ($174 billion annually), so anything that could make treatment more effective could potentially save an enormous amount of money in health care expenditures. It has already been established that magnesium deficiency results in increased insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes.

Likewise, it is old news that the mineral vanadium acts like insulin in the body and can therefore significantly help to lower blood sugar. Studies have shown that it may be a very valuable treatment for type 2 diabetes. Studies, that is, that were done up to 30 years ago.

One would think that studies like this would be of significant interest to a medical system that spends so much money treating this growing epidemic of a disease.

Instead, millions are spent studying the genetic risk factors that contribute to development of type 2 diabetes. This allows a medical system infatuated with high tech research to ignore the evidence that type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly a disease of diet and lifestyle. One study found that over 90% (!) of cases of type 2 diabetes could be attributed to diet and lifestyle factors, i.e. over 90% of cases were entirely preventable.

A medical system that actually worked toward the goal of health care would make these and similar findings the core of its focus, since the potential for lives and money saved is enormous. But, unfortunately, that’s not the goal of the medical system in the US.