American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 66, 1470-1474, Copyright © 1997 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc

ORIGINAL RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS

Low dietary fiber and high protein intakes associated with newly diagnosed diabetes in a remote aboriginal community

TM Wolever, S Hamad, J Gittelsohn, J Gao, AJ Hanley, SB Harris and B Zinman
Department of Nutritional Sciences and Medicine, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. thomas.wolever@utoronto.ca

The high prevalence of diabetes mellitus in North American aboriginal populations may be due to recent changes in lifestyle, including the adoption of a high-fat, low-fiber diet. To determine whether fat or fiber intakes were associated with new cases of diabetes, we studied 72% (728/1018) of residents aged > 9 y from a remote aboriginal community in northern Ontario using the 75-g oral-glucose-tolerance test and 24-h dietary recall. The mean fat intake of this population (36% of energy) was typical for North America, but fiber intake (1.2 g/MJ) was very low. Logistic-regression analysis, adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index, showed that a 1-SD increase in fiber intake reduced the risk of having diabetes by 39% (P = 0.026) whereas the same increase in protein intake increased the risk by 38% (P = 0.027). There was no significant effect of energy, fat, starch, or simple sugars. These data support Trowell's original dietary-fiber hypothesis that "... dietary fiber depleted starchy foods are conducive to the development of diabetes mellitus in susceptible human genotypes."

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