French researchers following almost 90,000 adults found that the people who took in the most of a little-known sugar carried by red meat were 63% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who took in the least.<\/p>\n
The sugar is N-glycolylneuraminic acid, usually shortened to Neu5Gc. Most mammals make it in their own bodies, but humans lost that ability after a mutation in a gene called CMAH. Beef and lamb hold the largest amounts, and dairy foods contain smaller quantities.<\/p>\n
Dr Leopold Fezeu of Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne Paris Nord in Bobigny, France, presented the work at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Milan, held from 28 September to 2 October. The results are preliminary: they have not been peer reviewed or published in a journal.<\/p>\n
His team drew on 89,953 adults in the NutriNet-Sant\u00e9 cohort, average age 42, 79% of them women, none with type 2 diabetes or cancer at the start. Each completed three 24-hour food records, and a food database was used to estimate how much Neu5Gc they ate. Over a median of 7.2 years, 966 developed type 2 diabetes. Compared with the lowest fifth of meat-derived intake, the fourth fifth carried a 41% higher risk and the top fifth a 63% higher risk. Neu5Gc from dairy showed no link.<\/p>\n
"It does not mean that 63% of high consumers will develop diabetes," Fezeu said, stressing that the figure is a relative difference between groups.<\/p>\n
Because the study is observational, it cannot show that the sugar causes diabetes. Adding body mass index weakened the association without removing it, with obesity explaining about 13%. Once total red meat intake was taken into account, the link was no longer statistically significant, so the authors cannot separate Neu5Gc from other parts of red meat. Intake was also estimated from food records rather than measured in the body.<\/p>\n
The researchers suspect chronic inflammation: dietary Neu5Gc can be built into human tissue and may trigger antibodies, a process earlier work has tied to heart disease and cancer. Their next step is to measure anti-Neu5Gc antibodies directly and to examine heme iron, another component of red meat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French researchers following almost 90,000 adults found that the people who took in the most of a little-known sugar carried by red meat were 63% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who took in the least. The sugar is N-glycolylneuraminic acid, usually shortened to Neu5Gc. Most mammals make it in their own bodies, but humans lost that ability after a mutation in a gene called CMAH. Beef and lamb hold the largest amounts, and dairy foods contain smaller quantities. Dr Leopold Fezeu of Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne Paris Nord in Bobigny, France, presented the work at the European Association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60829,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"yoast_head":"\n