How cinnamon can help blood sugar

What common spice has been proven to help control your blood sugar? It's a spice that's probably sitting right on your kitchen shelf. It's everyday cinnamon. And if you have prediabetes or metabolic syndrome, adding cinnamon to your diet (and making the diet and exercise changes your doctor has already recommended) just might help you turn things around.

The discovery that cinnamon might be good for blood-sugar control came about when a researcher learned that apple pie was commonly known for its insulin-boosting activity. At first, the researcher assumed it was the apples; but research showed it was the cinnamon.

Since that "aha" moment back in the 1990s, researchers have conducted a long string of studies to better understand the spice's impact. Some of their results have contradicted each other. In fact, a review of 16 cinnamon studies noted that five of them showed that cinnamon didn't make a bit of difference when it came to lowering blood sugar.

Turns out, in most of the studies in which cinnamon didn't work, the participants were also taking metformin. Metformin is the widely prescribed type 2 diabetes drug that works similarly to cinnamon, in that it increases sensitivity to insulin. To show cinnamon's effects on blood glucose, you have to decrease your metformin dose and see how well you do with and without cinnamon.

Another study in which cinnamon had no effect looked at young people with type 1 diabetes. Since cinnamon doesn't replace insulin — the lack of which causes type 1 — it wouldn't affect blood sugar in those with type 1 diabetes, experts explain.

Finally, another study showed that healthy people without blood sugar problems didn't experience blood sugar dips when they took cinnamon.

Bottom line, then, is that for people with type 2 diabetes who aren't on certain medications, cinnamon does appear to have a positive blood sugar controlling effect.

Cinnamon's most active compound, methylhydroxychalcone polymer (MHCP), can increase glucose metabolism — the process that turns sugar to energy — by a whopping 20 times, according to early research. That's not all. Researchers also learned that MHCP is an antioxidant that prevents free radical formation. That can reduce or slow the progression of several diabetes complications.