The Diabetes/Rice Study

A study came out June 14th in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine looking at the relationship of brown rice and white rice consumption with incidence of type 2 diabetes. The upshot of the whole thing is that the researchers have determined that white rice increases your risk of diabetes, while brown rice lowers it. Should we all start eating brown rice?

Not I. I ate a lot of brown rice in my low fat/whole grain days. And you know what? The stuff makes me hungry. Really, really hungry. A typical low fat dinner for me might have been a piece of roasted chicken with the skin removed ('cause the skin is high fat and eeevul), a big serving of broccoli with Butter Buds (gag), and a big serving of brown rice, also with Butter Buds (double gag.) By an hour after this supper, I would be in the kitchen, looking for something else to eat. Now I'll eat the chicken with the skin, and maybe the broccoli, with plenty of butter of course, but no rice at all, and I'm full till bedtime.

This tells me that, for me at least, brown rice causes blood sugar wackiness and insulin release. No thank you.

So what does this study really say?

The researchers did an analysis of dietary and health habits, "lifestyle habits," and disease status of 39,765 men and 157,463 women. They found that high intake of white rice -- five servings or more per week (someone's got a mean Chinese food monkey on their back!) -- was associated with a 17% greater risk of type 2 diabetes as compared to those who ate 1 serving per month or less. In contrast, people who ate 2 or more servings of brown rice per week had an 11% lower risk of diabetes than those who ate less than 1 serving of brown rice per month.

I find myself pondering some interesting questions. Like "Who eats five servings or more of white rice per week, and what are they eating with it? What are they not eating because they're eating white rice instead? Are they, as I joked above, eating a lot of take-out Chinese food? What else does that say about their lifestyles?" I had questions about the brown rice eaters, too. Now, the researchers stated that the brown rice eaters were likely to have better health habits in general than the white rice eaters, and having been a big brown rice eater I can see this would be true. I may have been eating a ton of carbs, but I wasn't eating Lucky Charms or Krispy Kremes or Pringles or Coca-Cola, you know?

But we know nothing about total carb intake here, do we? For all we know, the folks who only ate a paltry one serving of brown rice per month might have been eating, say, lots of whole wheat bread, which has a higher glycemic index than brown rice, and gluten in it, to boot. Or perhaps they've been eating potatoes, which also have a higher glycemic index than brown rice. Maybe they've been eating lovely whole grain cold cereal, which is not too far off from mainlining glucose. Or rice cakes, which are higher still, far higher than that plain boiled brown rice.

The conclusion everyone seems to be drawing from this study is "eating lots of brown rice will prevent diabetes," yet that seems utterly unwarranted to me. Worse, they're extending it to "whole grains in general will prevent diabetes," which is running right off the reservation entirely. This study actually indicates nothing about whole grains in general. Indeed, with all the holes in the information, it's hard to draw any conclusions at all, except maybe "a little brown rice is better than a lot of white rice."

In particular, it says exactly zero about a diet that slashes carbohydrate intake in general, and grain consumption, whole and refined, in specific, to the bone. For people who call themselves scientists to extrapolate from this study to "eating whole grains prevents diabetes" is shameful.

I read a great analogy the other day, I think at Mark Sisson's blog, Mark's Daily Apple (see the blogroll), but I could be wrong. Anyway, it was a great analogy, and I'll pass it on, with thanks to whomever came up with it (and if the person who came up with it reads this, I'm in your debt and would love to credit you, so post!) Here's the analogy:

Suppose that back in the late 1950s, when it first dawned on people that smoking caused lung cancer, a study came out showing that people who smoked filtered cigarettes had a lower risk of lung cancer than people who smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Is it possible that the researchers and media would seize on this to tell everyone that they should smoke plenty of filtered cigarettes, because they prevented lung cancer? Remember that everyone smoked back then, it was an accepted part of society, you could smoke in movie theaters, in stores, in hospitals for heaven's sake. Cigarettes were endorsed by doctors. People couldn't imagine life without cigarettes -- just the way most people can't imagine life without grains, you know?

So a little brown rice is better for you than a big pile of white rice, or, for that matter, than some other things the health-food types might be eating in its stead. That just doesn't translate into "brown rice prevents diabetes," much less into "whole grains prevent diabetes."

And it's irresponsible for the media and the researchers to say otherwise.