Within the past few years, studies have shown that cinnamon is helpful in reducing blood sugar levels!
Why does your blood sugar go up and down, anyway?
When you eat, the sugars and starches in foods get broken down into glucose, also known as blood sugar. Shortly after you eat, the level of glucose in your blood is high. Insulin (a naturally occurring hormone in your body) takes the glucose and uses it for energy or stores it as fat.
So what does cinnamon have to do with it?
One of the compounds that makes up cinnamon is called MHCP. In lab conditions, MHCP acts like insulin! A follow-up study of volunteers with Type 2 diabetes showed that everyone who took cinnamon capsules after meals showed lower blood sugar than the cinnamon-less control group.
After the study, volunteers who stopped taking the cinnamon capsules saw their blood sugar levels going up again.
Adding as little as a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon to your daily diet can make a significant impact on your blood sugar levels. And no, eating a cinnamon bun isn’t really going to have the same effect on your blood sugar. Instead, try sprinkling some cinnamon on your morning piece of toast, or on your oatmeal. A dash of cinnamon on your applesauce or sliced fruit isn’t bad — depending on the fruit and your particular tastes, that is. Vanilla yogurt with a touch of cinnamon sounds pretty good to me! Or try baked apples with cinnamon and brown sugar for dessert one night.
If you absolutely hate the taste, you can look for cinnamon capsules at your local health food store or online.
And the nice thing is, cinnamon has other health benefits! It can help lower the level of fats and bad cholesterol in your blood. Both things, by the way, that are normally controlled (in part) by insulin. In lab experiments, cinnamon also helped neutralize free radicals — the same thing that antioxidants do!