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Today’s guest post comes from Dylan MacKay. Dylan is a nutritional biochemist who has type 1 diabetes and when I saw RD Marie Spano’s Instagram post, I knew he would have both personal and professional thoughts to share and so I invited him to do so.

I don’t know what it is with grapes but they always seem to be raisin my ire…

I mean as a person with type 1 diabetes, a PhD in Human Nutritional Science, and who does diabetes research and occasionally clinical trials looking at glucose response, maybe I’m not the one to talk about this, but I just can’t not.

Recently a Welch’s (*cough* big grape juice) “nutrition advisor” posted the above nutrition translation travesty on Instagram.

This is really kind of surprised me because when I have low blood sugar I often drink grape juice, How am I still alive? I mean I can honestly say there are times grape juice may have saved my life (by raising my blood sugar). Yet you could potentially look at this Instagram post and fairly think

“drinking 100% juice made from polyphenol-rich fruit juice does not raise your blood sugar”

unlike apparently that bad candy or pop that raises your blood sugar.

That would be of course 100% wrong.

Polyphenols are not magic sugar blockers, otherwise we would be using them to treat diabetes and you would get serious gastrointestinal upset from eating berries and grapes. I feel like you don’t even really need to be an RD to see this messaging is bad (Seriously, Welch’s advisors, how much do you get paid for your credibility?). Especially on a social media platform, where someone might not scroll to the end of the associated comment and look at the “reference” provided.

Speaking of the reference used for this knowledge translation crime, it is for a review article called Impact of Dietary Polyphenols on Carbohydrate Metabolism and having reviewed it I can say it does not in support the claim in that post. Most of the article talks about animal or cell culture results that show polyphenols may impact glucose digestion or absorption, but there’s nothing in the article showing it stops it. It even concludes that

“To confirm the implications of polyphenol consumption for prevention of insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and eventually type 2 diabetes, human trials with well-defined diets, controlled study designs and clinically relevant endpoints… are needed.”

The closest thing in the article supporting the Instagram post is

“The shape of the plasma glucose curve with reduced concentrations in the early phase and a slightly elevated concentration in the later phase indicates delayed response due to berry consumption”

about a study done with 12 healthy participants looking at berry puree (rich in polyphenols). The polyphenols (or something else in the berries) changed the timing of the blood sugar elevation.

I suppose the Welch’s RD nutrition advisor might say

“well actually Dylan, changing the shape of the blood sugar elevation means it doesn’t actually raise blood sugar like candy”

and we could get into a long argument of how you define “like”. When people are arguing over minutia or semantics big food companies have won.

This type of nutrition misinformation advertising works because ultimately it is designed to ruin peoples’ trust in nutritional science and nutrition experts (especially RDs). If consumers are confused and can’t trust anything in nutrition, they are ripe for the next trend or fad or advertising claim. That is a good thing for companies, but a bad thing for people.

If you like grape juice, drink it, I sometimes do when I have low blood sugar (I have chugged maple syrup for that too so…), but know that grape juice will raise your blood sugar, and liquid calories, like those found from the 9 teaspoons of sugar per glass of grape juice, are an easy way to go over on your energy intake. Most of us are trying to avoid excess energy intake, so for that, in my opinion, you can’t beat water.

Dylan MacKay PhD is a nutritional biochemist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. He is also a Clinical Trialist at the George and Fay Yee Center for Healthcare Innovation. Dylan has a special interest in human clinical trials related to lifestyle and diabetes. He is originally from St. John’s, Newfoundland where he started his graduate studies at Memorial University.

       

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These photos are from a CBC story yesterday on refugees crossing illegally from the United States.  They show RCMP helping the family of nine Sudanese people across a snowbank at the border, after running from US border guards.

As the CBC story notes, asylum seekers who cross illegally are arrested but they can remain in Canada while their refugee claim is assessed.  If  they try to claim refugee status at a regular border crossing, the so-called Safe Third Party agreement between Canada and the US means they are turned back immediately into the United States.
And in the United States, their future is now bleak.
I know I am probably quoting too much from this story, but it is just so great:

Eight asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.
As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, N.Y., four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.
One by one they scrambled across the snowy gully separating the two countries. RCMP officers watching from the other side helped them up, lifting the younger children and asking a woman, who leaned on her fellow passenger as she walked, if she needed medical care.
The children looked back from where they had come as the U.S. officer held the first man, saying his papers needed to be verified. The man turned to a pile of belongings and heaved pieces of luggage two at a time into the gully — enormous wheeled suitcases, plastic shopping bags, a black backpack.
“Nobody cares about us,” he told journalists.
…
The man then appeared to grab their passports from the U.S. officer before making a run for the border.
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The border patrol officer told his counterpart that the man was in the United States illegally and that he would have detained him. Officers on both sides momentarily eyed the luggage strewn in the snow before the U.S. officer took it, and a walker left on the road, to the border line.
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In comparison, refugee claimants can wait two or three years for a hearing in the U.S., and their legal costs can reach as high as $15,000. In the meantime, they can’t get a work visa, and welfare is all but non-existent south of the border, Taillefer added.
“I had clients who said they were living off soup kitchens and when they saw that their files would be treated in 45 days and they could get legal aid in Canada it made a big difference,” Taillefer said.
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Then there’s Trump — and the state of the world.
“Since November we’ve heard more and more about Trump’s politics but also of the attitude of Americans in general toward refugees (during the election campaign),” Taillefer said.
People who had legal status as refugee claimants or students started to say that even if they were accepted by the authorities the population would still see them in a negative light, he said.

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