Simple Dietary Switch for Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Proves Helpful (Study)

Within Chinese and Western Medicine there are a near infinite number of dietary reocmmendations. Some of these recommendations have strong research backed correlations with improvements in various health factors, and some don't. Within Chinese Medicine is can get even more complicated as recommendations are meant to be tailored to the persons constitution and/or diagnosis in Chinese Medicine terms, not by hard and fast rules. This means that dietary information in TCM can often be conflicting.

A group of reserachers from the University of Florence in Italy recently conducted a fairly simple study for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). They simply took a group of 40 patients with NAFLD and had one group continue to eat regular wheat grain products (i.e. pasta, bread, etc.) and the other group eat products made from khorasan wheat, or what is commercially known as kamut. Kamut is considered an "ancient" grain and has been shown in a number of studies to offer a beneficial effect on metabolic profiles vs. commercially grown wheat.

Basic markers for the liver such as AST, ALT and other blood markers such as cholesterol levels and other inflammatory markers were used to evaluate the affects. They found the following in the kamut group:

• ALT levels were reduced by 12%
• AST levels were reduced by 14%
• ALP levels were reduced by 8%
• Cholesterol levels were reduced by 6%
• Other inflammatory markers were reduced by 24-50%
• Ultrasound of the liver showed significant improvements in liver steatosis

The researchers concluded that: "short-term replacement with khorosan products is most effective in reducing metabolic risk factors and ameliorating the liver profile in patients with NAFLD"

Now I didn't write about this study to get people to necessarily switch to eating kamut vs. regular commercial wheat products. I wrote it to help illustrate how sometimes very small changes can make very large changes in our overall health. Dietary change can really weigh on people and if they can start with just a simple switch or two that have strong benefits, it can make the entire process easier. Many aspects of our current commercially grown food supply are debatable at best for our health, so generally speaking getting back as much as possible to a whole foods diet that contains food items in their most natural forms is a change that likely contains myriad benefits.