Gymnema for Diabetes

Gymnema sylvestre extract for diabetes is one of the most common natural herbal remedies that integrative medicine doctors recommend for people with diabetes or metabolic syndrome. The leaves of this plant provide the part that contains the medicinal ingredients.

This substance has a centuries-long history of use in the traditional system of complementary and alternative medicine from India known as Ayurveda.

One of the effects of gymnema is to reduce the bad effects of eating a high fat diet on weight and blood lipids. Gymnema may also have some antioxidant effects to protect cells from the damage that high blood sugar levels can cause.

In terms of diabetes, these plant extracts can bring down high blood sugar levels in part by stimulating the beta cells of the pancreas to release more insulin of its own. This mechanism of action is different from that of some other herbal and nutritional supplements, which may act more on insulin resistance of the body’s cells than on the pancreas itself.

The advantages of natural supplements that can help reverse diabetes is that they are generally less expensive and cause fewer side effects than Western anti-diabetic drugs. These types of natural products are usually fairly broad in the scope of benefits they offer, with positive effects on more than one aspect of health. These considerations can all contribute to a significant advantage for including a plant medicine like gymnema in a total treatment program for diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Gymnema is also helpful as a unique suppressant of sweet taste and appetite for foods such as various sugars and even artificial sugar substitutes like aspartame. Some believe that this unusual property helps reduce cravings for sugar-containing foods and thus decrease the tendency toward obesity that many people with type 2 diabetes experience.

You can find gymnema in dry or powdered leaf forms for tea-like infusions, in addition to liquid extracts in an ethanol (alcohol) solution. An important point to consider is that while modern pharmacologists want herbal products to be standardized to specific amounts of a specific ingredient for increased reliability, most herbs are complex integrated mixtures of many different compounds.

In gymnema for diabetes, the plant may include 20 or so different active ingredients. As a result, it is possible to improve the laboratory testing of an herbal medicine but distort its full therapeutic potential in the process of “standardizing” it. To date, researchers have not found satisfactory ways to balance the dual goals of using the plant as closely as possible to its native forms versus of ensuring greater consistency and reliability in its ingredients and effects from dose to dose or batch to batch.

Stomach irritation is the most likely side effect when a problem occurs, and some manufacturers offer enteric-coated tablet forms to protect the stomach lining as a result. Overall, gymnema for diabetes is worth discussing with your doctor as part of a natural treatment plan for high blood sugar levels.