Thinking Nutrition

Are chromium supplements helpful for people with diabetes?

August 24, 2021 Dr Tim Crowe Episode 79
Thinking Nutrition
Are chromium supplements helpful for people with diabetes?
Show Notes Transcript

Chromium is an essential trace mineral that is most closely tied to helping insulin work to lower glucose levels. That means you will often see it as a recommended supplement for people with diabetes. In this podcast, I’ll look closer at what chromium does in our body, where you find it in foods, and unpack the numerous health claims made about it in helping control blood sugars and even shed excess body weight.

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Chromium is an essential trace mineral that is most closely tied to helping insulin work to lower glucose levels. That means you will often see it as a recommended supplement for people with diabetes. In this podcast, I’ll look closer at what chromium does in our body, where you find it in foods, and unpack the numerous health claims made about it in helping control blood sugars and even shed excess body weight. 

Chromium is an essential mineral that participates in carbohydrate, protein and fat metabolism. One of the key roles of chromium is to help regulate blood glucose levels by enhancing the activity of insulin through its signalling of insulin receptors. When chromium is lacking, a diabetes-like condition may develop characterised by elevated blood glucose and impaired glucose tolerance and insulin response.

Over some decades, there has been research suggesting that chromium supplements may help lower blood glucose or improve insulin responses in people with type 2 diabetes, but findings have not been consistent and the evidence has changed over the years as more clinical trials have been done.

To showcase the latest research here, a systematic review of 23 randomised controlled trials published in 2020 did find some evidence that chromium supplementation could help improve levels of fasting glucose and insulin as well as insulin resistance. Doses of chromium used in the trials ranged from 50 to 1000 micrograms per day. And I’ll link to this review in the show notes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32730903

It seems though that when chromium is supplemented in people with normal or elevated chromium levels, no reliable effect on blood glucose levels is seen. People with a subclinical chromium deficiency which is below optimal, but not a true deficiency, may experience benefits when supplementing chromium, but more research is required to confirm this effect.

But it is not just blood glucose that is an issue in T2DM as there is a range of metabolic changes. So, how does chromium supplementation fare when taking a wider view of diabetes outside of blood sugar such as blood pressure, body weight, liver function and oxidative stress?

In a just-published meta-analysis of 15 randomised-controlled trials involving over 800 adults with T2DM, the effect of chromium supplementation was looked at. And I’ll link to this review in the show notes. And for the findings, it was a mixed bag with some benefit seen on blood pressure and oxidative stress, but not much benefit on liver function or body weight. Doses of chromium ranged from 200 to 1000 micrograms per day mostly in the form of chromium picolinate. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34237387

Perhaps those results are not so surprising considering an effect of chromium supplementation on blood sugar is not universal and it is insulin action that is the main role for chromium in the body. Not seeing a benefit of chromium on body weight is not so surprising. Chromium gets thrown around with gay abandon by those flogging chromium supplements online as a weight loss supplement purely on the merits of its role in glucose control, but that’s despite little evidence that it has much of a role in weight regulation in people with and without diabetes with a 2013 review of 11 RCTs finding just a tiny benefit of half-kilogram on weight loss. And at a cost of side effects such as watery stools, vertigo, headaches and skin irritation.

Looking at the studies as a whole, it may be that chromium works better if someone is deficient in it in the first place, which is usually only seen if a person has poor overall nutrition so that alone will affect a host of health outcomes. So you don’t always need to reach for a supplement bottle. Chromium is present in a variety of foods with the best sources being liver, brewer’s yeast, broccoli and whole grains. It should not be too much of a surprise to know that a diet high in wholegrains is also linked to a lower risk of developing T2DM as well as improving a whole raft of metabolic consequences of it.

So, let’s wrap all this up. From the research so far, there is a weak case for advocating for chromium supplementation to help with some aspects of the management of diabetes, but not everyone responds the same. And from my reading of the research, the effect is likely higher in those who are deficient in chromium in the first place. That is better addressed by diet first rather than reaching for a pill.

So that’s it for today’s show. You can find the show notes either in the app you’re listening to this podcast on if it supports it, or else head over to my webpage www.thinkingnutrition.com.au and click on the podcast section to find this episode to read the show notes.

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I’m Tim Crowe and you’ve been listening to Thinking Nutrition.