High Fat, Low-Carb Diet Lowers Blood Sugar and Improves Exercise in Mice

Managing life with diabetes involves many factors , including diet and exercise. Research is ongoing about how diet may interact with other components and affect diabetes risk.

A recent study published in Nature Communications explored how the ketogenic diet affected exercise training in mice with high blood sugar. The researchers found that the diet lowered blood glucose levels, improved aerobic exercise adaptation, and even positively impacted the exercising mice’s skeletal muscles.

The authors of this study explain that chronic high blood sugar can affect proper adaptation to aerobic exercise. People with high blood sugar may struggle to make improvements in peak oxygen consumption rate , which has to do with the highest level of oxygen the body can use in high-intensity exercise.

Previous research from this group had shown that high blood sugar in mice “impairs aerobic adaptation.” They wanted to see if the ketogenic diet could help restore this in mice that underwent exercise training. The ketogenic diet involves consuming higher amounts of fat and lower amounts of carbohydrates.