Buckwheat Component Maintains Blood Sugar Levels

BARCELONAD-fagomine, an iminosugar isolated from buckwheat seeds (Fagopyrum sculentum Moench), helped to maintain healthy blood sugar levels, and also showed a prebiotic effect in a new study published online in the British Journal of Nutrition (DOI:10.1017 / S0007114511005009).The researchers reported d-fagmine can be used as a dietary ingredient or functional food component to reduce the health risks associated with an excessive intake of fast-digestible carbohydrates or an excess of potentially pathogenic bacteria.

The researchers from Bioglane, a Spanish Research Council (CSIC) spin-off company, found combining d-fagomine with sucrose or starch lowered blood glucose in a dose-dependent manner without stimulating insulin secretion.

D-fagomine reduced the area under the blood glucose concentration curve (0120 min) by 20-percent (P<0.01) and shifted the time to maximum blood glucose concentration (Tmax) by 15 min at doses of 1 to 2 mg/kg body weight when administered together with 1 g sucrose/kg body weight. The insulin levels decreased in accordance with the decrease in blood glucose.

D-fagomine (0.14 mm) inhibited the adhesion of harmful bacteria, including E.coli and salmonella, 95 percent to 99 percent nt  (P<0.001), while it did not show this effect on Bifidobacterium spp. or Lactobacillus spp. In fact, at the same concentration, d-fagomine  promoted the adhesion of Lactobacillus acidophilus to the intestinal mucosa by 56 percent.

The study was performed by Bioglane in collaboration with different research institutions in the Barcelona area: the Institut de Química Avançada de Catalunya, CSIC; two Universities (Universitat de Barcelona and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and the Barcelona Science Park.

Sugar mimetics have the capacity to inhibit the intestinal enzymes that break up sucrose and starch into absorbable glucose units. In this way, glucose mimetic iminosugars flatten out the sharp blood glucose peaks that occur after the ingestion of refined carbohydrates. D-fagomine is a naturally occurring glucose analogue iminosugar, first isolated from buckwheat in 1974. Buckwheat contains a large number of relevant active substances and, based on this novel research, some of the healthy benefits attributed to buckwheat might be related to the presence of d-fagomine. Previous studies on buckwheat have shown it has a prebiotic effect.