The news about AGEs isn’t all bad. We are not helpless against increasing levels of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in our blood.

My recent blog entry here reviews Joe Anderson’s site that recommends a daunting diet of low-AGE foods. In my “Diabetes Update” newsletter I earlier reviewed Dr. Helen Vlassara’s research that found foods cooked at high temperatures dramatically increased the production of AGEs and that they produce inflammation-causing proteins.

Changing how we cook is clearly the first strategy to minimize AGEs in our bodies. This means cutting back, if not eliminating, fried, barbecued, broiled, or baked foods. But there is more that we can do.
The influential professional journal Diabetes Care has just published its first review about diabetes and AGEs. The lead author, Dr. Amy Huebschmann of University of Colorado Denver and Health Sciences Center, kindly sent me a PDF of the review a couple of days before official publication. An extract of the article is online.

Two people who are passionate about controlling AGEs have discussed the review with me. Karen LaVine, a registered nurse and Certified Diabetes Educator, says, “Think of the huge positive potential we can have on the future health of this country, if all health care providers know these facts and instruct their patients about them.”

To Karen the key statement in the review is that “while diabetic animals fed standard diets developed expected vascular or renal tissue injury, age-matched diabetic cohorts fed a low-AGE diet remained largely free of pathology despite untreated chronic hyperglycemia.”

After thinking hard about that statement, I agree with Karen. For years, at least since the U.K. Prospective Diabetes Study and the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial were completed more than 10 years ago, the received wisdom of diabetes professionals has been “that keeping blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible slows the onset and progression of eye, kidney, and nerve diseases caused by diabetes.” While low A1C levels must be awfully important, a low-AGE diet seems to be even more important.

Joe Anderson, whose site I reviewed here earlier, agrees that the new review is an excellent paper. To him dietary AGEs reduction is “what has been shown to work, and that is what all diabetics in a more perfect world would be doing now. The other problem is that most real world people don’t have a clue about what a low AGEs diet would be.”

Joe goes on to point out that the new review nevertheless concentrates mostly on drug cures for a high-AGEs diet. Most of these are experimental and many haven’t even been tested yet in humans. But two of the most common drugs for diabetes, metformin (Glucophage) and pioglitazone (Actos), each seem to reduce AGEs in preliminary studies.

Karen points out that benfotiamine and pyridoxamine are the only two therapeutic agents available without a prescription that the review lists. Three years ago I wrote about benfotiamine – a synthetic form of Vitamin B1 – in my “Diabetes Update” newsletter as a promising way to prevent diabetic retinopathy.