February is National Heart Month, a time to raise awareness of the importance of having a healthy heart and ways in which to maintain it.
Cinnamon is a spice that is taken from the bark of trees in Southern China and South East Asia. The tree it’s taken from is called a Cinnamomum. Cinnamon is used in both sweet and savoury cooking and is associated a lot with Christmas time.
I love cinnamon. The smell is beautiful. When I was a child my mum used to mix cinnamon with a bit of sugar and sprinkle it over the butter on my morning toast. I loved it!
There’s been an internet craze over the last few years for putting a table spoon of cinnamon into your mouth and eating it as quickly as you can. This is known as the cinnamon challenge, but when you think about it, it’s a stupid idea.
There are much cleverer ways of using cinnamon.
A study was done recently looking into the effects of spices such as cinnamon on fatty diets. After eating fatty meals, the levels of fats in your blood, called triglycerides, rises. Having chronically high levels of triglycerides will raise the risk of heart disease. This small study was done in just 6 overweight, but otherwise healthy, men and looked at the effects of spices in fatty meals. They were testing the effects of adding 2 teaspoons of spices, including cinnamon, into a fatty meal.
When comparing blood samples from those that had eaten the meal with cinnamon added to blood samples from those that had eaten the same control meal made without cinnamon, they found a considerable difference. The results showed that the blood antioxidant levels had increased by 13% and the triglycerides were reduced by 30% in those that had added cinnamon to their meal.
Other studies have been done looking into the effects cinnamon has on those with diabetes. According to Diabetes UK, cinnamon has been known to help lower blood sugar levels in people with type 1 or 2 diabetes by increasing insulin’s action and increasing the uptake of glucose in adiposes and skeletal muscles.
Studies from Diabetes Care have shown that cinnamon can help reduce serum glucose, triglyceride, LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol in people with type 2 diabetes and helped reduce any cardiovascular diseases.
More research is needed to bring about more definitive evidence on the properties of cinnamon. But it’s worked on many people in the past.
We have loads of cinnamon products available at GoodnessDirect that you can add to your diet in order to reap the benefits. You could enjoy a cup of Higher Living’s cinnamon tea, or just use ground cinnamon in your cooking, baking or morning smoothie. Of course, you may not like the taste of cinnamon, in which case you could use the Bio-Health Cinnamon Bark capsules instead.
