A diet rich in beans and nuts has outperformed the long recommended whole-grain diet for people with Type 2 diabetes, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Scientists led by David Jenkins at the University of Toronto reached this conclusion after following 210 patients that had been randomly assigned to one diet or the other.

Both diets were low in trans and saturated fat. Both groups were instructed to consume 8 servings of vegetables and fruit per day (who does this?).

The bean and nut diet causes mild excursions in blood glucose after meals, and is therefore described as having a low glycemic index. It features beans, lentils, peas, pasta, rye and pumpernickel breads, as well as oatmeal and oat bran cereals.

The high-cereal high fiber diet emphasizes “brown foods” like breakfast cereal, whole-grain bread, potatoes with skin and brown rice.

The scientists found that participants consuming the bean and nut diet experienced a 0.5% decrease in mean hemoglobin A1C levels — a measure of diabetes control in recent months, as well as a rise of 1.7% in their HDL (good) cholesterol levels.

Those consuming a whole-grain diet had less than half the beneficial reduction in hemoglobin A1C and an actual drop of 0.2% in HDL cholesterol.

 “That’s…important… because there’s a double whammy for people who are diabetic,” Jenkins told the New York Times. “If they’re men, they have twice the risk of heart disease. Women have 4 times the risk. If you can hit the heart disease, you may have something useful.”

Jenkins then added, “Pharmaceuticals used to control Type 2 diabetes have not shown the expected benefits in terms of reducing cardiovascular disease.”

“We’ve been telling people to eat whole grains for a long time,” said Emmy Suhl, a nutrition and diabetes educator at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.  “This study shows, it’s not enough to have whole grains. Low-glycemic carbohydrates do a better job.”

Every winter it seems, Russia and Ukraine get into a spat about Russian gas supplies, but this year the squabble ballooned into an energy emergency for the entire European Union. 

The EU receives 25% of its gas from Russian gas conglomerate Gazprom via a pipeline coursing through Ukraine.

Ukraine is itself a Gazprom customer and for years it paid less than half the market price for gas. In the fall, the 2 countries agreed that Ukraine would transition slowly to market prices but Ukraine wanted to increase is transit fees on gas headed for the EU in return.

Gazprom made an insulting offer in this regard. Ukraine responded with an outlandish counter. The parties then stopped talks just as Vlad the Impaler sniffed for the umpteenth time that his feelings got hurt when the Ukrainians supplied arms to the Georgians during last summer’s dance party in Tbilisi.

Who knows what happened over the holidays but just after new year a shady court ruling in Kiev voided the pricing agreement and hours later the Impaler ordered Gazprom to cut supplies to Europe through Ukraine by an amount it accused Ukraine of siphoning off for internal use.

“Ukraine had neither the need nor the intention to steal Russian gas,” Hryhory Nemyria, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister told the Economist. And he added that Russia’s crass act in the dead of winter exposes it as an energy bully.

To which Gazprom’s Alexander Medvedev retorted that Ukraine “is responsible for everything that has happened.”

The squabble has hit Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Slovakia the hardest. It has impacted France, Germany and Italy as well.

Then over the weekend, Russia noticed its gas reservoirs were topped off meaning if it didn’t resume pumping soon, it would have to start burning gas.

Seeing the folly in that, the sides just agreed to get the gas flowing again and have neutral observers monitor the pipeline. There are also plans to have both boys stand in a corner for 5 minutes.

Call it sad, ironic, paradoxical or whatever you want, but it’s true—there’s a link between hunger and obesity.

According to the Partnership for America’s Economic Success for example, toddlers living with families that have gone hungry are more than 3 times as likely to be obese.

And anti-hunger activists have long known that poor people purchase more fast food and calorie-leaden snacks because they are cheaper and easier to access than, say fruits and vegetables.

Right now an all-time record 31.5 million Americans record receive food stamps, and a third of our children are overweight or obese. Many expect these problems to worsen as the Great Economic Crisis unfolds.

But some public health advocates think the Crisis may have created an opportunity to link food assistance to proper nutrition once and for all.

Or as Kenneth Hecht, executive director of California Food Policy Advocates told the Washington Post. “What we wanted to do (in the past) was get more calories to people. Now we find it isn’t more calories. It’s more of the right calories.”

His non-profit lobbied California legislators to create incentives for food stamp recipients to purchase nutritious food. They did and the Terminator signed the bill, but the program languished due to poor funding.

But other NPOs have interesting experiments underway. The Wholesome Wave Foundation recently began a program for example that doubles the value of food stamps when used to buy fruit and vegetables.

“We’re not taking away your benefits because you spend them on Twinkies,” Michel Nischan, Wholesome Wave’s president told the Washington Post. “But if you decide you want to spend it on fresh tomatoes, you’ll get double your money.”