Nutrition & Deficiencies

Conditions

• Peripheral neuropathy Neuropathy is not one disease but a pattern of nerve damage with more than a hundred causes. Finding the cause is what makes it treatable.

Symptoms

• Tingling in hands and feet Everyone knows the pins and needles of a leg that has gone to sleep. Tingling that arrives without a reason, keeps returning, or spreads is a different matter, and the pattern usually points to the cause.

Health guides

• Fibre and blood sugar Fibre is the part of plant food the body cannot digest — and that is precisely why it steadies blood glucose. Most adults eat about half the amount recommended.
• Foods that affect blood sugar The glucose response to a meal depends less on any single "good" or "bad" food than on carbohydrate amount, how processed it is, and what it is eaten with. Here is how the pieces fit.
• Vitamin B12 deficiency B12 deficiency damages nerves before it shows in a blood count, and the damage can become permanent. It is common, easily missed, and one of the most rewarding things to find.

Ingredients

What the evidence says about ingredients commonly used in this area.

• Beta-sitosterol Beta-sitosterol has better prostate-symptom trial results than saw palmetto — from a handful of studies in the 1990s that were never repeated at scale. Its cholesterol effect is on much firmer ground.
• Chromium Chromium is one of the most common ingredients in blood sugar supplements and one of the most contested. Trials disagree, and the reasons why matter more than the headline.
• Cinnamon Cinnamon is the household spice most often claimed to lower blood sugar. Dozens of small trials have tested it, and they do not agree — partly because "cinnamon" is not one thing.
• Magnesium Magnesium is involved in hundreds of enzyme reactions, and low levels are common in people with type 2 diabetes. That is why it helps some people and not others — the benefit depends on where you start.