Balancing Insulin, Balancing Monastic Life: An Integrative Review of Middle Path Lifestyle Practices for Metabolic Health in Buddhist Monastic Communities
Keywords:
insulin resistance, Buddhist monks, time-restricted eating, lifestyle medicine, Middle Path, noncommunicable diseases, ThailandAbstract
Noncommunicable diseases are prevalent among Thai Buddhist monks. Reliance on alms, prolonged sedentary study and meditation, and limited control over donated food create a distinctive metabolic risk profile. Insulin resistance may contribute to obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia in this population. This integrative narrative review examines five lifestyle domains—meal timing, food quality, movement, sleep, and meditation—in relation to insulin action, organises the evidence within a Buddhist Middle Path framework, and assesses claims commonly used in monastic health education. The review was anchored in a Thai-language health-education volume produced under a national research fund and supplemented by targeted searches of PubMed and publisher records. Cited sources were checked against their DOI records. Monastic studies indicate a substantial burden of obesity, hypertension, and dysglycemia despite a naturally compressed eating window. Evidence is strongest for improving food quality through a Mediterranean-style dietary pattern, engaging in regular physical activity and interrupting prolonged sitting, and obtaining adequate sleep. Evidence for meditation as an intervention for stress and blood pressure is moderate, whereas evidence for time-restricted eating and proposed autophagy-related mechanisms remains limited to small, short-term trials. Several widely quoted effect sizes could not be verified in the sources cited for them. A temple-level programme combining education for lay donors, environmental changes, and links to clinical care is biologically plausible and culturally congruent. Its effectiveness among monks requires cluster-randomised evaluation before efficacy claims can be made.
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