When you consider that the average American intake of added (non-naturally occurring) sugar is about 22 teaspoons per day, it’s obvious Americans have a serious sweet tooth. That’s more than 355 calories consumed purely in sugar. With consumption rates that high, sugar is nothing short of slow suicide.
For decades “health nuts,” including yours truly, have been warning about the dangers of increased sugars and/or refined carbohydrates in the diet. Let me tell you, it has been a real uphill battle trying to convince the public that consuming too much sugar could eventually lead to diabetes, especially when conventional medicine kept asserting that sugar is totally harmless.
But even today, with diabetes reaching epidemic proportions in this country, most doctors continue to preach that dietary sugar has no connection to behavior problems, mood swings, depression, or the increased incidence of adult onset diabetes.
The gears behind the clockwork—or why
sugar is slow suicide
The carbohydrates we eat are converted by the body into a simple sugar called glucose or “blood sugar”—your body’s fuel. To be utilized, blood sugar must move from the bloodstream into your nerve and muscle cells. Insulin is what carries sugar into your cells.
For insulin to work properly, it must be present in sufficient quantities, and the cells in your body must be “sensitive” to its effects. When cells don’t react to the effects of insulin by allowing sugar to enter through their cell walls, a condition called insulin resistance exists. Insulin resistance is often directly related to obesity. This is especially true when a person has a fat buildup in the waist or abdominal area.
Studies have shown that obese, non-diabetic individuals can reduce their levels of circulating insulin simply by losing weight. This reduction in the amount of insulin occurs without any changes in blood sugar levels. In other words, by losing weight, one can often overcome insulin resistance. This is true because, with less fat to complicate the picture, existing insulin levels become more effective at lowering blood sugar levels.
It should be obvious from this simple biology review that the regulation of insulin is a very important part of staying healthy and alive. Unfortunately, an increasing percentage of the American population cannot maintain this balance. When their insulin and blood sugar regulation capabilities get seriously out of whack, their condition is referred to as type II (or adult onset) diabetes.
Yet, what most doctors fail to tell their patients is that, even if they use the best conventional therapies available, type II diabetes will only get progressively worse. If your doctor has led you to believe that taking your prescription medication will either fix your diabetes or keep it from getting worse, you’ve been terribly misinformed. Diabetes is a disease in which you have to address several underlying factors.
Muscle up to help control blood sugar
First and foremost, you need to get your weight down. In almost every case of type II diabetes, the body can control blood sugar fluctuations naturally when the obesity problem is taken care of. Obviously, this will require both changes in the diet and at least moderate amounts of exercise.
Exercise does four important things. It increases lean body tissue, burns fat, increases the sensitivity of insulin, and raises the metabolic rate.
Whatever exercise you choose, it needs to be done for at least 30 minutes, three times weekly. Brisk walking, jogging, swimming, and bicycling are all good programs. If possible, I would also highly recommend that you add weightlifting to the exercise program. Even a very limited amount of weight training has been shown to increase muscle mass, which routinely begins to decline between the ages of 40 and 50.
An important benefit of muscle tissue is that, unlike fat tissue, it constantly uses energy. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolic rate will be. While you burn a certain amount of calories during exercise, more important, your muscle tissue continues to burn calories for hours after the exercise is discontinued.
When you consider that muscle tissue is responsible for 80 percent of the blood sugar uptake following a meal, every little bit of extra muscle helps.
How to eat when your diet’s too sweet
As I’ve said many times in the past, the best way to prevent a disease is to eat as if you have the disease. The diet for a diabetic is essentially a diet for anyone concerned about their long-term health and survival. Several points to remember include:
1. Split the food you eat into several smaller meals throughout the day. If you normally eat a sandwich at noon, split it and eat half at your normal lunchtime and the other half in the middle of the afternoon. You should also eat something mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Other “snacks” at these times might be a cup of vegetable soup, a handful of nuts, several spirulina tablets, half of cup of cottage cheese, raw vegetable slices, or half an avocado.
2. Don’t skip meals, especially breakfast. Skipping meals signals your body that you are going into a starvation mode. Your body will automatically reduce your metabolic rate.
3. Avoid artificial sweeteners. The sweet taste in your mouth triggers the release of insulin, even though there might not be any sugar that needs to be dealt with. Candies and gum trigger the same reaction. But if you have a sweet tooth that must be satisfied, you can turn to one of these two healthy, natural sweeteners: Stevia (which is also sold under the brand name “Truvia”) and Xylitol. Both can be found in health food stores and online.
4. Avoid soft drinks and all fruit juices, regardless of whether they have been sweetened naturally or with sugar.
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The only true way to prevent or treat diabetes is to make changes in both your diet and lifestyle. If the nutrition “authorities” adopted these simple guidelines today, diabetes could be prevented, reversed, and/or eliminated. Best of all, it doesn’t require some rare, outrageously expensive magic bullet or treatment program to stop diabetes. Lifestyle and diet changes are a cure we can all afford.
Until next time,
Dr. David Williams
