Weight gain and Diabetes.
What is it that is causing this epidemic that is leading to masses of people getting Type 2 Diabetes?
Is it fat or is it sugar? Or is it just the way we eat?
My belief is that sugar is the main culprit along with poor quality fat (more on fats another day) as well as the fact that many people now eat and drink sugar all day.
Today I want to talk about the sugar in our diets. Not the obvious stuff like cakes and biscuits or sugar in our tea but the less obvious sugar that our body makes from carbohydrates. Now don’t get me wrong, if we are doing loads of exercise or our insulin/blood glucose mechanism is very efficient then it’s not such a worry but as we age most of us become a little insulin resistant and for some of us it’s serious.
I’m not going into detail on insulin resistance today but if you’re interested please do let me know and I’ll include it another time.
So I was alerted to the impact of hidden sugar by an endocrinologist speaking at a nutrition conference. When he said that a medium baked potato was equivalent to 19 teaspoons of sugar (one tsp = 5g) it made me think, it’s not only processed foods that contain lots of sugar. Most people think that baked potatoes are healthy but this means that for someone who cannot metabolise sugar they are not so healthy.
You can maybe imagine how I reacted when the next client I saw with a pre-diabetic diagnosis had a diet diary that read – toast for breakfast, rice and peas for lunch and baked potato for dinner. Hmm, I got the sugar lumps out and demonstrated how many lumps she had eaten that day – the pile was high, 2 teacups full – the rice about 10 teaspoons and the toast 10 teaspoons also. That’s way more than the recommended daily allowance in the UK of 30g per adult and that’s without any chocolate, coke or biscuits.
So what should we eat instead. I recommend that people make swaps to squash, sweet potato, beetroot or make some cauliflower rice.
Recipe for cauliflower rice is here –