Unrefined sugar consumption and diabetes

Learn how low and unrefined sugar foods can improve a Diabetics quality of life.

As challenging as it can be to be a diabetic – whether Type 1 or Type 2 – there are other diets that can pose even greater challenges in terms of food choices: a candida diet, for one, or a no flour no sugar diet, for another.

I’m not suggesting that diabetics have it easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Monitoring your blood sugar is high maintenance, there’s no way around it.

But unlike in those diets, sugar is not off-limits to you if you have diabetes – you just need to be smart about how much of it you have, and in what forms, because for diabetics, it’s as much about the carbohydrates as it is the sugars.

The advantage of being limited by the constraints of a diabetes diet, meanwhile, is that it tends to force you into healthier eating choices than you would otherwise have. It’s healthy to limit our starch intake. It’s healthy to cut down on sweets.

And it’s healthy to replace some of those foods with foods that we ideally should be having more of anyway, particularly vegetables and high-fiber fruits. To get more specific, I’m going to give you three tips for lowering your sugar consumption, which, in the process, will give you as a diabetic a higher quality of life.

1. Use Unrefined Sugar – Never Refined Sugar

This one may seem easy, but it’s deceptively simple. Old habits die hard. Not only is it easy to reach for a spoonful of sugar for our cereal or our coffee or tea, it’s just as easy to reach for honey, or artificial sweeteners.

Yes, is it true: technically, artificial sweeteners like Splenda are acceptable for diabetics, but I don’t like the habits artificial sweeteners encourage. If we’re always using artificial sweeteners to sweeten our foods and drinks, we make sweetness our norm.

And what happens if we reach for a pink, blue, or yellow packet, and there are none? Do we then need to reach for the sugar?

And what’s wrong with honey, you may ask? Honey, which is most frequently found in pasteurized form, has a high glycemic index, meaning it tends to spike blood sugar levels quickly.

You’ll find different stats online about what honey’s glycemic index is – some say it’s higher than sucrose/sugar, some say just a little lower – but it’s safe to conclude in either case that it’s not a diabetic’s best friend.

Raw honey is said to have a much lower and safer glycemic index, however, so if you have access to raw, try using it instead, but in modest quantities.

2. Choose Dark Chocolate Over Milk Chocolate

If you’re a diabetic who also happens to be a chocolate lover, you may opt for various sugar-free chocolates out there that are made to be diabetic-friendly, but for reasons mentioned above, plus the fact that there’s not a lot of established research on what kind of effects these sugar substitutes may have, I would avoid them.

Instead, if you’re going to buy chocolate, go for the real stuff, that by its very nature must have sugar added. But if you choose dark chocolate, you’re not only getting less sugar per serving, you’re also getting higher quality, because you’re getting more chocolate instead of sugar.

And the higher percentage cacao (or cocoa) you choose, the better (I would recommend at least 70%). If you’re not used to high-percentage cacao chocolate, because milk chocolate is your default, give yourself time to get adjusted; you’ll find the higher percentage chocolates the most satisfying and the best-tasting in the long run.

3. Choose Drinks With No Added Sweeteners

As is the case with artificial sweeteners, drinking diet sodas is technically safe for diabetics, but it’s not the best habit in my opinion. But if you live by your diet Cokes, then that’s where you are and you may continue to remain.

But if you’re not a slave to diet soda, see if you can get into healthier drinking habits. Water is of course the best, but I admit that everyone likes to mix it up, whether it’s drinking coconut milk, iced tea or juice.

Just pay attention to the ingredients: lots of canned and bottled iced teas on the market are sweetened; opt for the unsweetened versions. And for juices, be sure to avoid high fructose corn syrup or other additives.

Choose juices that are 100% juice, with no added sweeteners, and here’s a great additional tip: these 100% juices are so sweet on their own that if you water them down in 1:1 ratio, or even more water, you get more drink with even less sugar, but they still have that satisfying juice flavor. And that’s choosing wisely.

Author Bio: Michael Shaw writes about dietary choices and healthy alternatives to refined flours and refined sugars at his website, No Flour, No Sugar Diet.