Sugar cannot be avoided.

[TuTusweet]

I am trying to reduce my sugar intake which was not high (IMO) before my GP told me she thinks I have diabetes and put me straight on Eucreas at one (not two) per day and said to see her in a year.

I have discovered that it is more normal to try exercise and diet changes first then metaformin before adding vildagliptin later if needed. So the tablets will not be taken until diet changes have been tried. Someone has to take charge here and it is going to be me.

This has caused me to take more notice of food product ingredients. I read a label today which had Mango chutney as item seven in its list. The chutney had its ingredients shown --and item seven was --sugar. So the 7th item of the 7th item was sugar. You would need a magnifying glass to find such a tiny amount of sugar on your plate.

Is that really the sort of level I should be obsessing about ? However Sweet chilli sauce from Thailand has sugar as item one. Even I can see the difference. I can also see the difference between a pot of ,say,trifle and a pot of zero fat zero sugar yogurt.
I am struggling to get this in proportion.
If I avoid anything with sugar listed I shall starve to death or commit suicide because my love for and deep appreciation of food has been destroyed. Or I will ignore all of it and carry on as before suspecting it is actually a money making scam organized by the pharmaceutical industry.

Can anyone please ease my mind a little before I go to bed and never get out of it again. Sorry but I have no-one to discuss this with.

 

[Squire Fulwood]

The best way to find out what you can eat is to use a blood glucose monitor. Eat a meal and test two hours later to see what has happened to your blood sugar levels. If your levels are too high eat less of whatever caused that next time.

There is no need to be any more obsessed than that but having said that I would recommend the obvious and don't put sugar in your tea or coffee and don't have sugar encrusted cereals etc.

 

[Andy12345]

No one said this is easy I'm afraid, it takes a lot of work and research, sauces are normally full of sugar so making your own is much better and can be fun, trifles and low fat yogurts are also full of sugar, if you feel giving up these things is impossible then it will be, Henry ford said if you think you can or you think you can't, your right, it's a mindset, I gave up all that stuff and believe me I didn't want to but have realised just how amazing food can be, I enjoy what I eat so very much more than I did, there's no contest my diet is terrific full of delicious tasty healthy things, I know what I'm eating and my taste has completely changed, sugar is poison plain and simple, not just for us but for everyone, we are being killed by food manufacturers and paying them to do it, this is just an opinion I have no superior knowledge of anything, I'm a dumb builder, but believe I have seen the light, hallelujah lol

Would I like to go to the shop and buy a massive trifle then stuff it down? Yes, do I want to die horribly before my time? No, am I going to go buy the trifle? It's our choice, in my opinion there's no god so only I will judge me, only you will judge you, do what you think is best

Sorry this is a little too deep, I just wished folks would do the right things (in my opinion lol) sheesh it's tuff keep saying that

Best wishes

 

[Madbazoo]

The important issue is to reduce your intake of carbohydrates and particularly the refined ones. Minor adjustments here can ensure that you can still enjoy many of your favourite meals. The important things to avoid are white flour (white bread, pasta, pizza etc), white rice and potatoes and instead look for seeded wheatmeal or granary breads, wholemeal pasta and brown rice (don't buy raw but look for pre-cooked such as Tilda). Many cereals can be very high in sugar and refined carbs. Eat more fruit, especially berries, but watch out for bananas as high in carbs.

Smaller portions and exercise will also help.

Look around this forum and you will find so much more information. Keep asking questions and you will always find help here. Good Luck with your quest.


Sent from the Diabetes Forum App

 

[mentat]

Sugar, specifically glucose, is the main fuel used by all the cells in your body! It's not a poison, and you don't need to completely avoid it. The problem with diabetes is that it accumulates where it isn't supposed to: in the blood.

When you eat any type of sugar (whether in fruit or juice or sweets or whatever) it gets absorbed by the walls of your stomach and passes straight into your blood. However, there's another big source of sugar: starch. Starch is made of long chains of sugar molecules joined together. When you eat starchy foods like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, even though they don't taste sweet, the starch in them breaks down into sugar and this all finds its way into your blood.

Sugars and starches are together called "carbohydrates" or carbs.

In a healthy person, the hormone insulin is then produced by the pancreas, which instructs all the cells in the body to absorb some sugar from the blood, thus ensuring there is not an oversupply of sugar in the blood. In a type 2 diabetic the cells become less responsive to insulin, so it takes a lot longer for the sugar in the blood to fall to normal levels.

The most useful thing on a food label is not the ingredients, but the nutritional table! This lets you see how many grams of carbohydrate are in the product. You will need to adjust for the portion size you eat, but that is a simple calculation. Clearly the more carbohydrates you eat, the more sugar enters your bloodstream, and the harder it is for your body to process. When it comes to fresh food without labels, i.e. fruit and veg, you can easily find nutrition tables on the internet.

As Madbazoo has suggested, it's not just how much but also what sort of carbs you eat. Usually more processed foods are digested more quickly, resulting in a big dump of sugar in the blood at once. It's easier for your body to process it if it arrives more gradually. If you think about eating a piece of fruit, your body will take longer to extract all the sugar from it than if you drink fruit juice. A lot of things with "sugar" in the ingredients refer to cane sugar, which is highly processed, and that is part of the reason to keep it low. This is not an exact science and different people's bodies react differently to certain foods, but as a general rule it's useful.

Losing weight and getting more exercise can increase the responsiveness of your cells to insulin, which will improve your blood sugars all round.

Yes it is a complex thing, but there are many ways to improve it! See what makes the most sense to you and put it in motion, then next time you get a blood sugar test you can re-evaluate.