People with diabetes are told that there s no problem with consuming table sugar ...do not need to be restricted... because it s no different from all the other carbohydrates in their diet. According to the American Diabetic Association, table sugar, (a.k.a. sucrose) is perfectly fine in the diabetics diet:
Translated from doctor-speak into layman s language, it means: Since table sugar doesn t increase blood glucose levels any more than the same amount of carbohydrates in vegetables, grains, legumes and fruits, table sugar and food with added sugar do not need to be restricted by people with diabetes
Indeed: once carbohydrates get digested -- be it bread, pasta, rice, or sugar the blood absorbs nothing but glucose, fructose, and galactose, the three basic sugar molecules that feed the body with energy. The only difference is that the table sugar absorbs into the blood faster than the bread, the bread faster than the rice, and the rice faster than the pasta. Everything else remains the same. So the message is: eat, baby, eat just don t forget to take a pill or some insulin to counteract the glucose s effect on the impaired body.
That s despite one unquestionable fact: if you suffer from the predominant (95%) type II diabetes, the moment you stop consuming foods that convert into glucose, your blood sugar plummets -- and, technically, you no longer suffer from diabetes. So the smartest, the simplest, and the most direct way to get rid of diabetes and related complications is to substantially reduce carbohydrates.
The results of the conventional approach isn t pretty: over 25 million Americans suffer from diabetes (one-third of them undiagnosed), and another 30 million are considered prediabetics -- some of the diabetes' symptoms are already present, but not yet bad enough to justify being treated.
This book is partially based on the author's own experience with severe diabetes, which wasn t properly diagnosed because, as so often happens in younger patients, his fasting blood sugar wasn t high enough to diagnose diabetes despite all of the obvious signs -- weight gain, polyuria (frequent urination), dry mouth, nerve damage, and other, less obvious symptoms.
Why the book-length treatment for a problem that fixes itself simply by reducing the carbs? Well, as with everything else in life, success is in the details. There s much more to disorders of carbohydrate metabolism than carbs.
