Glucose, a monosaccharide is our body's primary fuel source. Our brain can only use glucose to power itself. So, in eskimos who eat only meat, their liver converts fat into glucose to feed their brain. For the rest of us, the opposite happens. These days, we are eating too much sugar (mono/disaccharide) that our body has to convert it into fat for storage. Diabetes ( high blood sugar) is diagnosed by the measuring glucose coated on our haemoglobin (Hb), Hence the name, HbA1c test. Since Red Blood Corpuscles (RBCs) which house the Hb only lives for 2-3 months, it gives us the average blood glucose for that period. If it is more than 6.5%, we are considered diabetic [1]. We also need to measure blood sugar at two different points in time, Fasting blood sugar and Post prandial blood sugar. This is done to know the highs and lows of blood sugar in our body. If after fasting for 8 hours our blood sugar remains above 126 mg/dl then we are considered diabetic [1]. If after eating a meal (postprandial), our blood sugar remains above 200 mg/dl then we are considered diabetic [1].
As always, ask why? Why does our blood sugar remain high? Let's take Type 2 diabetes as it is something we can change. This occurs mostly because our cells don't listen to insulin anymore. Insulin is a hormone which tells our cells to consume the sugar in our blood. When we keep on eating sugar in excess, insulin gets secreted repeatedly to clean up the sugar in our blood. Like any kid with strict parents, after a while the kid just stops listening. The same happens to our cells as well. To compensate the body produces even more insulin until it cannot anymore. That's when we become Type 1 diabetic where we need to inject insulin externally. If you are not diabetic now, but your insulin level is very high, the probability of you becoming a diabetic increases correspondingly. So, in addition to testing your blood sugar, measure your insulin as well. As a rule of thumb, if our triglycerides are not more than two times our HDL , we are more likely to have low insulin.
So, what changed? why are we consuming sugar in excess? In nature, sugar is never found alone. Natural foods are mostly made up of starch (polysaccharides). When we put them in our mouth , the chewing and an enzyme, amylase in our saliva break them into smaller polysaccharides. As the food travels down to the small intestine, amylase from our pancreas breaks the polysaccharides into maltose, a type of disaccharides. Another enzyme maltase breaks the disaccharide maltose into glucose ( sugar or monosaccharides).
As sugar became cheap, we started eating more of it in the form of biscuits and cakes. Sweet dishes once prepared only for festivals have become a common food. Companies in the business of selling food have resorted to adding more sugar and tap into our sugar craving to sell us more food. Europeans brought tomatoes, native to Mexico to our shores. Ripe Red Tomato is a fruit laden with sugar. Since it is also tart/sour even when ripe, we have added it to our daily cooking as the sugar mellows the sour taste. It is very similar to citrus fruits. Same reason why we can eat more ketchup. Another staple of our cooking today is onion. We can taste the sugar in onion when sauteed because of the caramelization of sugar in them. Actually many of our foods today is made with onion and tomato as the base. The very famous chinese dish is sweet and sour sauce. Our equivalent is kuzhambu which uses onions, tomatoes and tamarind/kokum for the sweet and sour taste.
When we eat sugar, we bypass all the mechanisms that our body has built to extract sugar from starchy foods. Almost no energy is expended to digest sugar. On top of it, we are doing less aerobic activity like walking, running, and swimming which can potentially use up all the sugar we eat. The excess sugar in our blood damages our arteries and results in heart disease. Click here to learn more about heart disease.
We don't need to eat any sugar. For tea and coffee drinkers from India, milk already has sugar (lactose, a disaccharide). Eat more of less ripe fruits as fully ripe fruits contain more fructose, another disaccharide. The only way to avoid raw sugar is to find out what really goes into our meal. For that, we need to cook at home from scratch using natural foods. We have seen a healthy drop in blood sugar levels only a few months into our coaching program which encourages the above lifestyle.
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