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What’s So Bad About Carbs?
The Importance of Healthy Blood
Sugar for Weight Loss
By Dr. Pamela Frank, BSc (Hons), ND
Licensed Naturopathic Doctor
Forces of Nature, Toronto ON 416.481.0222
What do the Atkins Diet, the GI
diet and the South Beach Diet Have In Common?
·
These diets all emphasize the importance
of maintaining a healthy, steady blood sugar level.
·
As the name suggests this is the level of
sugar in the blood at a given moment in time.
·
Blood sugar can vary minute-by-minute in
response to foods, stress and insulin levels.
What is Insulin?
·
Insulin is a hormone produced by the
pancreas when blood sugar levels start to rise.
·
The more dramatic the rise in blood sugar
and the more sustained it is, the higher and more
prolonged the insulin production.
·
Insulin lowers blood sugar by removing the
sugar from the blood and placing it in the tissues.
What happens to the sugar?
·
In the tissue, the sugar can get burned
during aerobic exercise, utilized anaerobically turning
into lactic acid or it gets made into fat.
·
The higher your blood sugar, the higher
your insulin, the higher your insulin level, the more
sugar gets deposited into the tissues to get turned into
fat.
Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load
·
There are two measures of the impact a
food will have on your blood sugar: glycemic index and
glycemic load.
·
Glycemic index is a measure of how quickly
your blood sugar rises in response to a particular food.
The best foods have a glycemic index below 50.
·
Glycemic load takes into account the
amount of carbohydrates in a standard serving of a food
and the glycemic index. The best foods have a
glycemic load of less than 10.
Putting up a Resistance
·
Breads, pasta, cereal, rice, potatoes and
sugar all cause dramatic spikes in insulin levels and
put you at greater risk of developing insulin
resistance.
·
That is when the body stops responding
properly to the insulin so that in order to lower the
blood sugar, the body has to produce greater and greater
amounts of insulin.
How Your Husband/Wife is Like
Insulin Resistance
·
Think of it like you telling your
husband/wife repeatedly to do something, the more often
you tell him/her, the less often he/she listens, so you
have to keep telling him/her louder and more frequently.
So the body does with insulin - producing higher and
higher levels more often to try to get the body to
respond.
·
These higher than normal insulin levels
push more and more sugar into the tissues, generate more
and more fat and can lead to type II diabetes in later
life.
The Warning Signs
Warning signs that there are insulin
resistance problems:
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Blood pressure problems
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High cholesterol/triglycerides
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Obesity
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Tendency to form blood clots
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High blood sugar and/or
·
High insulin levels.
Diet, Exercise, Vitamins and
Minerals are Key
· Diet and exercise play key roles in
preventing and treating obesity and insulin resistance
problems.
· Choose foods that are low glycemic index
(50 or below) AND low glycemic load (10 or below)
· There are several vitamin and mineral
deficiencies that are associated with insulin
resistance: vitamin C, D, E, B12, folic acid, chromium,
vanadium and zinc.
Herbal Medicine and Weight Loss
· There are several herbs that can be used
to improve insulin sensitivity, normalize blood sugar
and enhance weight loss.
· Herbal treatments should never be used
without consulting a trained professional. Herbs if
used incorrectly can be toxic, have side effects and/or
harmful drug interactions.
You Can't Have Your Cake (or Bread) and Eat it Too!
Bread, any way you slice, is just plain unhealthy! You
can fool yourself into thinking that if you have a
"whole wheat" bagel it is somehow healthy - it's not.
Many "whole wheat" or "whole grain" products list the
main ingredient as enriched flour which means that the
bulk of what went into it is plain old refined white
flour. Even if another grain is listed as the main
ingredient, we do not eat grains in their natural
unprocessed state which makes it no longer "whole".
A whole grain is one that is intact, the way it grows
from the ground. We rarely ever eat grains this
way, they have to be processed into something else for
us to eat them - meaning they are probably not something
we were meant to eat. Grinding, refining, bleaching,
yeast, sugar and baking all go into making grains
palatable. A truly healthy food should not need this
much manipulation just to make it edible.
Copyright Pamela Frank © 2006
Beat the Heat with Cooling Foods
Traditional Chinese Medicine assigns certain properties to every food, such as warming, cooling and damp. With the high external heat, for most people it's best to eat lighter, more cooling foods. The following is a list of foods that can help prevent dehydration and alleviate thirst:
Watermelon, Apricot, Cantaloupe, Citrus Fruit, Tomato, Asparagus, Sprouts (alfalfa, mung bean), Beets, Broccoli, Cucumber, White Mushroom, Snow pea, Spinach, Summer Squash, Zucchini, Turnip, Watercress, Millet, Pearl Barley, Lentil
Copyright Pamela Frank © 2007
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