{"id":11911,"date":"2010-11-15T06:56:22","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T11:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=11911"},"modified":"2015-12-27T15:41:56","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T20:41:56","slug":"stabilize-your-blood-sugar-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=11911","title":{"rendered":"Stabilize Your Blood Sugar, Really?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To diabetics, B.S. stands for blood sugar.\u00a0 We all know the other meaning of B.S.\u00a0 And when it comes to talk of blood sugar there&#8217;s a lot of bullshit going around &#8211; the most annoying of which, I believe, is the phrase &#8220;stabilize your blood sugar.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Fruit-X.jpg\" rel=\"mfp\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-11941 lazyload\" style=\"margin: 4px;\" title=\"Fruit-X\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Fruit-X.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"210\" height=\"317\" \/><\/a>For example: A few weeks ago I bought a seemingly healthful granola cereal for my kids, Fruit&#8217;X.\u00a0 Being Texan at my core with a soft spot for cowboy boots, and as someone who in the back of her mind thinks <a href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/a-sweet-life-staff\/recipes\/meal-type\/main-course\/simple-perfect-chili\/4129\/\" target=\"_blank\">Pioneer Woman&#8217;s Chili<\/a> is a sound breakfast, sometimes I get a little wowed by European things.\u00a0 In this case, I was in the supermarket and I noticed cereal in a bag, not a box.\u00a0 And when \u00a0I saw \u00a0the words &#8220;Swiss muesli&#8221; on the bag, I felt I needed to buy it, swayed by the word <em>m<\/em>\u00fc<em>esli<\/em>, \u00a0the umlaut upon the u two beckoning little eyes.\u00a0 While the Swiss probably consider muesli nothing more than bird seed, I allowed myself to see it as a symbol of high culture and therefore (obviously!) it was good for my children to consume.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Later at\u00a0 home, \u00a0I read the muesli ingredients carefully (raw sugar, glucose syrup, sugar, and honey!), and saw that it was pure garbage.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t get angry.\u00a0 It was fair game, after all.\u00a0 The ingredients were there, but I had been too busy gawking at an accented vowel to read them. \u00a0I should know better.\u00a0 But, but, but&#8230; get this&#8230; the bag also says, &#8220;Fruit&#8217;X satisfies you for hours and helps maintain your blood sugar at a constant level.&#8221;\u00a0 For days after discovering \u00a0that claim, <a href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/author\/michael\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mike<\/a> and I made early morning, pre-coffee, slightly delirious comments to each other such as, &#8220;Want to stabilize your blood sugar at 1,000 for the day?&#8221; while offering the bag of Fruit&#8217;X like a waiter with a tray of hors d&#8217;oeuvres at a cocktail party.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Assuming you are post-coffee and not delirious, please consider this: Is there any food or food product these days that doesn&#8217;t \u00a0claim to stabilize blood sugar or reduce insulin resistance, or lower blood sugar levels?\u00a0 I could search for a lot of links to share, but since this isn&#8217;t much more than a rant, I won&#8217;t bother.\u00a0 Go ahead and do your own search sometime and you will probably find out that you can eat any of the following to lower your blood sugar: dairy, cinnamon, prickly pears, oats, beans, shoes, and so on&#8230; Other than shoes, I&#8217;ve tried them all.\u00a0 They do not lower my blood sugar.\u00a0 They do not stabilize my blood sugar.\u00a0 They just don&#8217;t.\u00a0 Sorry.\u00a0 Fasting lowers my blood sugar.\u00a0 Exercise lowers my blood sugar.\u00a0 Insulin lowers my blood sugar.\u00a0 That&#8217;s about it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Now, please journey with me to the land of <em>Reader&#8217;s Digest<\/em>, which unlike my blog, is read by hundreds of thousands of people each month, and let&#8217;s take a look at an article called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rd.com\/living-healthy\/stabilize-your-blood-sugar\/article16070.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Stabilize Your Blood Sugar.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Why do I hate this article so much? \u00a0Because of these sentences: &#8220;<em>All this scary talk of blood sugar and body chemistry is intimidating to many people. But it needn&#8217;t be so; blood sugar isn&#8217;t really that complicated.&#8221;<\/em> Obviously RD writer has never woken up in the middle of the night with a blood sugar of 38, or found himself at 250 after eating nothing, or been stuck below 70 for two hours despite downing two liters of grape juice.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">But anyway, thank you so much, RD, for clearing that up.\u00a0 Now that we know blood sugar isn&#8217;t complicated we can safely go on to assume that diabetes isn&#8217;t really all that complicated either, and do the following things you suggest to improve our health like eating dairy, cinnamon, baked chips, and yes, we&#8217;ll all be sure to have our <a href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/jessica-apple\/blogs\/food-nutrition-blogs\/doughnuts-for-diabetes\/5396\/\" target=\"_blank\">doughnut <\/a>with decaf (not regular) coffee.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em>&#8220;British researchers found that combining decaf with simple sugars (like those in doughnuts, cakes, and cookies) reduces the blood sugar spike such sweets create.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Reduces by how much?\u00a0 Post doughnut B.S. of 240 instead of 250?\u00a0 And thanks yet again, RD, for making me think about eating doughnuts when I totally wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In another tremendously helpful article, RD tells us about <em>super foods<\/em>, a phrase almost as annoying as <em>stabilize your blood sugar<\/em>.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rd.com\/living-healthy\/10-diabetes-super-foods\/article121742-3.html?obref=obnetwork\" target=\"_blank\"><em>&#8220;Eating right is key to managing diabetes. Here are 10 super foods that will help minimize blood sugar and even throw your disease into reverse.&#8221;<\/em><\/a> Yay, minimized blood sugar and diabetes in reverse! Take a look at superfood number 4 &#8211; cereal.\u00a0 No signs of pretentious Swiss muesli, only good old \u00a0American high fiber cereals like \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www2.kelloggs.com\/ProductDetail.aspx?id=582\" target=\"_blank\">Kellogg&#8217;s Raisin Bran<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0It&#8217;s not that I don&#8217;t love Raisin Bran, but with 46 grams of carb in a cup and both sugar and high fructose corn syrup as ingredients, I don&#8217;t see any blood sugar minimizing potential, but&#8230; maybe that&#8217;s just me.\u00a0 And wait&#8230; there&#8217;s more!\u00a0 RD says, &#8220;Top your cereal with fruit and you&#8217;ve checked off a fruit serving for the day.&#8221;\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 Now with the 13 grams of milk carb my Raisin Bran is floating in, plus the 20 grams of fruit carb&#8230; we&#8217;re up to 79 grams of carb for breakfast (but we got our fruit serving and fiber in didn&#8217;t we?!).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I know these articles are written for a <a href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/diabetes\/type-2-diabetes\/\" target=\"_blank\">type 2 diabetes<\/a> audience.\u00a0 That said, I think <em>especially<\/em> type 2&#8217;s should be wary of foods like cereal, fruit and chips- whether baked or fried.\u00a0 And finding ways to eat sugary foods under the guise of stabilizing blood sugar is not going to improve anyone&#8217;s health, diabetic or not.\u00a0 As for me, the only time my diabetes is in reverse is when I walk backwards.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":53098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1501],"tags":[93],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.9 (Yoast SEO v22.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Stabilize Your Blood Sugar, Really? | ASweetLife<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Yay, foods that minimize blood sugar and reverse diabetes! 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