The most important thing which diabetics must learn is how to control their blood sugar levels.
Food contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. These elements are ingested and assimilated by the body to produce energy, stimulate growth, and maintain life. However, our bodies make use of this food differently in ratios suitable for our own unique requirements. Everybody has his or her own food intake ratio. Two hours after eating food, blood sugar can be measured by the glucose level.
Your blood sugar level should always be within your own allowable or tolerable range. A 200 mg/dl reading could mean that you're already suffering from diabetes.
Glucose always exists in our blood.The body uses it as fuel to make us function properly. Glucose is a simple form of sugar, derived from the food we eat. When the food is digested, carbohydrates, protein, fat are processed by our digestive system to generate energy. If we have too much energy available (i.e. eating more than our body energy requirements) it is stored as fat - ready-sources of energy which can be expended as needed. Glucose are obtained from sugar. The carbohydrates we take in our converted to sugar by our body.
Carbohydrate-rich foods are rice, grains, bread, pasta and fruit. Other foods like palm sugar or refined sugar are called simple carbohydrates, while others such as grains or tubers are called complex carbohydrates (starches.)
Foods like honey, white rice, French bread release their energy quickly - they are called high glycemic (also, glycaemic) index (GI) food. If we intend to prepare for a day of hard, strenuous activities we need such food to supply us with energy to sustain us during work and afterwards. However, if we only do light work (lke a typical day in the office) we should choose food that have low glycemic values such as cereals, oats, brown rice and carrots.
When we eat high GI food but do little or no physical activity, the sugars from carbohydrates are stored by the body as fats. Our pancreas produces an enzyme called Insulin to regulate the amount of blood sugar in the body. If we keep on eating high GI food, we need more insulin. The same thing happens when we drink alcohol too often. Quick energy food, because they're usually composed of sugars causes our blood sugar to rise rapidly, triggering the release of insulin.
The consumption of too much sugar can cause the the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas to fail to produce insulin. Failure of insulin production capability leads to diabetes. To avoid this disease, we need to balance our food intake. Our meal should contain the right amount of carbohydrates, fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals that are essential to making the body function properly.
The key to managing blood sugar for Diabetics is the moderate consumption of foods, and as much as possible to take only foods with low Glycemic index values. For sweeteners, a low Glycemic Index sweetener like coco palm sugar assures you of the slow and steady release of sugar in the blood stream, instead of getting blood sugar "high".
Coco Palm Sugars are made from the coconut palm (Cocos Nucifera) and has been shown to have an extremely low glycemic (GI) index rating of only 35 by the Philippine Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI). This makes palm sugar one of the lowest GI unprocessed sweeteners available. By comparison, most other sweeteners have higher GI ratings. Honeys are GI:55 and Cane Sugars GI:68.
