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Diabetes, Desserts, and Sweetners
Diabetes does not mean that you can't ever have desserts. You can have desserts, use sweetners suited for you, and keep your blood glucose under control. The following are perfectly acceptable to sweeten your foods: Reduced calorie sweetners like Equal, or Splenda including sorbitol are fine. Any low calorie sweetners like aspartame or nutrasweet will work very well and have a good taste. In the past years, everyone with diabetes was told to completely give up sugars. Medical professionals were under the impression that eating sugar would rapidly increase your blood glucose levels. There was also a popular common myth that sugar was the cause of diabetes. This is simply not the truth. Carbohydrates in the total amounts will affect your blood glucose levels the most. It is the type of carbohydrate that can also affect blood glucose. You can eat sugars as long as you work them into your daily meal plans. These same overall guidelines apply to sweetners with calories, such as honey, syrups, or molasses. Refined sugars, and many sweets don't provide your vitamins and minerals that you get in healthier whole-grain foods. Therefore, you need to make certain that you are getting what nutrients you need from those other sources, and not sweets.
Try raisins, dates, or other dried fruit. Want to eat a rich dessert? Okay, but just a small serving size instead of pigout time. How about cutting back on the sugars and fats in your favorite sweets? Weightwatchers has some fabulous ideas for doing this. I highly recommend them for help! Try new recipes. I plan to put some healthier dessert recipes up on my site pages. Watch for them! Go for the lower calorie just as good tasting foods. Keeping your blood sugar on target is important. To do this, you should substitute small portions of sweet foods instead of having some other high-carb containing foods combined with sweet stuff too. In other words, substitute one for the other, don't have both. Another piece of advice is for instance, lunch. Say you are eating a bowl of soup which is fairly high in carbohydrates. You don't want to overdo it, so a good balance is one cup of soup, 4 slices healthy lunch meat, (like Healthy Choice, example), and 2 graham cracker sheets which counts as 1 carbohydrate serving. So altogether, you should only be having 2-3 servings of starch per meal. Not bad. Check your food labels. Foods that are labeled sugar-free, low sugar, or no sugar, still do contain a lot of carbohydrate sometimes. Look at the labels for sugar content as well which tells how high the contents are in this category as well as total carbohydrates. Be aware of sugar alchols too. Many of your reduced calorie sweetners have these. Sugar alcohols are mostly found in chewing gums, sugar free candies, and other carbohydrates. The ingredients Isomalt, Malitol, Mannitol, Xylitol, and Sorbitol are examples of these. There are times that these ingredients can cause diarrhea, moreso with kids. Foods containing sugar alchol are not "free foods." Your sugar alcohols do not raise blood glucose as much as other types of carbohydrates. In order to figure the amounts of other carbohydrate, you should follow some steps. For instance, subtract half of the sugar alcohol grams from the carbohydrate count. Many people ask whether low calorie sweetners are safe. Yes they are. They have all gone under testing to an in-depth degree before being put out there on the market. Low-calorie substitute sugars are safe for EVERYONE! Low calorie sweetners are an excellent alternative for adding the extra flavor or sweetness you need to enjoy your food. I enjoy desserts just as much with them as much as I do regular sugar, and in fact, find that regular-sugared sweets are too sweet! Another option for your favorite dessert is to order seamlessweb takeout food from your favorite restaurant.
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