Is the reason only why the doctors say not to eat sugar is because of BS Level? Or are there other reasons? If theres other reasons, I would like to know =]
Yeah I don’t know which doctors say not to eat sugar… it’s impossible. I guess just when you eat simple sugars, rather than whole, complex carbohydrate sugars, insulin doesn’t respond to it well. In most cases if you have the sugar you’re talking about, without doing it with protein or whole carbs, and take insulin with it, your blood sugar will drop.
Actually, it’s not like sugar is a forbidden food when you live with diabetes. It’s simply a food that many of us use only in moderation because it can make it difficult to keep blood glucose numbers on target.
Doctors who say don’t eat sugar may be concerned about blood glucose levels and about nutrition. But carbs of all sorts, including sugar, affect our blood glucose.
Although sugars (oses) are a fast form of energy, the form they come in may not offer much nutritional value, as in supplying you with vitamins and minerals. For example, a glucose tablet made with dextrose pretty much only supplies you with 4 grams pure dextrose. No vitamins and minerals.
Complex carbohydrates (such as oats, potatoes with skin, enriched cereals, etc) contain combinations of oses, fiber, and other nutrients and thus offer more macro- and micro-nutrients.
Your body’s processes of converting complex foods with fiber and protein to glucose (which is used as a fuel source by cells) may take longer than the process of converting pure forms of sugars (such as the dextrose in glucose tablets).
Theoretically, if you eat 15 grams of dextrose for one meal and 15 grams of carb in, say oatmeal, on another, you may find that the peak blood glucose from both is at the same level, but that the peak happens at different times (within 15 minutes with the dextrose, within 2 hours with the oatmeal). That’s important because rapid-acting insulin can only work so fast, so if your blood glucose in response to the food peaks before your insulin peaks, the peak number may be higher than you like. Of course, choosing foods, portions, and timing of insulin is a VERY inexact science.
It is possible to dose insulin to “cover” simple sugars, but it is easy to misjudge the amount of insulin needed and can be difficult to limit portions.