Guess What – It’s no longer just those with Diabetes; those with Insulin Resistance (Pre-Diabetes), or those with PCOS that need to watch their blood sugar levels – it’s now pretty much everybody.
Our modern diet contains far too much fast acting carbohydrate in the form of white sugar, white rice, white flour (are you beginning to see a pattern here?) and all those highly-refined, fast acting, (also known as high GI, high GL) foodstuffs that are causing our blood sugar levels to be on a constant roller-coaster ride.
So . . . if you don’t have any of those little nasties mentioned in the first paragraph; why worry . . . right? . . . WRONG! . . not only does the constantly bouncing ball of blood sugar instability lead to
Diabetes; it also contibutes to
Heart Attack; serious
Depression; Early onset
Senile Dementia; several types of
Cancer (particularly Colon/Rectal Cancer, Breast Cancer, Endometrial Cancer, and Prostate Cancer); and, of course, just plain old
Weight Gain.
One of the newer epidemics sweeping North America (and much of the rest of the world too) is a little thing called
METABOLIC SYNDROME which is a cluster of risk factors, closely connected with the sugar roller coaster, that very quickly leads to so many of those above noted problems that we’d all like to avoid.
Could you possibly have
Metabolic Syndrome and not even know it??? If you have three of the following five major indicators, you very likely do . . .
Central Obesity – a waist size more than 40 inches (102 cm) for men; more than 35 inches (88 cm) for women – regardless of whether you are overweight or not. The infamous “Apple” shape.
High Triglycerides – above 150 (US scale) or 1.7 (just about everybody else’s scale).
Low HDL Cholesteral – lower than 40 (US men) or 50 (US women) – for other parts of the world; that’s lower than 1.00 for men and 1.30 for women -- this is the good stuff, so higher is better.
High Blood Pressure – higher than 130/85 (hey, the same scale all over).
High Fasting Blood Glucose Levels– higher than 110 (US) or 6.0 (elsewhere) after you have not eaten for 6 to 8 hours.
You can determine the first of these yourself -- with a tape measure. For the others, you need to see your doctor and have routine blood work done.
Many of us have already been informed and warned of some of these factors. For many more, things may be starting to sound a little frightening. You need to find out -- hiding your head in the sand cannot help. Can you do
anything to help the situation? Yes you can . . . lots. You can help to prevent those diseases if you haven’t already contracted them and you can help to control them if you already have.
HOW . . . the answer, of course, lies in controlling that Blood Sugar Roller Coaster ride by lowering the Glycemic (sugar) Load provided by all those highly processed, fast acting carbohydrates in your diet – and for a nice little bonus, you’ll also probably lose some weight.