Eat Like A Diabetic

I always thought that I ate really well, that is really healthfully.  One day I was sitting in a restaurant with a friend who had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and we were talking about which foods she could order.  Foods that I thought might be appropriate turned out not to be her best choices.  It wasn't that my choices weren't healthy -- it's just that they weren't necessarily optimum foods for her according to the Glycemic Index.  She was working from a different set of principles than those that had set my course for many years.  My friend told me a little about the diet plan she was following for her diabetes, and I found what she had to say very interesting.  As soon as I had a chance, I began to reserach the principles of the Glycemic Index on my own.

That was 10 years ago or more.  Since that time, health practitioners have written and spoken more and more about the Glycemic Index and the benefits of an "anti-inflammatory" diet.  The more I read, the more the information makes sense to me.  Basically the idea is that the American diet, high as it is in sugar and low in fiber, contributes to a chronic inflammatory condition in our bodies.  In this country, most of us eat in such a way that our blood sugar spikes and then drops throughout the day.  The spikes are inflammatory and contribute to most of the major diseases of aging, including many forms of cancer and heart disease, Alzheimer's and diabetes. 

As diabetics know, it is possible to eat in such a way as to avoid the spikes in blood sugar -- that is, it is possible to control diabetes through diet, maintaining a stable blood sugar level.  As we maintain a constant blood sugar level, we eliminate the spikes in blood sugar, reduce the work load on our bodies to handle those spikes -- and contribute positively to our longer range health picture.

The idea that it is important to maintain a constant blood sugar level is not new -- at least not to diabetics and their physicians.  The specific link to the diseases of aging and the application of the Glycemic Index as an important principle for the general (non-diabetic) population is new.  I think it is one of the most important health discoveries in my lifetime.

Eating in a non-inflammatory way is easy.  It's easy to locate and review a Glycemic Index that rates foods according to the extent to which they cause (or don't cause) spikes in blood sugar.  Eating foods that are lower on the Glycemic Index and eliminating or minimizing consumption of foods that are higher is much easier, in my opinion, than counting calories.  And there are nice surprises along the way!  Sweet potatoes are lower on the Index than white potatoes, for example, and therefore make a better food choice.  No surprise -- and correlating to our Fabulous Fiber Rx, whole grains are lower on the Index than refined.

So, the second pillar in my health Rx: Become familiar with how foods are listed in the Glycemic Index, and start eating the non-inflammatory way.