According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 347 million people worldwide are suffering from diabetes. A healthy lifestyle, healthy diet and regular exercise can prevent or delay the onset of Type 2 diabetes.
Not sure whether you are a believer of this statement that if we eat too much sugar we are in danger of diabetes.
In reality, this is not the case that eating too much sugar will cause diabetes rather is the inability of our body to convert the ingested food into energy thus caused diabetes to develop. Nevertheless, cutting down sugar intake does help in controlling the blood sugar level of a person with diabetes.
The following are tips that I have recently learnt that can help us in reducing sugar in our diet:
- Regularly cut back on the amount of sugar added to our foods or drinks. One way to start with is to cut the usual amount of sugar we add by half and to further cut down from there.
- Try to avoid canned fruits in syrup, especially heavy syrup. It is always good to take a whole fruit or fresh fruit juice instead.
- Enhance food with spices such as ginger, allspice, cinnamon or nutmeg instead of sugar.
- We can add more variety in our food by incorporating whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables in our daily diet.
- Use artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, stevia or saccharin in moderation. Non-nutritive sweeteners may be a way to satisfy our sweet tooth without adding more calories to our diet.
- Learn to be a smart and health conscious consumer to read the food label and to recognize the sugar content of the product that interests us.
Best,
Tan Kok Hui
Nutrition Made Simple, Life Made Rich
