Eat For Stable Blood Sugar |
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When blood sugar drops and a person becomes hypoglycemic (has low blood sugar), stress follows quickly even in a non-stressful environment. Whenever blood sugar drops below a natural boundary built into our physiology, it is nature's signal to the brain that its major, often only, energy source is drying up. The brain panics. You can compare this to an unexpected, severe gasoline shortage in a city just before a major holiday.
Outward anxiety follows low blood sugar because the brain is distressed; this anxiety manifests as irritability, tenseness. fear. erratic behavior, and even incoherence. If blood sugar drops low enough, a person can pass out. In these cases, the person is often erroneously advised to eat more snacks, and may be told to keep candy around. Don’t follow this advice; instead, follow the tips for healthy daily eating.
Dietary carbohydrates-that means everything from carrots, apples, and pasta to any highly sugared foods or snacks, including soft drinks and even the sugar in your coffee-all become blood glucose, or blood sugar. For a demonstration of the amount and sources of sugar in a modern diet, do the following: Fill a 6-ounce juice glass heaping full of table sugar so the sugar starts spilling over; that's the amount of sugar the average person takes in each day. Now take out 1 tablespoon; that is the amount most people consciously add to their food, usually in coffee or tea and on cereal. The rest is found in the foods we purchase and eat daily. You'll find it on the ingredients lists of processed foods as sugar, corn syrup, corn sweeteners, corn syrup solids, glucose, fructose, and fruit sugar. Learn to read ingredients lists and you will soon realize just how much sugar you eat.
Blood sugar is important. Over our three million or more years of development, the brain has learned to rely on blood sugar for energy. In a twenty-four-hour day, about 20 percent of the circulating blood glucose will be used by the brain for energy. In a good diet the body holds blood sugar within a very liberal, yet consistent range. However, people can really mess up nature’s blood sugar control system by the food they eat and cause blood sugar to swing up and down like a child’s yo-yo.
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