It is important to have something sweet in your diet each day.  That’s the good news. What you choose for your sweets has a big impact on your diet and achieving your health goals, though, so regulating your diet by making better selections will go a long way towards better health and balancing sugar in your system.

 

In the last newsletter, I mentioned that sweet cravings are excessive when there is a lack of protein in a meal or a day.  When protein is combined with vegetables (sweet and non sweet), many of the body’s physical requirements are met. This is the best time to ingest sweets of any kind.  Sweets will complement the meal and nutrition versus filling a huge gap when the body is undernourished.

The easiest sugars (and by that, I mean the easiest for your body to cope with) come from sweet vegetables.  Butternut squash and many root vegetables like onions, carrots, parsnip and yams provide sweet flavour. If you choose these vegetables over fruits, you are also getting the mineral content of the vegetable that fruits simply do not have. It is best to combine sweet vegetables with greens and other non sweet vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. Some vegetables to avoid are beets and nightshade vegetables such as potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. They do not work the same way with your body chemistry as the sweet vegetables I mentioned.

When choosing fruit as your sweet source, the easiest on the body are the fruits with the lowest fructose levels, like blueberries, raspberries, peaches, grapefruit and plums. Moderate fructose level fruits include tropical fruits, pears, and apples. High fructose fruits are bananas and grapes, dry fruits like dates, figs and raisins and are best limited in consumption. The low and moderate fruits indicated above can be eaten in moderate amounts.  The natural fibre in whole fruits decrease the glycemic effect on blood sugar and body cells.  That is to say, eating whole fruit is very different from drinking fruit juice.

But what about other foods? There is an easy way to determine how sweet packaged prepared foods are.  Each item is required to list Nutritional information on the package.  You will see the grams of sugar per serving listed.  The package does not tell you the recommended total daily allowance.  Generally, nutritionists agree that 24 grams is a good total input per day.

I find that buying sweet treats that contain whole foods as ingredients with natural sweeteners can contain the lowest grams of sugars with the best flavours. Generally, sweets purchased at the health food store or health food section of the grocery store are the most likely to have lower grams of sugar.

I steer clear of artificial sweeteners.  They can be addictive and some studies show they affect the body the same way as white sugar does.

If you gradually and consistently decrease your total sugar intake per day, you will notice your overall health will improve.  It will also be much easier to adopt any kind of short term diet for specific purposes.