As in conventional treatment it is important to make lifestyle changes by looking at diet, exercise and also minimising your risks especially with the environmental chemicals and dirty electricity.
The most important dietary change that has to be made with any risk of diabetes is to cut out all sugar, processed foods and diet drinks, and monitor your sugar levels.
To keep a healthy body you should eat foods of a low glycaemic index, below 55. High glycemic index carbohydrates can push our body into a negative metabolic spiral that increases insulin resistance and could end in type-2 diabetes.
The Glycaemic Index (GI) is a measure of the effect of carbohydrates on blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates that break down rapidly during digestion, releasing glucose rapidly into the bloodstream, have a high GI; carbohydrates that break down slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the bloodstream, have a low GI. For most people, foods with a low GI have significant health benefits.
All vegetables are the carbohydrate key to good health. Non-starchy vegetables are the lowest possible glycemic impact carbohydrates that you can find, and a super low calorie package.
When you eat sugar, or high GI foods, your blood sugar rises quickly and your pancreas immediately jumps into action. It responds to the increase in blood sugar by secreting the hormone insulin, whose job, among other things, is to get that sugar out of the bloodstream quickly and deliver it to the muscle cells where it can be used for energy. That happens because if sugar hangs around the bloodstream, it ultimately does a lot of damage.
However, there are two problems with the way our bodies handle sugar. Firstly, most of us are not using those muscle cells enough to create much of a demand for the sugar, so the muscle cells eventually shut their doors. (It doesn’t require too much sugar to power the muscles used to move the mouse on your computer.) So sugar either goes into fat cells, or continues to hang out in the bloodstream, like an accident waiting to happen.
The second problem is that the small amount of insulin needed to manage a moderate amount of sugar from a natural food, like an apple for example, isn’t enough to manage a diet of 900-calorie “no-fat” muffins from Starbucks. The pancreas has to shoot more and more insulin into the system to get the job done, and high levels of insulin create a whole other set of problems.
Insulin, for example, tells the kidneys to hold onto sodium, increasing blood pressure. High insulin levels encourage the body to store excess fat and are pro inflammatory. Chronically high insulin levels have also been linked to Metabolic Syndrome, an insulin resistance problem, like a kind of “pre-diabetes” which increases the risk for heart disease. And that’s just the beginning.
It is not just ordinary table sugar that has this effect on the body. Some of the worst offenders, when it comes to raising blood sugar, are the high glycaemic index foods such as mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, most breads, pancakes, virtually all desserts, and even cornflakes. These foods convert quickly to sugar in the body. Your pancreas cannot tell the difference.
Sugar is not just non-nutritive, it’s anti–nutritive, and the reason for that is, that when sugar is found in real life foods and plants, like apples or berries, it comes complete with the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes needed for its complete digestion. Nature is amazing! When it is found in your sugar bowl, or in any of the typical chemical compounds that food manufacturers use to sweeten their goods like ‘brown rice syrup’ or the disaster known as ‘high fructose corn syrup’, it contains nothing of any value and is pro-inflammatory. Your body actually has to borrow from its stores of nutrients in order to process it. In order to be metabolized, sugar literally ‘eats up’ nutrients your body needs to stay healthy.
You may be thinking that instead of sugar you will take artificial sweeteners. Well recent studies have shown that artificial sweeteners can make you fatter because they increase your appetite, and they have been implicated in a wide range of risk factors predisposing people to heart disease, high blood pressure and insulin resistance.
There are three main minerals that help to keep the blood sugar even, Chromium, Vanadium and Zinc and these with other nutrients to support them can make a big difference to the highs and lows of sugar levels.