[sidebar]Starch is tasteless. If you don't believe that, try eating a spoonful of flour. You can hardly taste anything. It just feels as if you have a bunch of paste in your mouth. Sugar, on the other hand, is sickeningly sweet. Try eating a spoonful of that; it's nauseating. However, if you mix the two—if you put sugar in baked goods, such as cookies, cakes, and pies—you give the flour some flavor and you hide much of the sweetness of the sugar. The sugar makes you consume more starch, and the starch makes you consume more sugar. You end up eating a lot more starch and sugar than you would normally have the desire to eat. And as good as it might taste, it all turns to sugar in your gut.
So cookies, cakes, and doughnuts are out if you're trying to reduce your glycemic load, but here's the good news. The glycemic loads of sweets that do not contain starch are not particularly high—much lower, in fact, than the glycemic loads of starches, such as bread, potatoes, and rice. The table below lists the glycemic loads of some popular foods. As you can see, the glycemic loads of dark chocolate, peanut M&M's, and even pure table sugar aren't too bad.
Notice that the glycemic loads of the candies are lower than those of the bread, potatoes, and rice. How could that be? It’s not that they don’t contain high concentrations of easily digestible sugar. It’s because the typical serving sizes are smaller. Certainly, if you ate a pile of candy the size of a baked potato or a plateful of rice, you would raise your blood sugar as much as you would if you ate a baked potato or a plateful of rice. However, most of us don’t need that much candy to satisfy the urge for something sweet. A handful will usually do. Adapted from The Sugar Blockers Diet: Eat Great, Lose Weight–A Doctor’s 3-Step Plan to Lose Weight, Lower Blood Sugar, and Beat Diabetes–While Eating the Carbs You Love, by Rob Thompson, MD, with the editors of Prevention (Rodale, 2012). [header=Candy vs. Starch] Why don’t we eat as large portions of candy as we do bread, potatoes, or rice? Because most of us have a limited tolerance for sweetness. Although starch is pure sugar, the molecules are bonded together, so you can’t taste the sweetness—only about 2 percent of it breaks down to sugar in your mouth. However, you can taste all of the sugar in candy, so you need less of it to satisfy your sweet tooth. Indeed, despite skyrocketing obesity and diabetes rates, Americans aren’t eating any more candy than they did 50 years ago. According to USDA statistics, average candy consumption hasn’t changed since the 1960s. Because diabetics have problems with high blood levels of glucose, which, of course, is a type of sugar, doctors used to think that the worst thing a diabetic could do was consume sugar—the kind we use to sweeten things. However, the glycemic load measurements cast sugar in a different light. The glycemic load of a teaspoon of sugar is only 28 percent of that of a slice of white bread. If you want to put a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee or tea or sprinkle it on some berries, it’s not going to raise your daily glycemic load much at all. In fact, if you’re trying to reduce your glycemic load, sugar can actually help. It’s natural to crave a hint of sweetness. We have tastebuds devoted specifically to detecting sugar. To prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the taste of sugar meant that a plant part was edible and a source of calories. It is not surprising that for many of us, a meal isn’t complete without something sweet for dessert. The fact that many sweets have reasonably low glycemic loads is good news for those of us with a sweet tooth. A few bites of candy after a meal will have little effect on your blood sugar or on your body’s demand for insulin, and can be quite satisfying. Indeed, it’s a lot easier to pass up the potatoes and rice if you can look forward to something sweet for dessert. And, honestly, did you really think you could live without sweets? It’s true that for some people, sugar has an addictive quality. It can trigger bingelike behavior. They intend to eat one piece of chocolate and end up consuming the whole box. If that’s true for you, you should avoid sweets altogether. However, most of us can satisfy the urge for something sweet with just a few bites. So it’s okay to keep some candy around; just make sure it doesn’t contain starch—no cookies, cakes, pie, or pastries. Use sweets to satisfy your sweet tooth, not to fill up on. If you’re still hungry, have more meat and vegetables. Here are two rules of thumb for eating sweets: Eat them for dessert only, and don’t eat more than you can hold in the cup of your hand. Diabetes-Friendly Snacks and Appetizers [header=Sugar Substitutes] Sugar Substitutes Cane sugar, everybody’s favorite sweetener, is pure sucrose, a double molecule of glucose and fructose. Enzymes in your small intestine split sucrose into its component sugars before it enters your bloodstream. Thus, when you consume cane sugar, you’re actually consuming glucose and fructose. To cut costs, food producers are using increasing amounts of high-fructose corn syrup in place of cane sugar. This sweetener contains the same sugars as cane sugar: glucose and fructose. The only difference is slightly more fructose—55 percent versus 50 percent. Also popular are so-called natural sugars such as whole cane sugar (Sucanat), honey, and agave nectar. Although whole cane sugar and honey have interesting taste overtones, their composition is largely the same as sucrose: equal parts glucose and fructose. Their effect on blood sugar and insulin levels is no different from that of cane sugar. Agave nectar is higher in fructose, which makes it sweeter than cane sugar. The sweeter a sweetener is, the less of it you need to sweeten things up. Consequently, using agave nectar as a sweetener should encourage you to consume less sugar. Sugar-free sweeteners provide sweetness but with negligible calories. The four most popular ones are aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet), saccharin (Sweet’n Low), sucralose (Splenda, Altern), and stevia. Food producers also use sugar alcohols (sorbitol and maltitol) to sweeten their products. Although some scientists have expressed concern about the safety of artificial sweeteners, they have been extensively researched and to date have not been shown to be harmful. The FDA has deemed all of the above to be safe. Artificial sweeteners have no effect on blood sugar. It should be noted, however, that, despite their widespread use in the past 40 years, they have not prevented our obesity and diabetes epidemics—consistent with the premise that starch, not sugar, is the main dietary culprit [header=High-Fructose Corn Syrup] HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP: SUGAR BY ANOTHER NAME In the past 40 years, as we have become more overweight and diabetic, we have been consuming less old-fashioned cane sugar and more high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Is there anything about this sweetener that could be contributing to these problems? Actually, HFCS contains the same sugars that are in cane sugar: glucose and fructose. The only difference is that cane sugar is 50 percent fructose and HFCS is 55 percent fructose. There really isn’t much difference, but even if there were, there’s nothing unnatural about fructose. It’s the main sugar in fruit. In fact, your body turns all sugar to fructose before metabolizing it. The problem is mainly an economic one: High-fructose corn syrup is much cheaper than cane sugar. It slashes the cost of manufacturing sweets, which makes them much cheaper for consumers. This is especially true of soda. Now kids can afford to buy pop in 32-ounce Big Gulp containers instead of 7-ounce bottles, which were typical in the 1950s and ’60s. Drinking so much soda in one sitting would have been inconceivable in the past. Sodas are now the largest single source of calories for children and teenagers. They account for most of the increased sweetener consumption that has occurred in the past 40 years and are a major contributor to America’s epidemic of childhood obesity.
