COMMENTARY

Watching those sugar blues

Thursday,  January 19, 2006

Did you put sugar in your coffee this morning? Or eat a doughnut, pastry or sweet cereal? Those who did will probably crave a sweet snack about 3 hours after breakfast and then every few hours until bedtime.

Those who continue eating lots of sugar throughout the day are at risk for type 2 diabetes.

Many people don’t think diabetes is a serious issue. But diabetes can lead to amputations of arms and legs, blindness, erectile dysfunction (ED), and death. 

Most people with diabetes don’t know they have it until something scary occurs. For 12 percent of men with diabetes, a problem in the bedroom was their first indication of the disease.* Diabetes is the leading cause of sexual dysfunction in men and the National Institute of Health estimates that 60 percent of men with diabetes experience ED.* 

Others discover they’re diabetic after fainting from a blood sugar imbalance or during a doctor’s visit for complications related to the disease they don’t know they have yet. 

Type 2 Diabetes develops when sugar cannot be processed effectively. To metabolise sugar, the body needs to produce insulin. One becomes diabetic when their body can’t produce enough insulin to process the sugar in their diet. Complications related to diabetes often begin as minor adjustments, such as taking medication or injecting needles filled with insulin.

However, diabetes can progress rapidly and wreak havoc on the body. The disease restricts blood flow, which limits vision and mobility in arms and legs (including that third-leg men sometimes refer to). Within 16 months, I watched my neighbour in New York undergo 2 leg amputations, one arm amputation and become blind. Six years after my grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes, she died.

The good news is that type 2 Diabetes can be prevented and even reversed among those already diagnosed. Diet and exercise is the key to reducing your risks related to diabetes. Aerobic activity such as running, walking, swimming, or biking improves insulin production, which helps process sugar more effectively.

During my years of clinical research in New York, I enrolled diabetic patients into exercise studies and witnessed their transition from injecting insulin to taking pills to relying on exercise to balance insulin production.

Although cardiovascular exercise can eventually replace insulin medications for some people, the benefit is short-lived which means that one must exercise regularly to sustain their reduced risk for diabetic complications. Limiting the sugar you eat also reduces the risk for developing type 2 diabetes. One way to do this is to wait until late in the day before eating sugar. The problem with eating sugar in the morning is that it spikes your blood sugar level for about 2 to 3 hours and then forces your blood sugar level to drop drastically which makes you crave more sugar.

When a person eats sugar in the morning, their body will feel great for a couple of hours and then they’ll feel tired and drained by lunchtime.

If a person eats a high-sugar lunch, their body will crash around mid to late-afternoon and demand a sugar fix. The cravings for sugar are so strong; people often can’t resist a quick fix of cookies, candy-bar, or coffee, which also has the stimulant of caffeine to boost energy levels.

Health professionals often refer to this syndrome as ‘Sugar Blues’ or the ‘Sugar Highs and Lows’. By waiting until late in the day to have your first sugar fix, you will limit the number of sugar cravings your body experiences and reduce your sugar intake throughout the day as well as your sugar blues.

You can also exercise the blues away. Cardiovascular exercise makes you feel great by increasing activity among the ‘happy’ neurotransmitters in your brain. Most aerobic instructors are smiling bubbly people and many attribute these qualities to their frequency of exercise. 

Instead of relying on sugar to pick you up, turn to exercise and you’ll experience more energy and look better than any sugary snack can make you feel. 

Changing your health behaviour doesn’t have to be difficult. You can start by succeeding at small steps such as parking your car farther away from your office which forces you to walk more or experimenting with sugar alternatives in your coffee every other day. Replace an afternoon candy bar with a piece of fruit or stroll the beach instead of eating dessert. 

The point is – you can succeed at making small changes that can lead to big results. By sticking to fruit instead of candy bars or walking the stairs everyday instead of taking the elevator, you are improving your health and reducing your risk for diabetes.

Once this behaviour becomes a habit, you have successfully improved your health and reduced your blues.

So what’s for dinner tonight Cayman? 

If you waited all day for your sugar, maybe you’ll have cheesecake or cookies for dessert. If you’re a man who exercised and avoided sugar today, maybe you’ll have something better – because preventing diabetes means you won’t be singing the blues tonight.

*NIH Publication No 06-3932 The National Kidney and Urological Diseases Information Clearinghouse, (NKUDIC) is a service of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDKK): Erectile Dysfunction, December 2005.

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