Why is Junk Food Bad for Blood Sugar?
Question: Why is junk food bad for blood sugar?
You probably have been to the zoo and seen the sign “Don’t Feed the Animals”. Think about that for a minute. What you’re eating, likely what your kid is eating, is not suitable for animals. In other words, they put that sign up so you won’t throw the junk that you’re eating at the zoo because you’ll make the animals sick.
Stop and think about that for a minute. If you’re eating healthy food, they wouldn’t have to worry about this.
Ideally, your blood sugar should be pretty steady throughout the day. For most people it’s normal and okay if there is a little bit of a rise after you eat. Meaning that you eat some food, your blood sugar goes up but it comes right back down and your energy is pretty steady throughout the day. You should be sleeping well. You should get up ready and raring to go. Your energy should stay fairly steady throughout the day and you should nicely fall asleep. That’s what we’re looking for. But, if your blood sugar’s all over the place, or it stays above normal and healthy levels, then you’re going to find out soon that you’ve got problems. It can be the beginning of most every problem out there. Lack of control of blood sugar is part of what we call metabolic syndrome.
Now some people, or the majority of people actually, have a rise in blood sugar and then a fall actually below the level where they started. That’s called hypoglycemia. What happens is this person ate enough sugar that it ran their blood sugar really high and then the pancreas had to put out a whole bunch of insulin to try to bring that back down, but it usually over responds. So it put out more insulin than it really needed. Ideally, when I’m fasting, I shouldn’t have any insulin. I should have used it up. It was dosed just right then. But I test a lot of people. I do their fasting insulin. It’s going to tell me much more than just their fasting blood sugar level because it tells me if they’ve got excess insulin around. This means that they put out too much. Well if you put out too much insulin, you’re going to drive your blood sugar lower than it should be. And now I’m hypoglycemic. I don’t even have enough blood sugar to keep awake. My brain has to almost shut down. I get crabby. I get cravings. You can probably describe people that are that way. You know, the person that has their coffee and donut and they’re up and they’re all happy in the morning and then through the midmorning they kind of die off and get crabby and then they grab another cup of coffee and it’s just an up and down all day. You can only go on with that for so long and then the body’s not going to keep up. And when it’s not keeping up we call it Diabetes, because you reach a point where you can’t even maintain your blood sugar level.
The blood sugar goes up and it just doesn’t seem to come down. And that’s because I cannot put out enough insulin, at the level of sensitivity that I have to my insulin or from some other reason ( it’s usually insulin insensitivity in Type II Diabetes). But I just can’t bring my blood sugar level down. That’s dangerous. You don’t want to get sugar that has that high glycemic index that shocks the body over and over again because there will reach a point where you just can’t keep up anymore. So we want to maintain those blood sugar levels and that’s why we’re talking about the lower glycemic indexed foods. You want to preserve lean muscle mass, keep your metabolic rate up where it should be and give yourself that steady stream of energy. If you eat low glycemic index, you’re going to be eating vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains. You’re going to be eating foods that don’t cause that moderate to severe blood sugar response. That’s our first objective, to get you to stop doing that so much if you’re doing it now.
Remember, high glycemic foods are your processed foods, your cereals, your pastas, anything that’s processed. It’s in a sense predigested with less nutrient density. Your body’s designed to eat something, break it down, extract nutrients and get rid of the waste. But what most of us do is to choose foods that are easier to digest almost in a sense, but they’re hard on the body because things get in too much of a concentration too quickly and they cause a problem. If you use lower glycemic index foods, you’re going to be eating the high fiber foods, You’re going to be eating the nutrient dense foods. You’re going to be eating real food. You want to eat what comes from Mother Nature. New to nature molecules, anything that’s processed, I don’t care if we’re talking about drugs or food, are detrimental to your body. Your food is really having the biggest affect on your health.
So how do you make better choices? Glycemic index. Remember glycemic index is a measure of how quickly your consumed food becomes blood sugar. White sugar and white bread were used as the standards. They were set at 100. But there are a lot of foods indexed higher than 100 meaning that when you eat them, they become blood sugar even faster than white bread or white sugar. But there are a lot of foods, the better choices, that are lower than 100. In fact, I’d like your goal to be 55 or less as far as the glycemic index of each food.
You can check out the glycemic index food chart on our website to find foods that have a low glycemic index, and the ones that are higher and should be avoided.
So, I would like you to start learning about glycemic index and using that to make your food choices. It makes it a lot easier if you understand each food’s glycemic index. Simply try to choose each food individually with that lower glycemic index. That’s going to force you to eat vegetables, proteins, fruits, things that are less of a problem for the body. If you’re eating a lot of processed foods, which are the junk foods, you’re going to be eating those higher numbers. So again, start using the glycemic index because that’s your first step toward health.
