Whether you are a diabetic, have problems digesting sugar, or simply want to cut down on your intake of refined sugars, minimizing your intake of sugar can really benefit your body in many ways.
Main Types Of Sugar Intake
There are 3 main areas of food consumption where you reduce blood sugar in your diet from. They are:
- Sugar added to your own food (like putting sugar on your cereal)
- Sugar included in your homemade foods (when you bake cookies)
- Sugar already included in store-bought food.
If you can eliminate, or at least reduce blood sugar you take from these areas, then you will be well on your way to healthy eating (and a healthier body).
#1. Reducing Sugar Added To Your Own Food
All of us like to make the little things we eat “Just a little sweeter”.
Now most people would simply tell you that you can’t add sugar to these anymore. And really, who wants to do that? I sure as heck don’t want to quit putting sugar on my ridiculously sour Grapefruit in the morning.
I’m here to show you how to eat healthier, and reduce blood sugar, without a complete lifestyle change.
If you remember, we are trying to avoid refined sugars, but natural sugars are still in the picture, right?
So I suggest that you try out Agave Nectar.
Agave nectar is low Glycemic (Safe for Diabetics), all-natural syrup (Much like maple syrup) that comes from the Agave Cactus plant.
It’s amazing.
So put it on your pancakes, cereal, grapefruit, bacon…whatever meets your fancy! If you use Agave instead of regular refined sugars here, then you will already be doing wonders for yourself.
#2. Reducing Sugar Added To Your Baking
Like I talked about with adding sugars to your food, you can use the same technique in most of your baking.
Using Agave nectar in your baking is very similar to using honey. To do it, for every 1 cup or sugar, replace it with 1 cup of Agave nectar.
Of course, there are some recipes where the sugar just works better (you can’t caramelize Agave the same way you can normal sugar), especially recipes that call for brown sugar. For these I recommend Erythritol, which acts very similarly to sugar.
But for things like cookies, cakes, and pies, Agave is a very sweet sweetener indeed (and don’t forget how much better it is for you than other sweeteners.)
#3. Reducing Sugar From Food In The Stores That Already Have Sugar In Them
Now here is the tricky part.
You will be absolutely flabbergasted when you see how much sugar is added to the food you get every day.
The key to reducing sugar in the food you find in the stores, is to look at the Ingredients and Nutritional information on every product.
The Nutritional Information is the white box that has a bunch of percentages and other numbers. What you need to look for there is the “Sugars” column, and see how many grams of sugar are in the product.
1 to 4 grams for each 1/3 of a cup here is often a pretty acceptable number (for most measurement types. For example it might show “4g of Sugar for every 1/3 cup of cereal), but much higher than that and you are looking at a product that has too much sugar in it.
Although if you are looking at an item that has fruit in it, the number might be very high because fruit has a lot of sugar in it (sometimes up to 25g!). If you don’t have any problems with fruit sugars, it would be okay for you to eat this product.
A caveat though, they do not separate the fruit sugars from the refined sugars in this area. That is why it is important for you to look at the ingredients list, and see how far sugar is to the top of that list.
The closer to the top of the list an ingredient is, the more of that ingredient is used.
So if sugar is near the bottom of the list, then there probably is not too much sugar in that product and it will aid you in your quest to reduce blood sugar.
