How your bakeries are killing you! Hint: It's not how you think

 There are up to 1000 sugar molecules in just one starch molecule. So, if you think you are greatly reducing the sugar in your diet by limiting the added sugar in your foods, surprise! It is far more important to look at the amount of starch, too, as in most recipes (breads; cakes; cereals; pasta; rice) starch contains stupendously huge amounts of sugar. Even in a slice of wedding cake, the sugar in the starch is far more than the amount of "sugar" put into the recipe.

But there is a way to still enjoy a lot of starch without causing a huge blood sugar spike: If that starch is easy to digest (e.g., white flour), then it slams your body with a huge blood sugar spike. Very bad! But if the starch is whole grain (whole wheat; barley; oat; spelt; etc.), then all the fiber interferes with the sugar extraction process and so it takes a lot longer to break the starch down into sugar, and there's no spike. This is WONDERFUL for our health--it's how we evolved to eat.

Blood sugar spikes wear our pancreases out, as we didn't evolve eating huge quantities of sugar and our pancreases are limited in how much insulin they can make to process sugar; I believe that over time, exhausted pancreases lead to diabetes; if high blood sugar levels continue for months and years, they will eventually kill us. We have a national diabetes emergency, and what's cruelest about it is that we could avoid most of it by changing only one thing: avoiding white flour and white rice. We might not even have to reduce the added sugar in our diets!

Yay for whole grains!

This is the mistake that bakeries make, when they make pastries designed for diabetics: They sub artificial sugar (gross! poisonous!) for the added sugar, but they don't do anything about the massive amount of instantly-available sugar contained in the white flour they're using. Only one bakery I've found in the entire state of Washington is using a whole grain in everything (spelt). The others just don't get it. And the result of this "bakery mistakery," even if using only artificial sugar, is that the item is still a sugar bomb that ruins our health. If the bakeries would use whole grain flours, then there'd be no blood sugar spikes. When I bake, so long as I use whole grains, I can still use real sugar for the added sugar and still not have a blood sugar spike!

Maybe this is one more example of how the US won't change anything, even in the face of disaster, if big corporations are making money from it. This is why gun control fails; it's why our drugs and medical care cost so much more than elsewhere; and it's why we will never see our government push to make our food healthier. But you can save yourself! Good: whole grains; whole foods like whole fruit. Bad: White wheat flour; white rice; fruit juices.

But you can fix this easily with your own cooking at home! Please do. Who wants diabetes? I don't.

The foregoing is the result of my own experience, learning, and research, and it worked for me (I went from normal, to Prediabetic, and then when I avoided white flour and white rice, I went back to normal). But you should not rely on this post as medical advice; I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist; you should learn more and decide what to try for your self, at your own risk. The problem is, however, that you're not going to find what I've written in the bewildering online morass of diet info. Hell, even the nutritionists at Kaiser Permanente don't understand it whatsoever. Thank goodness my KP doctor does. Good luck!

(photo credit: istock)




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