I recently worked with a young woman who was trying to follow a completely sugar-free diet. She was struggling because she found that her proposed diet eliminated all fruits and milk, which contain natural sugars.
Among people with diabetes, this situation is all too common. Food manufacturers have taken this misinformation to the extreme. Along with the low-carb diet craze, we are now hearing "no added sugar" or "only two grams of sugar."
What the food manufacturers or the marketing on the package doesn't tell you is that these foods still contain carbohydrates and can raise your blood glucose levels. Food manufacturers are cashing in, literally, because these types of foods also tend to be more expensive. In my opinion, we don't need everything to be sugar-free.
There certainly are some sugar-free foods that I recommend for people with diabetes. These include foods that are concentrated sweets where a small amount such as a tablespoon contains a larger amount of sugar or carbohydrates. I recommend the following items be consumed in their sugar-free forms:
- Beverages. Make all your drink choices, except milk, diet drinks. The reason is that soda, juices, iced teas, and lemonades all contain a lot of sugar and carbohydrates. Picture this: as little as one ounce of many of these regular beverages is the equivalent of consuming a packet of sugar, so a typical 12-ounce soda is . . . scary, isn't it? The one exception to drinking diet soda is when you need to treat hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), when a sugared soda or juice can help restore glucose levels quickly.
- Jams and jellies. Just one tablespoon of regular jelly is like putting three sugar packets onto your toast.
- Syrup. Unfortunately, the foods we put syrup over are already high in carbohydrates so we don't need to add more sugar to them. One tablespoon of syrup is, again, about three sugar packets.
Are sugar-free foods necessary? In my opinion, they aren't, although some items are worth the extra cost or maybe a change in taste to keep the carb and sugar content lower. Which sugar-free foods have worked well for you?
