therapist residing in Valemount. You can
find her on Instagram and Facebook @wildwellnessholisticnutrition. /FILE PHOTO
By Amy Pawliuk, Registered Nutritional Therapist
If feeling better and preventing disease is a goal of yours, this article is for you.
Our bodies can only operate within a narrow range of conditions, and are pretty good at keeping us within these conditions to keep us alive. For example, if you get too hot with a fever or too cold with hypothermia you will die. Similar to temperature, our body has a narrow window of tolerance for how high or low our blood sugar can be and still operate effectively and stay alive in.
This applies to ALL of us, regardless of age, not just diabetics, or people who have been warned they are headed that way if they don’t make changes. Most people know that being too high isn’t good, but being too low can also be harmful.
Our blood sugar impacts way more than you may think. Weight gain, inflammation, liver health, fatigue, brain fog, hormonal issues, skin conditions, poor sleep, menopause and pms symptoms, mental health symptoms, mood swings, our immune system, and even Alzheimer’s have all been connected to blood sugar!
Even symptoms of dizziness, headaches and nausea can all be linked to blood sugar in many people!
Let me explain blood sugar a little bit here… when we eat food it is broken down into useable parts and sent through our bodies to be used or stored. It gets around our bodies in our bloodstream. When we eat carbohydrates they are converted into sugar (glucose) by the time it hits our blood. This is not a bad thing, our bodies rely on glucose in our blood as our primary energy source and to fuel our brains. We would literally go into a coma and die if it went too low.
In response to rising blood sugar levels we release insulin trigging our cells to absorb the sugar and keep the level in our bloodstream safe. When our blood sugar rises slowly the response is less and we have lovely smooth blood sugar with minimal spikes and crashes. This is ideal.
The trouble happens when too much sugar hits our blood stream too quickly it causes it to rise quickly causing a blood sugar spike.
This spike triggers larger amounts of insulin to bring our blood sugar levels quickly back down into a safe range. This results in a ‘crash.’ The crash triggers our bodies to raise our blood sugar again either by eating quickly digestible carbs (cookies, candy, sweets) or with a stress response causing our bodies to dump sugar that was stored in our cells back into our blood stream to keep us alive.
Both of these responses continue the cycle of spikes and crashes so the main goal really is to prevent them in the beginning!
Eating food in a state as close to how it grew usually maintains the most protective qualities of that food. Eating an apple compared to drinking apple juice will have very different impacts on your body!
If you can eat the food very quickly, chances are that it is also hitting your bloodstream very quickly. Think how quickly you can eat a doughnut, or a bag of chips. Choosing foods that take time to chew, generally also take time to get to your bloodstream, resulting in more stable blood sugar levels.
One of the largest things I work on with my clients is learning how their choices impact their blood sugar and simple things they can do to improve it while still enjoying their lives and the foods they love. Most of the recipes I have on my webpage, such as the Buffalo Chicken Salad, Blueberry Banana Bread or Coconut Macaroons, are very blood sugar friendly.
If you would like to learn more please reach out!
As always, if you have a topic you would like me to cover please let me know!
Love, Amy
