I developed type-1 diabetes mellitus (insulin-dependent or "childhood diabetes") when I was 17. I thought that changing my diet would be a nightmare, because I ate carbs without much thought, although I had a very good diet because I also had chronic bowel disease.
The things my nutritionist instilled in me:
1. The more processed a food is, the worse it is for your blood sugar (often because it's a function of glycemic index:
Apple > apple juice > apple fruit roll-up
(fruit with fiber) > (fruit juice without fiber) > (fruit with added sugar)
2.
Glycemic Index matters. Glycemic Index is the speed (compared to glucose) at which carbs are broken down and enter the bloodstream, raising your blood glucose (bg) levels.
Foods with a high glycemic index will raise your bg rapidly, which in non-diabetics, causes your pancreas to dump insulin. Often, it dumps too much, so you get that "crashed" feeling a while after eating sweets. The "crash" is a low bg. It's called "reactive hypoglycemia." Your brain senses this hypoglycemia -- literally, low glucose in the blood -- and it trips its hunger mechanism, making you crave something which will raise your bg to normal levels. Hmmm, what will raise my bg? Mmmmm.... sugar. It's a viscious cycle.
You can interrupt this by eating foods with lower glycemic index. It takes your body longer to untangle the carbohydrates in them (simplifying them to glucose), so you don't get a sharp rise in bg. Your pancreas doesn't panic and dump insulin, so you don't later get a sharp drop in bg. No sharp drop in bg... no hunger mechinism tripped. Make sense?
So you can eat carbs without cutting them out totally, if you don't want to cut them out.
But Zulu is right, if you cut out all carbs, you will stop wanting them after few days. This is because your body switches over to burning fat for fuel, which causes a small amount of ketone bodies to build up in your bloodstream. Ketones (in trace amounts) are notorious for suppressing appitite. (Ketones in large amounts cause nausea and vomiting, but you need to be diabetic before that's a problem.
) Your pancreas will just produce basal insulin, and you won't be having nearly as many fluxuations in bg. (Having been in diabetic ketoacidosis a couple of times, and knowing what ketones in large amounts can do your body, I'm skeptical that the Atkins diet is safe in the long term... but that's just me. There's evidence on both sides of the debate.)
As far as shocking you? Gee. I dunno?
Did you knowa lot of
white sugar (from cane) is filtered with
bone char? (Sugar in its rawest form, extruded from cane or beets, is not fit for human consumption, according to the FDA, which should give you an idea of how much it is refined before it becomes table sugar.)
Wheat... well, eat whole wheat if you must eat it. Again, white flour is heavily refined to get it white and fluffy. All wheat probably has bugs ground up in it, but somehow that doesn't bother me personally.
You might visit your nearest med school and ask if you can visit the dissection lab. My summer in gross anatomy, scraping fat off corpses with the back of a scalpel, almost put me off all food perdiod.
