The Road to Type 2 Diabetes is Paved in Sugar

This article was originally written for and posted in my column, The Fitness Corner, in The Macon Telegraph.

Years ago, when my family would leave our home in Macon on Sunday mornings to head to our church in south Georgia, we developed a habit of picking up snacks from convenience stores along the way.  Because we often had to gas up for the commute, we would also run into the store to get a few snacks, which were not healthy, for the most part.

It was normal for me to come out with something like a 20-ounce Coca-Cola and a package of pecan twirls.

Then one day our snack buying stopped. My dad figured that we didn’t need those unhealthy snacks as a regular part of our Sunday morning travel, but because I enjoyed my sugary fix on Sunday mornings, I was frustrated.

Now that I’m an adult, I am grateful that my dad made the decision to halt our frequent convenience store trips. As I’ve learned, developing self-control with sweets and sugary treats is paramount when it comes to avoiding all kinds of health woes, including one of the most common and deadly diseases of modern times: Type 2 diabetes.

So How Are Sugar and Diabetes Related?

Sugar and Type 2 diabetes are very much related. I recently learned much more about the relationship between the two from my own research. Without going into too much detail, here’s some of what I learned about how sugar and diabetes are related.

In a normally functioning body, the glucose (or sugar) from the food we consume goes into the bloodstream, from which it is pulled into the body’s cells to give them energy for pretty much all of their activities. Insulin, a hormone secreted by the pancreas when you have sugar in your blood, essentially opens the body’s cells to let the sugar in.

Diabetes happens when your body has been overwhelmed by sugar to the point that either your pancreas can’t keep up, or the cells in your body are exposed to so much insulin that they begin to become resistant to it.

This is why it is common for those with diabetes to become very tired, since their bodily cells aren’t utilizing sugar to provide them with energy. It also means that sugar builds up in their blood, which is a huge problem, as sugar is toxic in the bloodstream for an extended period of time.  It is the sugar in the blood that damages other parts of the body and causes problems such as slow healing from infections, nerve damage, amputations and heart disease.

Snacks Are Absolutely Packed With Sugar

Many of the snacks that we eat today, such as my Cokes and pecan twirls, are absolutely packed with sugar.

Think about this: For the most part, sugar that naturally occurs in fruits and vegetables is combined with fiber, which keeps it from overwhelming our bodies when we eat it. However, the sugar in packaged foods is in such a pure form that it’s almost guaranteed to spike our blood sugar levels and cause our bodies to respond with a flood of insulin.

The American Heart Association says that 9 grams of sugar per day for men and 6 grams per day for women are the maximums of what we should consume, but when you drink just one 12-ounce soda, you’ve already passed that amount since canned sodas have an average of 10 grams of sugar.  Imagine how shocked our bodies must be when we drink several sodas per day!

Here’s the take-home lesson for today: Make every effort to develop true self-control with sweets, because while occasional sweet indulgences won’t do much harm, frequent treats surely will.